100 TRUE Ghost & Paranormal Stories You Shouldn’t Watch at Night 🌙

100 TRUE Ghost & Paranormal Stories You Shouldn’t Watch at Night 🌙

Good evening, seekers of the spectral, and a 
most dreadful Halloween to you all. As the veil between worlds thins, we gather to indulge 
in tales that will pluck at your sanity,   stories of specters and shadows that linger. 
Prepare yourselves, for tonight we unlock a century of unsettling encounters. Have you ever 
felt that icy finger trace your spine in an empty room or sensed an unseen gaze pierce the solitude 
of your home? It’s time to dim the lights, embrace the creeping dread, and surrender to the unseen 
forces that stir in the dark. My own unsettling journey began almost a decade ago during the quiet 
low of a late autumn evening at the ancestral home of my grandmother. The household had long since 
succumbed to sleep, my grandparents, my mother Sarah, and my living brother Liam, all oblivious 
to the encroaching hours. I, the watcher, however, found myself restless, drawn to the quiet glow of 
my laptop screen, a small television murmuring low in the background, a silent companion to my late 
night browsing. The clock edged past 4:30 when an unbidden chill snaked up my back, far colder than 
any draft. Then I heard it, the unmistakable sound of children’s laughter. Two distinct voices, 
a boy and a girl, bright and carefree, yet utterly out of place. My pulse quickened. I was 
certain I was the soul waking soul in the house. I glanced at the television, but the scene unfolding 
was a chaotic melee devoid of any such mariment. I checked my computer’s audio settings. Everything 
was muted. The laughter persisted, a playful, echoing sound from nowhere. My mind scrambled 
for a rational explanation. The kitchen radio, perhaps a digital model. It could have a timer 
or simply malfunction. I pushed myself from the chair, a cold knot forming in my stomach, 
and began to move towards the kitchen doorway. With each tentative step, the innocent giggles 
intensified, morphing into boisterous, almost frantic peels of mirth. Then, a new sound joined 
the symphony of fear. the faint, sorrowful cry of an infant. What bizarre broadcast could this be? 
I wondered, my logic struggling to hold ground against the growing terror. Another few steps, and 
the laughter escalated to a truly maniacal pitch, while the baby’s whimpers transformed into 
agonizing screams, full of pain and despair. My legs trembled violently, yet an instinctual 
autopilot propelled me forward. I had to reach Sarah just across the hall. Surely her presence 
would dispel this nightmare. The final steps to the doorway were a cacophony. The shrieks and 
hysterical laughter rising to an almost unbearable crescendo as if invisible speakers were pressed 
directly to my ears, blasting me with pure dread. It was an assault on my senses. I mustered every 
ounce of courage, bracing myself to dash across the hall. The moment my hand grazed the door 
frame, an invisible force slammed into my chest, sending me reeling backward, offbalance, 
and sprawling onto the floor of the room. As suddenly as it had erupted, the horrifying chorus 
of cries and laughter ceased. The entire ordeal, though lasting mere seconds, felt like an 
eternity. Overwhelmed, I dissolved into tears, eventually curling up in a small armchair where 
I remained until my grandmother found me at dawn, leading me downstairs to the safety of her 
bed. Years later, the memory of that night still haunted me, a chilling enigma I couldn’t 
explain. I am the youngest of three brothers. Our middle brother, Michael, had tragically 
passed away in 2005. A few years after that, my cousin gave birth to a son, Finn, a boy who 
naturally had never known his uncle Michael. Fast forward another 5 years, Finn was now old 
enough to string together coherent thoughts. My aunt Clara was recounting to my mother Sarah the 
peculiar habits of Finn’s imaginary friend, a boy named Michael. Initially, both Sarah and Clara 
dismissed it as childish fantasy, a common phase. But then Clara began to elaborate and the details 
sent a shiver down my spine. This Michael would frequently wake young Finn in the dead of night, 
eager to play basketball. Finn, being a cheerful child, didn’t mind as he loved the sport. But it 
was the middle of the night. The second detail was even more unnerving. Michael would often 
point to his own throat and complain of an oie. The account of Finn’s imaginary companion 
deepened the mystery surrounding Michael’s   passing. It turned out Finn hadn’t merely been shy 
that day when Aunt Clara visited Sarah. My cousin explained that Finn had confided Michael told 
him to be shy. Even more unnerving was when Sarah presented Finn with a photograph of our deceased 
brother. The boy who had never met him, pointed directly to it, and declared, “That’s Michael.” 
I witnessed this myself on a subsequent visit. Finn repeated the gesture and my cousin revealed 
he’d whispered, “Michael, my brother, is here.” The chilling truth was that our middle brother’s 
full name was Travis Michael. He had been an avid basketball player in high school. His life was 
tragically cut short in a freak ATV accident in San Luis Oispo. The impact had crushed his Adam’s 
apple, effectively suffocating him. Years later, both of our parents passed away. Their final 
wishes were for cremation. Their ashes placed in tasteful boxes on our family wine rack. A specific 
instruction was given. I was to ensure one shelf remained empty between their boxes. After our 
father’s passing in 2011 and Sarah’s in 2015, I admit I delayed. For several weeks, I kept Sarah’s 
ashes in the same room, but a few feet away from the designated wine rack, struggling to find the 
perfect resting box. It seemed this temporary arrangement displeased someone. Every single 
night, without fail, at precisely 3:00 a.m., our outdoor doorbell would begin to ring, jarring 
me awake. I brought the button portion inside, convinced no one could press it. Yet, it 
continued. I removed the batteries, but the phantom ringing persisted at the same exact time. 
I even dismantled the entire mechanism, piece by piece, only for it to ring once more. Our home 
phone began to dial itself, displaying Sarah’s name on the caller ID, despite the bill being 
solely in my name. Then the strings on my father’s cherished guitars, which hung on the wall beside 
the wine rack, began to snap, one every few days. All of this ceased the moment I finally acquired 
a suitable box for Sarah’s ashes and placed her   on the wine rack precisely as instructed, 
with a shelf separating her from my father. Not a single strange incident has occurred since, 
and I have absolutely no intention of ever moving those boxes. Should I ever relocate, they will be 
transported together with their designated divider intact. A few days after, a dear friend whom 
I’ve known for years tragically passed away in a car accident, I experienced a dream so vivid it 
felt like reality. I was hurtling down a road in a vehicle, barreling towards her as she stood eerily 
in the center of the asphalt. I collided with her, but instead of an impact, she simply materialized 
in the seat beside me. She then forced my head towards her abdomen where her stomach should have 
been. There, a large, grotesque mouth gaped open, its teeth crafted from jagged shards of broken 
glass and sharp metal. from it. She continuously whispered. I woke with a jolt, the chilling sound 
still echoing in my ears. Looking towards the foot of my bed, I saw her standing silently in my 
room. She then walked through my closed door and into the hallway. Compelled, I opened the door 
and followed. She moved down the hall, then simply vanished through the front door of the house. I 
didn’t register it at the time, but my father, who was sleeping on the couch, roused himself. 
He asked if I was okay and if the flickering lights had woken me up. He hadn’t seen her, and I 
hadn’t even noticed any flickering lights myself. I have many more stories to share. The next one 
comes from a fifth grade field trip. Growing up in Northern Virginia, we were surrounded by 
historical battlefields and sites. My class visited the Bell Grove plantation situated on the 
Cedar Creek battlefield, a grand old house that still bore the scars of gunfire on its columns. We 
were gathered in the plantation kitchen, listening to a tall lady talk about whatever aspects of 
plantation life are deemed appropriate for a group   of 10-year-olds. Large double doors stood open on 
either side of the room. Suddenly, a soft humming drifted in from outside. Our teacher’s aid, whom 
we affectionately or not so affectionately called bulldog because of her striking resemblance to 
the breed, sternly told us to stop humming. But it wasn’t coming from any of us. It was definitely 
from beyond the kitchen walls. Bulldog stepped out, disappeared for a moment, then reappeared 
to investigate the garden side. She returned perplexed, telling the dosent that no one was out 
there. But she insisted the sound was right there in the garden despite no one being present. It 
might not sound like much now, but years later, I stumbled upon a book titled The Ghosts of 
Virginia. Within its pages was a chilling account of Bell Grove. It detailed how the lady of the 
plantation was discovered one fateful day in the smokehouse, brutally beaten, half submerged in the 
smoldering embers. her face bearing distinct fist imprints. She succumbed to her injuries mere days 
later. A slave girl was subsequently accused of the heinous crime, convicted, and hanged. The book 
went on to explain that the lady of the house had a particular fondness for strolling through her 
garden, often humming to herself. Over the years, numerous individuals reported encountering an 
ethereal humming emanating from the garden,   a sound that held no earthly source. When I 
connected this historical tragedy to my own childhood experience, it sent an absolute 
torrent of dread through me. I realized I too had been a witness. When I was 14, my father 
passed away. There’s no need for sorrow. He was, to put it mildly, quite the character. Often a 
complete ass. He delighted in ambushing people, scaring them senseless. One of his favorite 
tactics was to simply materialize silently at the edge of your vision, chilling there until you 
slowly became aware of this presence just staring   at you. After his death, this particular quirk 
persisted. I’d be in the living room watching TV, and from the front entryway, I’d catch a fleeting 
glimpse of him gliding into the corner of my eye, standing motionless, only to vanish into thin 
air when I turned to look directly. While it’s easy to dismiss these instances as tricks of the 
light or a tired mind, there was far more to it. My father was an avid fan of history and nature 
documentaries back when channels like History and Discovery actually offered quality content. He 
battled insomnia, so he’d often be up late, those channels droning on. The volume invariably would 
be quite high, and as a child, I’d constantly have to beg him to lower it so I could sleep. For a 
few months after he passed, at least once a week, I’d wake up in bed to the unmistakable sound of 
the living room television. It would always be a documentary on ants or a biography of Churchill 
or something similar. It was undeniably unnerving. Liam couldn’t have been responsible. He’s deaf, 
so he’d always mute the TV if he watched it. And besides, he had his own set. Sarah worked nights, 
and these occurrences always happened when she wasn’t home. My sister by then had been living 
independently for quite some time. I dragged myself out of bed thinking perhaps our cat Max 
the tuxedo had somehow managed to turn it on. But Max was typically either curled up with me or 
outside. I tked down the hall through the kitchen and dining room, the TV’s droning commentary 
on worker ants echoing through the house. Yet, the very instant I reached the threshold where I 
could see into the living room and view the TV,   the noise would abruptly cease. It would become 
utterly silent, so quiet, in fact, you’d likely hear a spider exhale. But the phenomena didn’t 
stop there. After his passing, our front door, which was always locked, chained, and deadbolted, 
would frequently swing open on its own to let the cat in. This even happened once, witnessed by 
everyone on a cold winter evening after our dear old dad had kicked the bucket. However, the most 
profound incident, the one that truly solidified my belief, happened one night when I was in 
the basement watching TV. Sarah was home in the living room. Whenever she needed my attention, 
she’d stomp on the floor above. That night, she stomped with a fury I’d rarely heard. I 
flew upstairs to find her sitting in a chair, a wooden TV tray table before her. On the table, 
a styrofoam cup vibrated violently. There were no open windows, no fans, no discernable drafts. 
I picked up the cup, inspecting it for wires or strings. Absolutely nothing was attached. It 
couldn’t have moved by itself. I placed it back on the table, and it began to shake again. Sarah, 
of course, was adamant. “It has to be your dad,” she stated. “Nothing else. The eerie visions, 
the cat being let in through a bolted door, the late night ant documentaries, they all 
unnerved me. But that damn cup, that cup solidified everything. And I knew with absolute 
certainty Sarah wasn’t orchestrating any of it. I meticulously examined the small table, confirming 
its sturdy stance on the floor. Not a single tremor, no hidden mechanism to explain the cup’s 
frantic dance without disturbing its base. Sarah, unwavering in her conviction, insisted it was my 
father forever the playful tormentor. In a surge of exasperation and terror, I blurted out, “If 
that’s you, Dad, cut it out.” The words barely left my lips, the command still echoing in the 
air, when the styrofoam cup instantly stilled, as if an unseen hand had abruptly snatched 
its energy. From that precise moment onward, the spectral mischief ceased. Our tuxedo cat, 
Max, once again relied on living hands to open the front door. The eerie drone of late night 
documentaries, those unexpected broadcasts from the past, vanished from our household, and the 
unsettling glimpses of my father materializing silently at the periphery of my vision only to 
dissolve when confronted, never occurred again. It was as if my direct address had, for some 
reason, granted him a final piece. Years passed and as I turned 16, a new chapter unfolded when 
I began dating Joe. He and his friends shared a peculiar fascination for exploring abandoned 
loces. Long before the phenomenon of paranormal investigation shows dominated television screens, 
their preferred haunt was a dilapidated house situated on a quiet road not far from our own. We 
always referred to it by the name of that road, though for the sake of its enduring mystery 
and the privacy of the area, I’ll refrain from   disclosing its true designation. Just a few weeks 
into our relationship, Joe and I, accompanied by two other friends, resolved one weekend to delve 
into the mysteries of this infamous dwelling. The local lore surrounding the house painted a 
chilling tableau. A deranged farmer driven to madness first murdered his brother in the barn, 
then stalked through his own home with an axe, slaughtering his wife and children. On the 
second floor, visible scars on the walls indeed suggested violent hacking. The motive, 
as whispers claimed, stemmed from an alleged affair between his wife and brother, leading 
him to believe the children weren’t his own. I must confess, I later attempted to unearth any 
official records or historical accounts validating this gruesome tale, but my efforts yielded nothing 
concrete. Yet, regardless of its factual basis, the house’s reputation clung to it like a shroud, 
and I wasn’t entirely convinced its documented past, or lack thereof, truly mattered in the face 
of the inexplicable. Our initial expedition was regrettably an utter letdown. We roamed the 
decaying property, exploring every creaking floorboard and dusty corner, but the promised 
specters remained stubbornly absent. It was, frankly, boring. However, that very 
night, long after I’d returned home, a profoundly unsettling dream took hold. I found 
myself in the dilapidated barn of that property, our friend Anthony beside me. Before us stood a 
man, his presence palpable, inviting me to ask any questions I wished, even to take photographs. 
But Anthony, ever the nuisance, kept interjecting with name queries, disrupting the spectral 
encounter. From the fragmented conversation, I gleaned only that the man was a ghost, partial 
to haunting the barn, and his attire consisted of a plaid flannel shirt, overalls, and a baseball 
cap. Most strikingly, he possessed only one arm. The following day, I recounted the dream to Joe, 
detailing the ghost’s distinctive plaid shirt, overalls, and baseball cap. His expression 
turned grim. “Was he missing an arm?” Joe asked, his voice low. A jolt went through me. “Yes,” 
I stammered. “How did you know?” Joe explained that his sister Jolene had as a child frequently 
encountered a man matching my exact description, including the absent arm, standing in the hallway 
of their own home late at night, often conversing with two other shadowy figures. Jolene would get 
up for the bathroom, see them, and by the time she reached her destination, they would be gone. 
I hadn’t yet met Jolene at that point, but years later, when our paths finally crossed, I pressed 
her for details. Her confirmation was immediate and chilling. She had indeed seen the armless man 
countless times throughout her childhood. Yet, the story took an even stranger turn. Our friend 
Tina, who lived with her parents in a nearby town not too far from the infamous house, had a young 
son. This little boy would speak of a man in their basement who constantly talked to him. One day, 
he drew this man. The resemblance was uncanny, a perfect match for the description. Whether this 
entity was a ghost, a hallucination, or something else entirely, I couldn’t say. But the irrefutable 
fact that three separate individuals across years and different locations had all described the 
exact same distinct figure down to the missing limb was profoundly unnerving. And then there’s 
the other tale associated with that house, a night that began with a spontaneous decision. We found 
ourselves with enough people to strategically cover both the sprawling house and its desolate 
barn. And conveniently, one of our group owned   a van, offering easy transport to the secluded 
property. The logistics of our next venture to the infamous house were meticulously planned. This 
time, with enough friends to truly explore, we formed an expeditionary team. A friend’s van meant 
we wouldn’t draw undue attention with a convoy of cars on the secluded lane leading to the property. 
Eight of us divided ourselves strategically. Two for the barn, two for the basement, two for the 
main floor, two for the second story, and two for the attic. By this point, the watcher had explored 
every inch of that decaying structure countless times, as well as our own home, and was completely 
sober, neither under the influence of drugs nor alcohol. Joe and the watcher drew the assignment 
of the second floor. But as we ascended, a chilling surprise awaited us. There connecting two 
of the bedrooms was a bathroom. And not just any bathroom. This was a large opulent space dominated 
by a massive claw-footed tub. The shock wasn’t its existence, but its sudden, inexplicable presence. 
The watcher had explored this house extensively. This bathroom had simply never been there before. 
The sheer impossibility of it sent a jolt of dread through the watcher. We had all agreed to spend 
at least 20 minutes on our designated floors, and Joe, perhaps sensing the unease, insisted we 
spend part of that time inside this perplexing new room. The watcher half expected the entire 
structure to dissolve around them, taking them into oblivion. Thankfully, it didn’t, but the 
mystery only deepened. Sometime later, the watcher returned to the house, this time with a different 
group of friends. Joe not among them. With a strange mix of apprehension and curiosity, the 
watcher led them through the second floor. Every doorway, every al cove, every forgotten closet was 
meticulously checked. The bathroom was gone. It had vanished without a trace, as if it had never 
materialized in the first place. The watcher still struggles to reconcile what they saw with reality. 
The watcher deeply wishes to have been drunk or high on either occasion, for that would at least 
offer a logical, if disappointing, explanation, but they were not. The watcher’s grandmother used 
to share a haunting story from her own family history, a tale from the secret war in Laos. 
Her aunt had befriended an American soldier, and over time, he even began learning rudimentary 
mum. Then one day, he simply ceased to appear. The general consensus was that he had died, a casualty 
of the conflict. Yet the ant held on to hope waiting for him. As the war intensified and bombs 
began to fall, their village sought refuge in the protective embrace of the caves. One night, amidst 
the sleeping figures, the aunt heard a voice, distinctively his, though mumbling and broken m 
repeating, “Back for you, back for you.” Her eyes remained closed, fear paralyzing her until she 
felt a touch. Something reached out and grasped her shoulder, slowly moving down to her hand. “It 
wasn’t human flesh,” she would later recount, but a large coarse animal paw. Briefly, she pried open 
her eyes, glimpsing a dark, non-human silhouette standing over her. Then she heard her own aunt 
stir and speak, though the words were indistinct. The figure departed and the watcher’s great aunt 
in the dead of night followed. She was never seen again. Was it the dead soldier returning to claim 
her or something far more sinister mimicking his form to lure her away? The ambiguity remained. 
When the watcher was very young, perhaps 8 years old, living in a mobile home, they made a unique 
friend. His name was Adam, and he resided in the floor beneath them. For an entire year, Adam was 
the watcher’s best friend. He wasn’t a constant presence, appearing only at certain times of 
the day, usually just as the watcher returned   home from school. Adam would always greet them, 
inquiring about their day. Sometimes he’d ask the watcher to move to a different part of the house, 
often the bathroom, suggesting it was easier for him to hear there. The watcher would sit in the 
bathtub conversing with this unseen companion. Liam, the watcher’s brother, could also hear 
Adam, though he lived with their grandparents   and wasn’t often around. The watcher doesn’t 
believe their father ever heard Adam. Or perhaps Adam simply chose not to speak in his presence. 
Adam frequently urged the watcher to go outside, and sometimes they did, but Adam was never seen 
or encountered physically. Then, as abruptly as he arrived, Adam simply stopped talking. The watcher 
never heard from him again. The watcher is still unsure if Adam was a ghost or some form of spirit. 
They hoped it was, finding that a more palatable explanation than the unsettling truth that there 
might have been someone living under their house,   a physical impossibility given the concrete slab 
foundation and lack of a crawl space. Years later, Sarah, the watcher’s mother, unearthed an old 
photograph of the Watcher with one of their late uncles. She asked if the Watcher remembered 
him. Having passed away when the Watcher was very young, the memory had unfortunately 
faded entirely. I had unfortunately retained very little of him. Sarah revealed that he had 
been a constant presence in my earliest years, caring for me while both my parents were at 
work. He wasn’t just an uncle. He had become a second father figure. She recounted how one night 
they were abruptly woken by my piercing cries, me screaming his name. Rushing into the room, they 
found me clutching that very photograph of us, the one I mentioned earlier. That same morning, a call 
came from Aunt Clara. He had passed away suddenly. Sarah confided that the only other time she’d ever 
witnessed such profound grief from me were when   my biological father had to leave for deployment. 
She was certain that moment clutching his picture was my uncle bidding me a final goodbye. Another 
family tale tinged with sorrow and enduring love belongs to my great-g grandandmother. She 
had witnessed the passing of her beloved   husband John and their bond was truly eternal. 
After his death, she would awaken each morning, sighing a mournful, “Damn it!” yearning for her 
own end to come, ready to join him. Our family, through the baby monitor, would often hear her 
in the quiet hours, conversing with relatives who had long since departed. Then, one afternoon, 
the monitor crackled to life with her voice, clear and tinged with impatience. “John, finally, 
why are you always so late?” My family froze, for John was indeed my great-grandfather’s name. 
10 minutes later, they entered her room to find she had passed away peacefully. She had simply 
been waiting for her husband to come and retrieve her. In middle school, our class embarked on a 
field trip to Cataluchi Valley, nestled deep in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, to 
explore some historic homesteads. We were eating lunch on the riverbank directly opposite the 
Caldwell House. My friend Robert and I, having finished early, decided to cross the bridge and 
investigate the house. At that time, it remained untouched by restoration, its interior scarred 
with crude carvings etched into the plaster and wood of the second floor. It was early winter in 
the mountains, and a profound silence enveloped the valley. As Robert and I padded across the 
creaking hardwood floors, our footsteps were the only sound within the house. We were absorbed in 
reading the names, messages, declarations of love, and sometimes unsettling confessions scrolled 
across the walls when simultaneously both of us stopped. We stood absolutely still, holding 
our breath, listening intently to something we had both distinctly heard. After about 30 seconds, 
we nervously laughed it off, rationalizing it as an animal. Yet, we were profoundly unsettled 
and chose to leave. As we exited the room, our friend John, who had apparently been lurking 
around the corner, slammed his fists against the   wall, startling us violently. Richard and 
I yelled at him for the fright, but we all quickly broke into laughter. John explained that 
our teacher had sent him to tell us the class was leaving in 5 minutes and we should head back. We 
acknowledged him and he departed. Knowing Jon had been the source of the earlier noise, Richard and 
I crossed the hall into another upstairs room. A minute or two later, Richard noticed carvings 
on the back of the door, so he closed it for   a better look. As we were reading, another 
loud slam, this time directly on the door, echoed through the house. We jumped, froze for a 
second, then laughed again, assuming it was John once more, coming to collect us. We opened the 
door, and started downstairs. As we emerged from the front door of the house, I spotted John. He 
was already across the river. Barely 30 seconds had passed since the door slam, making it utterly 
impossible for him to have descended the stairs, crossed the yard, and traversed the bridge in 
that time frame. I pointed this out to Richard, and we sprinted towards the class as fast as 
our legs could carry us. I have never been more terrified in my entire life. Years later, Sarah, 
who works in the medical field, was treating a woman in her late 90s or early hundreds. This 
woman had grown up in the very Caldwell house we had explored. She explained that in the early 
1900s, with the nearest town so far away, the Caldwell family couldn’t transport sick or elderly 
members to a hospital or doctor. Consequently, a significant number of Caldwells had passed away 
within the house itself, their graves located less than a/4 mile away on the property. Later, while 
deployed in Iraq, I found myself in a guard tower with a buddy amidst the desolate expanse of the 
middle of nowhere. It was around 1:00 a.m. in the middle of June when, without warning, a cacophony 
erupted below us, a pack of dogs suddenly lost their minds, barking and growling furiously. The 
frantic barks escalated into a chorus of howls erupting from all sides of the desolate 
landscape. Tales of the region echoed in   my mind. Local folklore whispered of dogs sensing 
malevolent spirits. But we were hardened soldiers, armed and equipped, surely immune to such 
superstitions. Yet a creeping unease tightened its grip. Moments after the canine hysteria 
began, a violent, bone-chilling blast of wind, frigid as an arctic gale, tore through our guard 
tower. Every hair on our bodies stood on end. Rifles at the ready, my buddy and I scanned 
the inky blackness, desperately attempting to   contact other towers and the tactical operations 
center via radio. But each attempt was met with nothing but dead air and unsettling static. Panic 
began to set in. After much contentious argument, I convinced my comrade weeks to brave the descent 
and investigate the TOC on foot. As he reluctantly lowered himself from the floorboards of the 
tower, fully geared, another brutal gust of wind materialized. It didn’t just blow, it slammed into 
the tower, tearing the camera netting clean off the roof and sending the ladder plummeting to the 
ground with a horrifying clatter. weeks dangling 20 ft in the air, held on by sheer will, I lunged, 
grabbing him, and with a monumental effort, he was a formidable 250 lbs, hauled him back to safety. 
Still shaking, I furiously worked the radio, finally establishing contact with the TOC. We 
relayed our bizarre ordeal, and the response was chillingly understated. Sit tight. There’s 
something going on with the other towers. We hunkered down, minutes stretching into what 
felt like an eternity until the sergeant of the   guard arrived in a pickup truck. His debriefing 
confirmed our worst fears. Similar, inexplicable events had plagued nearly every other guard tower. 
And then the final unsettling detail. A soldier walking from the Chow Hall to his bunk had been 
struck forcefully on the head by an unseen object, almost rendering him unconscious. There was 
no one around, no discernable projectile on the ground. A platoon of battleh hardened men, 
all bearing their combat infantrymen’s badges, were left utterly unnerved, genuinely shaking in 
their boots. To this day, we speak of it in hushed tones with no explanation. When we questioned 
our local interpreter about Iraqi spirits, his only response was unnerving. There are 
ghosts here, but I cannot speak its name. This cryptic reply only intensified our collective 
anxiety. This incident occurred over a decade ago in a remote Iraqi outpost with minimal internet 
access, so our attempts to research what we had experienced online only yielded more unsettling 
lore and disturbing images. The memory still sends shivers down my spine. That particular chilling 
account isn’t mine, but my husband’s. We resided in a quiet rural community and in the adjacent 
town stood a reputedly haunted establishment known as the Thomas House Hotel. When the time 
came to finalize the closing on our new home, my husband flew in to manage the paperwork and 
checked himself into the Thomas House. He was fully aware of its spooky reputation, but remained 
a staunch disbeliever in anything supernatural. My own views on the matter are perhaps less 
relevant. Curiously, a popular ghost hunting show had recently filmed an episode there. While they 
failed to capture definitive proof of the elusive   spectre, their broadcast certainly made for 
compelling, eerie television. It was the Christmas season, and the hotel was adorned with charming 
antique and country-style holiday decorations. Even the notorious clown room, yes, you heard that 
right, a clown room, was decked out in its festive glory. As he made his way to his room, he passed a 
small girl in the hallway. She walked by silently, offering no greeting, but he, ever polite, offered 
a soft hi. The little girl then continued on, disappearing into what he noted was a doll room. 
His impression, he later told me, was that she had special needs. Aside from the family who owned 
and operated the hotel, he encountered no other guests during his stay. A year later, I was at my 
new hairdresser salon, a charming local woman who had spent her entire life in the area and knew 
the hotel owning family well. As we chatted, I recounted my husband’s stay, mentioning his 
encounter with the little girl. Her face instantly drained of color. She turned to another stylist, a 
gasp escaping her lips. “Did you hear that? There are no little girls living in that hotel.” She 
explained that the family was older now and all their children were long grown. The little girl my 
husband had seen was in fact the hotel’s resident spirit. She was known to play in the doll room, 
had a particular fondness for the clown room, and only revealed herself to a select few. Despite 
this chilling confirmation from someone intimately connected to the hotel, my husband to this day 
still refuses to believe he actually saw a ghost. Beyond the familiar confines of my hometown, 
Rochester Hills, Michigan, lies a place of both historical grandeur and chilling enigma, 
Meadowbrook Manor. This stately edifice, once home to the illustrious Dodge family and now 
nestled within the grounds of Oakland University, holds a grim history. Deaths have occurred within 
its walls, and whispers of lingering spirits abound. My own friend spent years working there, 
and my wife has even hosted events on its elegant premises. It was, in fact, the very place I chose 
to propose to her. The house itself is a paradox, a tapestry of breathtaking beauty, complete with 
concealed staircases behind cleverly disguised bookshelves. Yet, it radiates an undeniable, 
pervasive eeriness. Among its spectral residents, one figure stands out, the caramel apple girl. 
Lore describes her as a young, silent apparition, perpetually clutching a caramel apple adorned 
with peanuts. Many have reported sightings, including my closest friend, a man utterly 
devoid of pretense, who would never invent   such a tale. One evening, as he tidied up after an 
event, he saw her. There on the grand staircase, a small girl sat serenely eating her peanut 
dusted treat. “Are you all right?” he inquired, his voice gentle. “I’m lost,” she replied softly. 
He assured her he’d find her parents, instructing her to wait. He turned briefly to retrieve his 
phone, and when he looked back, she was gone. A quick scan of the stairs revealed only a scatter 
of peanuts where she had sat. Frantically, he and a few other employees scoured the house. He called 
me and I rushed over, thrilled by the prospect of a genuine haunting. After another 30 minutes of 
fruitless searching, we finally contacted the police and the staff secured the property. As we 
stood outside recounting the bewildering incident to a university police officer, a light flickered 
on in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Panic surged through us. That wing had been meticulously 
searched for hours. The officer exchanged glances with my friend and me. A silent question passing 
between us. Who’s going in? He started towards the house, then stopped abruptly, turning back to us 
with a ry knowing look. Forget that, he declared, having clearly heard the local legends, he 
summoned a full team of backup. When they eventually re-entered, the peanuts on the stairs 
were mysteriously absent. From the hallowed, haunted halls of Metobrook, my memory shifts to 
a more primal fear. Born in the desolate reaches of rural Tennessee, there a particular bridge 
nestled deep in the back country where I grew up holds a dark reputation for unleashing blood 
curdling screams into the night. These screams, eerily confined to the bridge itself, are said 
to be inaudible even to homes just two properties away. You purportedly must be on the structure 
to hear them at all, a theory I personally never put to the test. The prevailing and far too simple 
explanation points to a bobcat living beneath the bridge. Yet those who have dared to investigate 
with dogs invariably find nothing. For years, my friends and I had exchanged these chilling 
anecdotes. Yet none of us had ever dared to   challenge the legend. Then one night, fueled 
by a few beers and a potent blend of bravado and curiosity, we decided to embark on our own 
expedition. Five of us crammed into a battered car, drove out to that remote bridge and parked 
squarely upon it. It was 1:30 a.m. and the world outside was cloaked in an oppressive, profound 
silence. We sat there, windows down, for a solid 45 minutes. Nothing. Just as we began to mock our 
own foolishness, debating if the whole story was a hoax, it happened. the scream. With our lights 
off, the moonlight offered decent visibility, confirming there was absolutely nothing 
discernible outside the car. But the sound, it was deafening. A prolonged raw shriek like 
a woman’s skin being slowly torn from her body, erupting from just beyond the rear passenger side 
window, aimed squarely at the chasm below. I’ve heard bobcats in heat during hunting trips. 
They do scream in short, repetitive bursts. This was different. This was a sustained 3 to 
4 secondond torrent of unimaginable human-like agony delivered with astonishing volume. We tore 
away from that bridge as if demons themselves were hot on our heels. It took us a couple of 
miles to finally stop. Our minds struggling to process the sheer terror. My own adrenaline 
surged, leaving me trembling uncontrollably. One of my friends, I swear, wet himself, a sight 
I’d never witnessed before. Another bolted from the car immediately, violently ill. That, I think, 
perfectly illustrates the profound, visceral horror of that moment. The friend whose car we 
were in didn’t even chastise the one who soiled his seat. It was simply beyond comprehension. To 
this day, I have no explanation for what we heard. My knowledge of the Glor Psychiatric Museum in St. 
Joseph, Missouri was limited to a paper a friend had written for her psychology class detailing its 
supposedly fascinating exhibits. The museum itself occupied a modern building distinct from the 
antiquated hospital structure standing next door. Within its walls lay a collection of equipment 
and personal effects from the early 1900s when the asylum was operational, a chilling array 
of relics from an era of questionable therapies   and unsettling procedures. Oddly, none of these 
morbid artifacts perturbed me. As a side note, the museum also featured separate wings dedicated 
to local Native American tribes and the Pony Express. Our tour began on the main floor, a 
rather unremarkable space housing a gift shop and small displays. My composure remained 
intact until we reached the second floor, the gateway to the psychiatric exhibit. The moment 
the doors slid open, a distinct form materialized within my mind’s eye. It wasn’t a physical 
sighting, but a vivid internal impression, a spectral, almost silhouette-like figure 
reminiscent of a death eater from Harry Potter, though smaller and entirely headless. This unseen 
presence seemed to track our movements throughout the psychiatric exhibit, pausing when we paused. 
I subtly cautioned Sarah, my mother, to refrain from vocalizing any perceptions she might have, 
hoping to avoid a biased experience for myself. As I examined the forgotten belongings of former 
patients, an undeniable sensation washed over me, a silent warning to avoid touching anything, 
lest some unseen consequence unfold. Eventually, we moved on to the Native American exhibit, and 
there it was again the same shadowy companion, maintaining a consistent 20ft distance behind us. 
We proceeded to the morg area in the basement, an environment one might expect to be rife with 
spectral activity. Yet, I felt absolutely nothing. Finally, we made our way back to the main floor 
and with immense relief exited the building. Once outside on our journey home, I confessed to Sarah 
that I’d felt a distinct presence following us. Her eyes widened in recognition. I saw it, too, 
she confirmed. I proposed a test. We would face away from each other and sketch what we perceived. 
The result was uncanny. Our drawings were identical. I later emailed the museum recounting 
our shared experience, half expecting no reply. To my surprise, they responded, confirming that 
such encounters were remarkably common among both their staff and other visitors, and that they 
periodically allowed paranormal investigations. So, yes, that was our chilling encounter at the 
Glor Psychiatric Museum. My professional life once led me to work as a cook in a charming tea room, a 
building with a colorful past as a brothel in the 1800s. We had a cozy dining area and a small gift 
shop filled with pottery and silverware. I was often the last to leave, responsible for locking 
up. It was common to hear disembodied sounds, footsteps echoing through empty halls, or what 
sounded like objects falling, but I rarely gave them much thought. One particularly late 
evening around 10 or 11, I was called in to begin prepping for Sunday brunch. As I moved about the 
deserted kitchen, footsteps echoed from upstairs, followed by the distinct click of lights flicking 
on. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was the sole living soul in the building. Curiosity 
overriding my apprehension, I ascended the stairs to investigate. Everything appeared normal. I 
switched the lights off and started back down, only to see them illuminate again behind 
me. A tremor of unease snaked through me. Hello, I called out, my voice a tentative 
whisper in the stillness. No answer, I forced myself back upstairs, heading for the 
light switch. The instant my hand reached out, a large base prominently displayed on a nearby 
table defied gravity. It rose several inches, drifted silently to the right, then crashed to the 
floor with a terrifying ceramic explosion. Pure terror seized me. I immediately called my boss 
who to my utter disbelief casually brushed it off with a weary sigh. “Oh, that’s just our resident 
spirit,” she said as if discussing the weather. “It’s quite regular here.” Another unsettling 
memory centers on assisting Liam, my younger brother, as he moved into a new apartment with 
his friends. I had my two very young daughters with me. The youngest, barely two and a half 
or three, was an intrepid explorer, utterly fearless. She ventured into every room with Liam, 
laughing and having a grand old time until they reached the kitchen. The moment she stepped across 
the threshold, my daughter froze. Her wide eyes, usually brimming with playful curiosity, were 
now dilated with pure, unadulterated terror. Within 10 agonizing seconds, she was screaming 
bloody murder, tearing across the room towards me, babbling incoherently about the lady in the 
kitchen. Liam and I attempted to soothe her, to redirect her attention, to laugh it off as 
childish imagination, but my normally calm, resilient little girl was inconsolable, completely 
hysterical. We had no choice but to leave. That night, tucked safely into her bed, she 
described the chilling figure to me. The lady had red eyes. “Mommy,” she whispered, her voice 
still trembling. “She was so scary. To truly grasp the impact of that moment, you’d have to know 
my daughter.” Her usual boundless energy and cheerful disposition evaporated, replaced by an 
absolute certainty. She was utterly convinced she had seen a woman simply standing there in the 
kitchen. And to this very day, 7 years later, she still swears to it. My own inherent skepticism 
regarding the spectral was profoundly shaken by the raw terror in her eyes. Liam, too, recounted 
peculiar occurrences during his time in that apartment. Phantom footsteps, disembodied noises, 
and a chilling anecdote about one of his roommates being tapped awake by an invisible ring. It 
was, by all accounts, a truly unsettling place. This inexplicable dread resonates with an 
experience from my own past. Years prior, when I resided in a one-bedroom apartment, I 
returned home around 2:30 in the morning, utterly drained. My only thought was to collapse into bed. 
As I settled in, a sharp, jarring thud echoed from the living room, a sound akin to someone leaping 
from the couch and landing heavily on the floor. Living on the top floor of the building, I knew 
it couldn’t be from below. Immediately on edge, I lay perfectly still, straining to catch any 
further sound. Then, whatever had created the initial noise began to charge, a terrifying, 
thunderous rush towards my bedroom. It wasn’t the rhythmic thud of human footsteps. 
It was a frenzied, four-legged scramble,   inhumanly fast, and deafeningly loud. It halted 
abruptly. I gauged about a foot from my face. I refused to open my eyes, fearing what might be 
waiting. The sound vanished, but an overwhelming wave of dread and profound darkness radiated 
through my room for a solid 5 minutes before   dissipating as quickly as it had appeared. 
The oppressive atmosphere lifted instantly, and the room returned to its normal, benign state. 
It never happened again during my residency, but it remains one of the most viscerally terrifying 
encounters of my life. During high school, I spent a couple of years working at a charming 
old-fashioned doughnut shop. They baked fresh every night, and the season employees all spoke 
of the resident ghost, a burly former baker who, legend had it, once slept in the back room and 
still roamed the premises. My shifts typically began just before the front of the shop closed for 
the evening and before the night bakers arrived. This meant I often found myself alone, tasked 
with cleaning the chaotic back area where baking happened. It could get truly disgusting with jam 
and glaze smeared across the floor, requiring me to scrape it clean with a paint scraper 
attached to a stick. Being a rather ingenious, if lazy teenager, I discovered I could simply 
duct tape cardboard over the worst sticky patches, dramatically cutting my cleaning time in half. 
This left me with ample free time to idle at the front counter. One evening, as I was comfortably 
whiling away the minutes, I caught a flicker of movement in my peripheral vision. It looked like 
someone in a flannel shirt had walked from the front, then turned sharply, disappearing into the 
back. Convinced the owner had caught me slacking, and without having heard anyone enter, I headed 
to the back, ready to face the music. But when I got there, no one. I knew what I had seen. I 
even ascended the stairs to the offices above, a part of the building I’d never explored, 
just to be sure. Still, no one. Later, I asked the older staff about the ghost’s attire 
when he was alive. The unanimous answer, always flannel. My experiences with the unexplained 
weren’t limited to abandoned houses or old shops. I once worked at a daycare, specifically with 
infants aged 9 to 18 months. Nap time was a delicate ballet. Once all the babies were settled 
in their individual cribs, the teachers would   retreat to the furthest corner of the room to 
ensure absolute quiet. One particularly successful day, all the children were finally asleep, a 
feat in itself. I was sitting facing the room, chatting softly with a coworker. As I surveyed the 
peaceful scene, a slightly deflated rubber ball, left innocently on the floor, began to move. 
It rolled 4 feet across the room, all on its own. It hadn’t been near any of the babies, who, 
in any case, were deep in slumber. What made it even more unnerving was the faint scuffing sound 
it made, as if unseen fingers were attempting to get a purchase on its smooth, rubbery surface. 
One might dismiss this as a trick of the light or a sudden draft from the air conditioning. 
But my c-orker, whose gaze had been fixed on me, abruptly swiveled towards the sound. “What was 
that?” she whispered. I explained what I just witnessed. A nervous laugh escaped us and we half 
joking, half serious, asked the unseen presence to please refrain from disturbing any of the sleeping 
children. Other colleagues at the center had recounted similar oddities, feeling a distinct 
tap on their backs when no one was behind them,   observing objects shifting on their own. One even 
described a figure, too tall and amorphous to be a child, darting down the hallway only to dissolve 
into thin air. My own home, where the Watcher’s family and I moved in when I was 7 years old, has 
not been immune to these unexplainable events. I’m now 20. And while the exact timing of this 
first incident escapes me, I vividly recall one night I was lying in bed hovering on the precipice 
of sleep when I swear to you, something seized my ankles and tugged me several inches down 
the mattress. I didn’t tumble out of bed, but I certainly didn’t close my eyes again that 
night. Another time, perhaps when I was 13 or 14, I drifted off while engrossed in a video game. 
I awoke around 1:00 a.m. disoriented. And as I turned to reorient myself, I saw it. In 
the kitchen doorway, about 20 ft away, stood a towering, inky shadow. It wasn’t 
translucent. It was as solid as the night itself, so tall that its head bent at a 90° angle against 
the ceiling. I froze, my eyes wide, scrutinizing it to confirm it was truly there. It was. The 
TV and Xbox remained on, casting a faint glow, providing just enough light for me to navigate to 
the stairway lights leading to my room. As I moved to switch off the Xbox, I glanced back. The shadow 
was gone. I suppose one could easily dismiss this particular incident as a sleepy hallucination. 
But a short while later, something that felt far more tangible than a dream unfolded. Call it a 
nightmare, a scarring experience, or a message from one of the houses’s resident spirits, but it 
was profoundly unsettling. I was browsing Reddit, scrolling through what I thought were humorous 
links on the front page. I clicked on a link featuring a girl’s picture. The moment I did, 
a knot tightened in my stomach. The thumbnail on the page seemed to morph, transforming 
into something entirely different, like a   distorted dog. Hoping for normaly, I clicked 
the link directly below it. I was mistaken. My screen went black. Then that same unnerving 
picture reappeared, filling the display. Words, “Daddy, no!” began to type themselves in bright 
red letters, rapidly cascading down the screen, threatening to engulf it. I woke with a jolt 
before it could complete its silent assault. On another occasion, a friend who has a particular 
affinity for the occult was staying over. He had his own chilling encounter. He described seeing a 
figure in the kitchen doorway identical to the one I’d witnessed and at the same time of night after 
we had both fallen asleep. For me, that was solid confirmation that I wasn’t losing my mind. Not 
long after, I was at a different friend’s house and we were playing video games in their basement. 
The munchies soon hit and we decided to grab some snacks. My friend too had experienced peculiar 
happenings in their home, so they suggested we set up a webcam to record the basement while we 
were gone, just in case we caught something. We positioned a Mac with its webcam focused on the 
couch where we’d been sitting. Upon returning to the basement, eager to resume our crucial 
gaming session, we reviewed the footage. The video played for about a minute before 
simultaneously, both of us distinctly heard a disembodied voice say, “Make it quick.” As far 
as we could tell, nothing in the basement had been disturbed, so we had no idea what it was or what 
it had done quickly. But one thing was certain, we had no intention of lingering there that 
evening. With the sheer volume of experiences I’ve personally encountered, I find myself in a 
peculiar space, neither entirely sane nor entirely deluded, but these accounts for me are undeniably 
true. Now, let me share a story told to me by a dear friend. I’ve never been able to retell it 
with the same gripping detail as he does, but it’s a tale that has never left me. He’s around 40 
now, divorced, but this happened back when he was married with a one-year-old daughter. He and his 
wife had just bought an old house and moved in. It was apparently a very old home, an old house that 
despite its considerable age, they’d secured for a steal. It needed work, but they were ready for the 
challenge. After settling in for about a week, my friend noticed something chilling in the corner of 
his daughter’s nursery, a life-sized doll. Being a normal human, its unblinking stare unnerved 
him. So, he turned it to face the wall. Later that evening, after tucking his little girl into 
bed, he descended the stairs and asked his wife, “Where did that doll come from?” She looked at 
him puzzled. “I don’t remember,” she replied. “I just assumed someone gave it to our daughter and 
we moved it up there.” My friend was profoundly unsettled. He had no recollection of the doll 
being moved or even of it being in the house when they first arrived. He wondered if it had simply 
been overlooked during their initial inspection. The following morning, as he went to collect his 
daughter from her crib, he saw it. The doll was no longer facing the corner. Its vacant eyes were 
once again fixed on him. Even now, recalling his account sends a shiver down my spine. This 
was enough to thoroughly unnerve anyone. So he promptly snatched the doll and banished it to 
the closet, firmly shutting the door. That night, he and his wife found themselves embroiled in a 
heated argument. The specifics aren’t relevant, but suffice it to say, tempers flared. Their 
raised voices and intense focus meant they initially missed the sound of their daughter’s 
cries from upstairs. During a momentary low, his wife heard her and made to check, but he, 
still caught up in the dispute, assured her, “She’ll be fine. Let’s just resolve this. 
Another minute passed and suddenly he realized he was practically yelling to be heard over his 
daughter’s escalating screams. It wasn’t her usual cry. This was raw primal terror. He exchanged a 
frantic glance with his wife and bolted up the stairs. What he witnessed the moment he flung open 
the nursery door still makes my eyes water with fear as I think about it. The closet door stood 
a jar. The life-sized doll was positioned next to the crib, its rigid arms outstretched through the 
bars, frozen in a grotesque pose as if caught in the very act of reaching for his daughter before 
reverting to its inanimate state. Needless to say, the doll was immediately ejected from the 
house and, I believe, incinerated. There was no conceivable explanation other than something 
profoundly demonic at play. And yet, the chilling narrative of that house extends far beyond this 
incident. I still get goosebumps trying to recall it all. We have some very close family friends 
whose son tragically died in an accident at the age of 12. This boy possessed an incredibly strong 
will and a mischievous spirit, traits that, it turned out, persisted beyond his passing. He would 
frequently manifest to his younger sister, the one who had tragically discovered him after his death. 
His father, a talented violinist, was playing at his memorial concert when, from the edge of 
the stage, his sister saw him. He appeared, walked towards his father, and in the middle of 
the performance, plucked a violin string, snapping it. The boy had a particular fondness for airsoft 
guns, and as a recurring reminder of his ethereal presence, the family would often discover small 
pyramids of airsoft pellets strategically placed around the house. You could wipe a counter clean, 
turn your back, and moments later, a small stack of pellets would mysteriously appear. Shortly 
after his passing, Sarah, my mother, introduced a friend of hers to the family. This friend, who had 
once possessed the ability to see and communicate with spirits, but hadn’t experienced anything 
in years, began visiting weekly for a class the mother offered. Soon after she started her visits, 
the deceased son began appearing to her during her car rides home. tasking her with relaying messages 
to his mother. She would return to the house, recounting incredibly personal memories 
and details that she couldn’t possibly have   known. This continued for several months until one 
particular drive home. Her infant in the back seat began to giggle and squeal for no apparent reason. 
She glanced into the rear view mirror and saw him playing with and she believed tickling the baby. 
The sight utterly unnerved her and she told him firmly that he had to leave. He never reappeared 
to her again. The final and arguably most profound act he performed occurred a year after his passing 
on the day that would have been his bar mitzvah,   an event he had been eagerly preparing for. 
The family held a memorial service that day, and upon returning home, they discovered someone 
had left them a a message awaiting them. They pressed play and from the speaker emerged the very 
song intended for his bar mitzvah. Sung by voices so pure and ethereal they seemed to resonate 
from another realm entirely. It was an offering of peace, a final beautiful affirmation from 
beyond. They preserved that voicemail for years, a sacred artifact, and my family, myself included, 
had the profound privilege of hearing it. To this day, it stands as one of the most exquisitly 
beautiful things I have ever experienced. While I have many stories stemming from my own father’s 
spectral persistence, some far more unsettling, this particular tale of spiritual solace remains 
my enduring favorite. My own journey into the inexplicable truly solidified one autumn evening 
when I was a mere 13 years old, living in a small, sleepy farming town. Halloween was on the horizon 
and the crisp bite of the changing season was palpable. A friend was spending the night, but 
by 10:00 restlessness had set in. We decided on a whim to walk the two miles to their house just 
beyond the town’s limits. We reached the periphery of civilization, the last street lamp casting a 
lonely beacon onto the desolate country road that stretched into the darkness ahead. Neither of us 
harbored any real fear. The route was primarily open fields bordered by tree lines and the most 
formidable predator we expected was an occasional coyote. We walked on the distant street lamp 
shrinking behind us until it was just a faint hopeful star. The road offered scant illumination 
enough only to remind us that the emptiness wasn’t absolute. A small ancient cemetery paralleled a 
section of the path. My friend attempted a few joking frights, but their words dissolved into 
the profound silence, devoid of impact. Just as we reached the cemetery’s end, where the tree 
line thickened and separated from the open fields, a sound erupted. Something large was moving within 
the trees, creating a significant disturbance. It wasn’t a frenzied crashing, but a slow, deliberate 
advance, each broken limb and snapping branch echoing like a muffled explosion in the blackness. 
For the first time, I truly understood the paralyzing terror of a deer in the headlights 
moment. My heart hammered against my ribs. Adrenaline coursed through me. Yet, I was utterly 
frozen. My primal instinct screamed danger, but offered no escape. It wasn’t until a sudden blur 
of motion streaked past me that my mind finally re-engaged. I registered that blur as my friend, 
bolting down the road within speed born of pure terror. That I decided was an excellent course of 
action. I pivoted and fled after them, running as if my life depended on it. We eventually reached 
my friend’s house, safe and breathless, spending the remainder of the night conjuring fantastical 
theories about the behemoth in the woods. The following morning, I walked the same road in 
the returning daylight. The eerie atmosphere had vanished, replaced by mundane reality. It was 
then I saw it. In one of the adjoining fields, a small herd of cattle grazed peacefully. For the 
rest of my life, I’ve remained 99% convinced that the terrifying encounter was nothing more than a 
lone cow startled by our voices, lumbering towards us. But that tiny persistent needle of doubt, the 
sheer impossibility of truly knowing, compels me to consider a far more supernatural explanation. 
My brother Michael passed away on December 22nd, 2004 at precisely 4:40 a.m. Over the years, I’ve 
had a few minor incidents I attributed to his lingering presence, objects flying off shelves, 
or the distinct plucking of my guitar strings, but the weirdest occurrence by far happened 
2 years ago. It was December 21st and I had gone to bed around 11 p.m. My phone is almost 
always on silent, but that night the insistent ringtone ripped me from sleep in the dead 
of night. An unfamiliar number flashed on the screen. Ordinarily, I’d answer without a 
second thought, but an inexplicable sensation washed over me. A profound feeling of wrongness. 
I simply couldn’t bring myself to pick up. The call went to voicemail, but when I listened, all 
I heard was static and unintelligible mess. It was only later that I noticed the caller had made a 
second attempt, reaching out at exactly 4:40 a.m. on December 22nd, the exact moment of Michael’s 
passing. The next morning, I tried calling the number back, only to be met with a message stating 
the number had been disconnected and was no longer   in service. My attempts to trace it through 
any means proved fruitless. My journey with the paranormal continued when I spent a year living 
in an overseas dorm in Texas, a building with   a curious past as an orphanage. During my time 
there, I encountered a myriad of unexplainable phenomena, though most were more strange than 
genuinely terrifying. But rather than begin with a general overview, I’ll recount the events 
of my first two nights in that peculiar place. The very first night, I found myself. The evening had 
stretched long. a blur of packing boxes and the clatter of a late dinner with former colleagues. 
By the time I finally returned to the dorm, all I could manage was to pull out my bedding before 
exhaustion claimed me. Sleep, when it finally arrived, brought with it a vivid dream. A boy, 
no older than 10 or 12, bounded with unrestrained joy through the open front doors of my apartment, 
straight onto my bed, a silent, playful greeting. From my vantage point in bed, the entryway was 
clearly visible, and there, standing just beyond the bedroom threshold, was an adult male figure. 
I couldn’t discern any features, only a vague impression of his silhouette, arms crossed, 
observing silently. It was a bizarre dream, nothing more, I told myself. Yet the following 
morning, both my bedroom doors stood wide open. Perhaps I hadn’t latched them properly, I am 
mused, despite the lingering conviction that I’d   secured them before bed. Maybe one of the other 
girls on the floor had been curious. The thought was fleeting, dismissed. But then it happened 
again the next morning. And this time there was no doubt. The doors had been firmly closed and locked 
when I drifted off to sleep. This peculiar detail, it turned out, was significant. I would later 
learn that our floor was not merely a dorm, but a spectral stage for three distinct entities, 
a playful pre-teen boy, a quiet nun, and a deeply malevolent male spirit. This chilling truth only 
unfolded weeks into my stay after I’d already accumulated a disquing collection of unexplained 
encounters. Sleep rarely came easily to me. Often, it was a battle lasting hours. And once I finally 
succumbed, the slightest disruption would wrench me back to wakefulness. One particular night, 
I was jolted awake by a sound like thunderclaps exploding right beside my ears. My eyes flew open, 
scanning the dim room. There, at the foot of my bed, a towering inky silhouette, a void against 
the faint streetlight glow, commanded the space. It stood where my door usually began. Its form 
a stark, deeper black compared to the yellowed ambient light that seeped in from outside. More 
than just a visual, an overwhelming wave of pure hatred radiated from it. A palpable malevolence 
that made it clear I was unwelcome. Trapped, my escape routes were limited. I’d have to physically 
run through the shadow, which stood directly in   front of the door knob, or leap from my third 
story window. Desperation seized me. I pulled the blankets over my head, reciting the Lord’s Prayer 
repeatedly until miraculously sleep offered a temporary reprieve. I encountered that terrifying 
shadow once more under similar circumstances. The only difference was that this time I witnessed its 
inception, a swirling black ball materializing in the air, expanding, spiraling outwards until 
it solidified into the familiar oppressive silhouette. My reaction was identical. I burrowed 
under the covers, clutching at prayer until unconsciousness claimed me. I remained utterly 
convinced these were visits from the malevolent male spirit. The second deeply unsettling incident 
occurred on the first floor. My boss tasked me with cataloging the contents of the unoccupied 
rooms. An RA accompanied me and together we moved from room to room, making our inventory. Directly 
beneath my own room was a laundry area, but this was no ordinary space. Unlike the simple utility 
room on my floor, this one branched into a long S-shaped hallway. Its walls lined floor to ceiling 
with storage closets. As we ventured deeper into its twisting expanse, an oppressive silence fell 
between us. Everything felt profoundly wrong, as if pressing onward would lead us to something 
unspeakable or worse, to a point of no return. We exchanged a silent, panicked glance and beat a 
hasty retreat. Certain our boss would understand. After abandoning the laundry room, only one 
room remained on our list. I pushed open its heavy door, revealing what looked like a cavernous 
storage area. A distant window offered only faint outlines of shapes. I recall the vague curve 
of a bicycle wheel, but the room was plunged into an impenetrable gloom. The sense of dread 
here was far more potent than in the laundry room. A chilling malevolence permeated the air so 
thick it felt almost suffocating. My hand froze, unable to reach for a light switch. I knew with an 
instinctual certainty that illuminating this space would reveal the horrifying source of what I was 
feeling. Without another thought, I slammed the door shut, the sound echoing ominously through the 
silent hall. These are just a few of the strange tales from that haunted dorm. The dorm building, 
though technically a high school dormatory, was administered by a 4-year university just down the 
street. During my inaugural week there, another perplexing incident unfolded. On my very first 
day of work, I’d made my way to the university campus for departmental introductions, a campus 
tour, and all the usual initial activities. By 300 p.m., I headed back to my floor, intending 
to greet the girls as they returned from school and start getting to know them individually. 
One by one, they entered, heading towards their rooms. And one by one, they reappeared, each 
with a bewildered expression, reporting that their bedroom doors were inexplicably locked. 
I was the sole individual on the entire floor who possessed master keys to their rooms. 
Not even the cleaning staff had access. It was standard practice for everyone, including 
the students, to leave their doors unlocked unless they were actually inside. The girls hadn’t locked 
their doors, nor had the cleaning staff. In fact, the cleaning crew never entered student 
rooms unless they had private bathrooms,   a luxury only two of the seniors enjoyed. And I, 
without a doubt, had not locked a single door. The very next day, the identical scenario repeated 
itself. I remember thinking how utterly strange it was for two such incidents to occur back to back. 
The following Friday, I found myself as the lone staff member on the floor, my RAS having gone out 
for the evening. The hallway was shaped like an S, and I was settled right at the bend, regaling some 
of the students with the peculiar occurrences I’d already witnessed. As I recounted what had 
happened, the door of an unoccupied room directly opposite us began to rattle violently, as 
if someone trapped within was desperately trying   to get out. One of the students beside me let 
out a piercing shriek and scrambled into my lap, attempting to bolt. Though a cold knot of fear had 
formed in my own stomach, I found myself letting out a nervous laugh. “Why are you laughing?” the 
student shrieked, clearly terrified. “Well,” I replied. It’s either laugh, run, or scream into 
the night and I don’t exactly have anywhere to run to right now. As the semester progressed 
and the students grew more comfortable with me, they affectionately started calling me mom. 
It became routine for them to visit my room and I would often leave my door a jar when 
I was awake and active. They’d simply call out cool mom to get my attention. But after the 
girls had retired for the night, I’d often hear a disembodied mom echoing down the hallway. Each 
time it seemed to be a different girl’s voice, I would poke my head out, but there was never anyone 
there. And in a building nearly a century old, you could hear every creek, every footstep, every 
door opening or closing. I never heard anything beyond that lone whispered call. Then in November, 
a new phenomenon began. the incessant flicking of the metal blinds that hung in the living room. 
Every night I would hear a soft metallic ping ping ping repeat until I finally drifted off to sleep. 
One particular night, already deep in slumber, I suppose my subconscious had simply reached its 
breaking point. I jolted awake, screaming into the darkness, “For the love of God, stop it.” 
And just like that, the sound ceased, never to be heard again. In December, one of the students 
was preparing to move back to her native Mexico, diligently packing up her room. She reported 
hearing a woman’s voice, soft and reverent, praying in Spanish. This was our first confirmed 
encounter with the nun, a spectral presence who would become a more regular part of my life 
during the spring semester. Indeed, that spring, the various hauntings seemed to take on 
a more benign, almost routine character. One of the seniors moved into the room directly 
adjacent to mine, making my side of the hall significantly quieter. With her arrival, we both 
began to experience a new peculiar ritual. Every night, precisely at 12:30 a.m., I would hear a 
single distinct knock on my door. 5 minutes later, the same solitary knock would sound on her door. 
This occurred nightly for the remainder of the semester. Each time we would cautiously peek out 
of our rooms only to find the hallway utterly empty. As summer approached, my professional life 
grew increasingly demanding. The job was taking an immense toll. I was working a staggering 
120 hours a week, often with only one or two days off a month. The girls were buzzing with the 
excitement of leaving for their summer breaks, but I was consumed with a different kind of internal 
debate whether to commit to another year in the   dorms or finally return to full-time studies. I 
was also at the time preparing to adding to my escalating stress, I was scheduled for outpatient 
surgery to address an issue with my sciatic nerve and procedure that would necessitate several days 
of recovery just before the semester concluded. My supervisors were not thrilled about the timing. 
The looming prospect of spending the entire summer alone in the famously haunted dorm also weighed 
heavily on my mind. I admit my mental state wasn’t at its peak, which might indeed influence my 
interpretation of the events that followed. After the girls departed for their summer breaks, I 
noticed a peculiar phenomenon beginning each night   as I prepared for sleep. I often slept sprawled 
across my bed like a starfish. Each evening, I would feel the covers subtly flatten between my 
legs, followed by a distinct indentation of the mattress, as if an unseen presence had settled 
gently between my outstretched limbs. Then, a soft, almost ethereal hand would brush against 
my calf. Logically, I should have been terrified, but with each touch, an inexplicable sense 
of profound peace washed over me. A warmth so comforting that it lulled me into a swift, 
deep sleep. I choose to believe it was the nun, extending a compassionate touch, helping me find 
solace amidst the relentless anxieties of my life. To this day, I haven’t definitively unraveled the 
mystery of who orchestrated all the dorm’s various hauntings. However, based on the patterns, 
I’m inclined to attribute the locked doors, the disembodied calls of mom, and the nightly 
knocks to the playful spirit of the boy. I suspect the violent door rattling, too, was his doing. 
None of his antics ever felt truly malicious. They seemed perfectly timed, more like mischievous 
pranks designed to startle both the students and   myself. Separately, my best friend’s boyfriend, 
a man prone to oneupping, had once mentioned his ability to perceive spirits. I’d mostly 
dismissed it. However, one Saturday evening, while we were all casually socializing at 
my mother’s house, no alcohol involved,   just friendly chatter, he suddenly grew very quiet 
and still. My best friend, sensing his shift, asked what was wrong. He explained that a powerful 
presence had entered the house and instructed us to continue our conversation while he felt it 
out. We resumed our idol gossip. A while later, he spoke again, stating the spirit was in the 
kitchen and appeared male, at least to him. He added that it didn’t feel like other spirits he’d 
encountered. Rather, it exuded a benevolent aura like a guardian angel. Still skeptical, I began 
to probe him with questions. He asserted that the entity was undeniably connected to my family and 
that it was young. Then he abruptly turned to me and asked, “Did your mother have a miscarriage?” 
The color drained from my face and goosebumps erupted across my skin. Sarah had miscarried a 
child before my birth. A boy who would have been my older brother. There was no conceivable 
way he could have known this. Even my best friend was unaware. He continued, “Did she name 
him?” “He’s trying to tell me it starts with an A.” My hands began to tremble. Sarah had indeed 
told me she’d planned to name him Alex. He then explained his belief. This was my unborn older 
brother, acting as a guardian angel for my mother, particularly at that time as Sarah was battling 
a severe episode of depression. That encounter was both profoundly unsettling and uncannily 
accurate. I have never questioned his abilities since. When I recounted the incident to Sarah the 
next day, she dissolved into tears. She confessed to having felt a comforting presence by her side 
during that difficult period. always attributing   it to her beloved grandfather. To realize it 
might have been her unborn son still watching over her gave her immense solace. And even now 
the memory sends shivers down my spine. This next account concerns my sister who passed away 
7 years ago. The first time I saw her after her death was in a vivid dream. She was admonishing 
me quite loudly to stop being a hermit and go out and meet people. When I asked her how, she simply 
shrugged. I don’t know. Put an ad on Craigslist. And perhaps surprisingly, that’s precisely how I 
eventually met my husband. The second encounter, however, was in Waking Life. I was leaving my 
apartment complex to pick up my son from school, and there she was, leaning casually against the 
building, waiting. She fell into step with me, walking all the way to the school. When my son 
spotted us, he ran up, utterly unperturbed, and began chatting with my sister as if her presence 
was a regular, unremarkable occurrence. On the walk home, she continued to stroll between us, a 
silent, familiar companion to him and me. My son, still processing her ethereal form, tried to pass 
directly through where my sister, Jaime, stood. He faltered, a look of utter bewilderment and fear 
crossing his face before he darted around her, scrambling away from us both. I can’t recall 
the specifics of our conversation then, but the sheer joy of seeing and speaking with her 
again was profound. It had been 8 months since our last clear encounter. That previous time, I was at 
my parents house and stepped into my niece’s room, intending to chat with her. Instead, I noticed 
her twin daughters, then just infants around 8 months old, happily babbling away in their 
cribs. I took a closer look and realized my sister Jaime was sitting right there in front 
of them, conversing with the babies. “Hey, Jamie,” I commented. “Do you actually understand 
what they’re saying?” My niece, clearly unnerved, shrieked at me before bolting from the room. I 
simply sat down behind the twins and Jaime and I talked for about 20 minutes. My father then 
entered the room. He seemed to catch a glimpse of Jaime and immediately sank to his knees, 
tears streaming down his face as he choked   out apologies. Jaime turned to me, her expression 
serene, and asked me to tell him it’s all right and that she still gets to talk and see her 
grandbabies and she loves you, Dad. The raw emotion in that room, both palpable and unseen, 
was unforgettable. Beyond my personal encounters, a few stories from friends resonate deeply. 
One in particular, recounted by a close friend, involves an ancient farmhouse, half consumed by 
fire and left as a decaying monument in the local landscape. The urban legend was a gruesome one. 
Approximately two decades prior, the last family to inhabit it met a horrific end. Depending on the 
teller, the father either brutally murdered his wife and children before taking his own life and 
then the house caught fire, or he deliberately set   the blaze after his bloody rampage. Regardless 
of the exact sequence, the home was infamous. A chilling dare circulated among local youth, 
spend a night within its charred walls. Rumor had it one unfortunate soul who attempted it 
was later committed to a mental institution. Others who tried were merely spooked or claimed 
to have seen unsettling things. Given my own accumulating list of inexplicable experiences, I 
approached these tales with an open, if cautious, mind. So, one night when I was between 12 and 14 
years old, I and three friends decided to bravely, or perhaps foolishly, accept the challenge. Our 
parents, understandably, were not keen on us camping out in a derelict, possibly murderous 
inferno. So, we orchestrated a sleepover at a friend’s house. His parents were famously heavy 
sleepers, and he had the perfect escape route. His basement bedroom had a private door leading 
directly outside. We made our clandestine way to the farmhouse. Inside, we found a large room that 
miraculously still boasted a partial ceiling, a fact we later realized was a structural stroke of 
luck. We settled down, trying to conjure bravado. Then, simultaneously, all four of us jolted awake. 
The reason was immediate and terrifyingly clear. Someone was screaming our names. One of my friends 
swore it sounded exactly like his mother. For me, it was my father’s voice, sharp with alarm. It was 
like a shared nightmare made real, but even that, given our location and the escalating nerves, 
wasn’t entirely beyond the realm of what a   rational mind might conjure under pressure. What 
followed, however, defied all rationalization. From the floor above, distinct screams erupted. 
A woman’s voice piercingly shrill and utterly panicked. It wasn’t the theatrical wailing of a 
horror movie. This was raw, incoherent babbling, followed by a series of garbled, inhuman 
noises that seemed to twist in the air. A deafening thump followed, then an unsettling 
void of silence. After a few agonizing moments, a new sound began, a gradual, heavy thutting, as 
though something immense was being laboriously dragged across the floorboards upstairs, scraping 
and knocking against furniture and doorways. We remained frozen, listening intently, until 
the sounds descended directly to the top of the staircase leading into our room. One of us, 
summoning immense courage, shown a flashlight towards the landing. The beam cut through the 
darkness, illuminating absolutely nothing. Yet the dragging continued. Then another muffled 
thunk, as if whatever was there had dropped a few inches onto a lower surface, like the next step 
down. At that precise moment, a flying insect, perhaps drawn to the light, zipped into the beam. 
It took off, and so did we. I’ve recounted this story many times, sometimes adding flourishes, 
like claiming we saw shadowy figures where only darkness lay. But the cold truth is simpler, 
yet no less terrifying. While it’s possible, however improbable, that someone was upstairs 
with a stereo rigged for spooky sound effects, or that our fear simply conjured up illusions, 
the visceral terror of that night remains one of   the most profound and inexplicable moments of my 
young life. The thought of ghosts still feels less outlandish than trying to logically piece together 
those sounds with nothing visible. Years later, my parents and I were touring a house we were 
considering moving into. As we walked past one of the downstairs rooms, a profound chill snaked 
up my spine, raising goosebumps on my arms the moment I peered inside. All the lights were 
functioning, casting a perfectly ordinary glow. Yet the air in that particular space felt thick 
with an unseen presence. The realtor, perhaps sensing our collective pause, simply continued 
ahead, leaving us to our own unsettling thoughts. The house we eventually moved into a few 
months later, held a particular room,   a space so profoundly dark it unnerved me from the 
outset. I hadn’t given it much thought since our arrival until one afternoon, idly kicking a ball 
around downstairs, I caught a fleeting glimpse of something in my peripheral vision. I whipped my 
head towards it, and for a hearttoppping second, it remained. A small girl in a luminous white 
night gown poised in the room’s doorway before dissolving into thin air. Utterly terrified, 
I raced upstairs to recount the chilling sight to my parents, who predictably dismissed it as an 
overactive imagination. Weeks later, repeating the same mundane activity downstairs, another movement 
caught my eye. This time, I exercised caution, attempting to identify the presence purely 
through my peripheral view. It was a towering, dark silhouette. Gathering my courage, I looked 
directly, and once more, for a brief instant, it held its ground before vanishing. This figure 
was unmistakably male, immense, and shadowy, still framed by the doorway, and unnervingly, it 
was pointing into the room. Suffice it to say, my ball kicking activities on that floor ceased 
immediately. Later, one night, having returned from a late night bathroom trip, I lay in bed, 
struggling to drift off. Distinct knocking began to emanate from the wall I shared with that 
unsettling room. A few rhythmic taps, then the faint, sorrowful cry of an infant from within the 
room itself, followed by the knocking resuming. This eerie sequence repeated itself, an agonizing 
loop, while I lay paralyzed by fear, unable to investigate. Eventually, exhaustion claimed me. 
Sleep brought a vivid dream. I was once again near that room and inside I saw a tall man suspended 
by a noose, a girl in white weeping in the corner and a small boy circling the hanging figure. Since 
that dream, the room has remained silent for me. My family, however, maintains I’m merely trying 
to frighten them when I share these accounts. I’ve since moved into my own place, profoundly relieved 
to be free of that house’s unsettling embrace. My mother Sarah has long held a personal theory. 
She believes a profound connection exists between so-called poltergeist phenomena and environment 
saturated with stress and intense emotion. Given her own childhood and adolescence, much of 
which was spent living above a bustling pub,   I find this conviction entirely understandable. 
Beyond the general challenges of growing up above a 1970s London pub, a landscape punctuated by 
IRA bombings, and a pervasive drinking culture, Sarah recounted a myriad of unsettling 
experiences within its very walls. The building itself was structured across four 
distinct levels. A top floor attic designated   primarily for storage, the first floor living 
quarters situated directly above the main bar, the public bar and its seating areas, and finally 
the basement. Sarah admitted she preferred not to acknowledge the supernatural activity at the time, 
a perfectly reasonable stance considering she had no option but to coexist with it. The living 
floor, somewhat ironically, was less prone to overt manifestations. However, in typical old 
pub fashion, a direct staircase ascended from the bustling bar area into their apartment. Some 
nights Sarah would find herself quietly settled on these stairs, captivated by disembodied voices 
drifting up from the deserted bar below. She also recalled a long hallway on that floor, 
adorned with mirrors leading to the bathroom. Crossing this corridor at night invariably 
brought a chilling unease, compelling her to   avert her gaze from every reflection. The pub’s 
history was scarred by the blitz, during which the entire public bar was obliterated, tragically 
claiming the lives of all within it. The floor had collapsed, sending debris and bodies tumbling into 
a section of the basement. Though swiftly rebuilt, the basement continued its function as a storage 
area for kegs and barrels. Yet, one particular section remained universally avoided, a distinct 
separate chamber, always noticeably colder than the rest. Even the formidable Doberman owned by 
my grandparents would recoil from its vicinity, actively resisting any attempt to draw it near. 
Naturally, this was the part of the basement. The attic, a cavernous space predominantly used for 
storing forgotten furniture, lay directly above Sarah’s bedroom. She frequently recounted waking 
to the unmistakable drag and scrape of heavy objects being pulled across its floorboards, an 
inexplicable symphony of movement in the dead of night. Most intriguingly, after she met my father 
in her late teens, he was a police officer. Then, these nightly disturbances persisted. He would 
often ascend to the attic, convinced he was about to apprehend a burglar. He’d meticulously 
search, fully believing an intruder lay in wait, yet he never once discovered a soul, only an 
empty, silent room. The very atmosphere of that house shifted dramatically around my 9inth year, 
darkening considerably as my father succumbed to severe alcoholism and drug addiction. Its once 
vibrant energy curdled into something heavy and unsettling. Doors developed a jarring life of 
their own, slamming shut with a force that rattled the foundations. Phantom footsteps echoed through 
barren corridors, and a non-existent telephone would chime with an antiquated ring, its source 
untraceable. But for me, the most profound terror struck one night as I lay in bed, when I felt 
my covers slowly, inexraably being peeled down my body. When I instinctively tugged them back, 
a distinct, firm resistance met my pull. Then, from the unseen space between my bed and the door, 
came the undeniable sound of something crawling, steadily approaching. Sarah’s own most terrifying 
experience within those walls occurred one morning when I was ill and she had to venture out 
for supplies. As she emerged from her room, a figure descended the staircase. She called out 
my name, asking if I felt better, believing it was me. She followed the disappearing silhouette 
around a bend. Later, at the gas station, an unnerving chill snaked up her spine. Sensing an 
oppressive presence behind her, she instinctively whirled around, shouting for it to leave her 
alone. When my parents eventually divorced, Sarah and I faced the daunting task of packing up 
our lives and moving ourselves. On the final day, as we reversed down the driveway, a stark figure 
appeared in an upstairs window, offering a slow, deliberate wave of farewell. It felt like a 
parting gesture from the very essence of the house itself. This theory resonated with me years 
later when I learned of the concept that intense emotional turmoil, particularly experienced by a 
teenage girl during puberty and especially related to her father, can manifest an energetic entity, 
a kind of psychological poltergeist that thrives on and amplifies those very raw feelings. It was a 
thought that retrospectively offered a disturbing lens through which to view our old home. 
Life, however, continued its relentless march. A dear friend of mine endured the devastating loss 
of her husband at an age far too young. Their love was a vibrant, undeniable force, their marriage 
a beacon of joy, and his sudden passing plunged everyone who knew them into profound shock. To 
offer what solace I could, I moved in with her for a few months. She often found herself needing 
to visit family out of town, especially during her long-term bereavement leave, leaving me to care 
for her pets, a loyal dog, and three affectionate cats. Her dog in particular was cherished like a 
child. My temporary sleeping arrangement involved one of two narrow twin beds, originally belonging 
to her late husband from his childhood. Though often cramped with her dog and my own small canine 
companion sharing the mattress, it was where I rested. During those months, a series of uncanny 
events unfolded, which I instinctively understood as manifestations of his enduring presence. 
Some of these occurrences were so utterly beyond belief, I dare not commit them to words. I don’t 
seek external validation for what I personally witnessed. Yet, I share one particular incident, 
hoping it might offer a sliver of comfort to   others. navigating similar grief. One night, 
utterly spent after a double shift waiting tables, I finally collapsed into sleep. I awoke suddenly 
to an ethereal, blinding white sphere of light hovering directly over the unoccupied twin bed 
beside me. It pulsed with an intense luminosity, brighter at its core, roughly the size of an 
exercise ball. Her dog, nestled near me, was rigid with an unnerving stare fixed directly upon it. 
Pure terror seized me. I shrieked the dog’s name, my throat raw with the effort, and slammed my 
eyes shut, burying myself beneath the covers until exhaustion dragged me back into oblivion. I kept 
many of these encounters to myself. My friend, still grappling with her grief, found herself 
inexplicably frustrated that these spectral   visitations seemed to gravitate towards me 
rather than her. It seemed, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, that her late husband chose 
me as a conduit to communicate his lingering   presence. She has since found a new partner and 
is engaged, and the moments of profound connection with him have mercifully brought her solace. Once 
I moved out of that house, the phenomena ceased entirely. We’ve tacitly agreed not to revisit the 
unsettling events of those few months. Now, let me share a story from my Abella, a tale from the 
time she welcomed her first son, my uncle, into the world. My Abella once recounted a particularly 
eerie incident from when my uncle was just a baby. She and her mother were relaxing in the kitchen, 
a spot from which they had a clear view of the   hallway and the slightly open door to my uncle’s 
nursery, where he was napping soundly in his crib. Suddenly, a tiny figure, no bigger than a child’s 
doll, but distinctly human in form, shot out from beneath my uncle’s room, vanishing down the hall 
in a blink. Both women were utterly paralyzed by fear for a moment before scrambling to check 
on the baby. He was undisturbed, still deep in slumber. My Abella swears it was a miniature 
man, like something out of folklore. Perhaps a leprechaun or a mischievous goblin, she’d muse, 
wondering if it had somehow slipped in through a window. My own daily life often puts me in places 
that seem innocuous, yet harbor the inexplicable. I reside in a vibrant, well-lit part of town, 
brimming with businesses, a major hospital, and pleasant suburban pockets. It’s the kind of place 
where an 11:00 p.m. drive for groceries to a store open almost around the clock with short lines and 
a superb deli feels utterly unremarkable. Yet, one night, cruising down a brightly illuminated 
street, I spotted a woman in her early 20s. She had long brown hair, a chic Burberry scarf, a tan 
sweater, form-fitting dark pants, and brown boots. My immediate thought was that her attire seemed a 
little too edgy for that particular city stretch   at such a late hour. Maybe she’d overindulged at 
one of the numerous restaurants or comedy clubs a short distance away and was bravely trekking home. 
I’d certainly done it myself. As my car glided past, she met my gaze, a brief but direct eye to 
eye connection. About 10 minutes later, I pulled into the grocery store parking lot. I walked up to 
the automatic doors and as I reached for a basket, someone was exiting. I stepped aside to let them 
pass, looked up and felt a chill. It was the same woman. She gave me a fleeting glance, a slight 
knowing grin, and continued on, disappearing around the corner of the building. I stood there, 
utterly bewildered. I walked a few steps into the store, numbly acknowledging a passing employee, 
my mind still reeling. Then, on an impulse, I spun around and hurried back outside, intent on seeing 
where she’d gone. The parking lot was vast and brilliantly lit, with only my car and two others 
present when I’d arrived. There was no one there, not another soul. It defied logic. It couldn’t 
have been a doppelganger dressed identically. To this day, I believe it was her. And her 
impossible reappearance and vanishing act remain one of the strangest experiences of my life. Even 
now, a decade later. Around that same period, I was living in an apartment with my 4-year-old 
daughter. We were alone, just the two of us, and unexplained phenomena became a common occurrence. 
I’d meticulously cleaned the downstairs, every surface gleaming, only to go upstairs, return 
a short while later, and find things like wine boxes or markers inexplicably moved to the kitchen 
counter. The light switches in my room had a habit of flipping on and off with such regularity that I 
eventually replaced the fixture with a fluorescent shop light, one of those long tubes with a chain 
pull, only to have the chain begin to pull itself, activating the light. In winter, when our 
windows were sealed with plastic for insulation, my bedroom door would slowly, deliberately swing 
wide open right before my eyes. We had baseboard heating, and one afternoon after preheating the 
oven, I came downstairs to discover the oven door agape. It was spring-loaded, meaning it wouldn’t 
simply fall open. And I certainly hadn’t left it that way. I wasn’t particularly predisposed 
to believing in hauntings then, but I simply attributed these events to a non-threatening 
entity. Nothing truly menacing ever happened, and these occurrences always took place when I 
was alone in the house, stone cold sober. One day, I decided to try and capture proof. Armed with 
a digital camera, I started snapping pictures, hoping to catch something out of the ordinary. 
A few shots revealed nothing a miss. Then, as I turned towards the bathroom, aiming the 
lens, half of the resulting image was utterly   black. I spun fully towards the bathroom, pressing 
the shutter again, and the camera, despite being fully charged, instantly died. Puzzled, I tried 
taking pictures in other parts of the apartment, and it worked perfectly. But the moment I pointed 
it back towards the toilet, it died once more. That evening, the girl’s cries were particularly 
distraught. After about 10 minutes of trying to soothe her back to sleep, her muffled voice 
emerged from under the covers. She complained of a sharp pain on her back where the man scratched 
her. Pulling down her footed pajamas, I discovered several deep, inexplicable scratches on her skin, 
reaching areas she couldn’t possibly have touched herself. Her bed offered no explanation either. 
Still shaking, she whispered about a towering figure with fiery hands that had pressed against 
her, urging her to observe all the others who   worked everywhere. The terror was suffocating. 
Within a month, we had abandoned that apartment. Despite our financial struggles, we sought 
refuge at Liam’s place for a few weeks until   I secured new housing. My only regret remains 
not having the foresight to bring in a medium to cleanse the space. Thankfully, my daughter never 
endured such a tormenting experience again. But I am convinced to my core that what transpired 
was no mere fabrication of a child’s mind or a cruel twist of fate. My next chapter led me to the 
Cliff Hotel in Colorado, where I took on a role as a housekeeper. The hotel was renowned for its 
paranormal activity. Guests frequently reported disembodied tapping and the unnerving sensation 
of being watched, often requesting room changes. This establishment, the second to stand on the 
site after its predecessor succumbed to fire   in the 1980s, was steeped in history, built on 
the dramatic slopes of Pikes Peak, and had once hosted an array of prominent figures in the 1800s, 
when the area pulsed as a lively hub. Both myself and other staff members were privy to a multitude 
of strange occurrences. On my very first day, my manager, Rosa, warned me that the two housekeepers 
who previously covered the sixth floor had quit, with the most recent one claiming a ghost 
had physically pushed her to the ground,   prompting her immediate resignation. Rosa sternly 
advised me that I would need to be strong with the ghosts on the sixth floor, as each of the hotel’s 
six levels had a dedicated housekeeper. The sixth floor, comprised entirely of elegant, luxurious 
suites, captivated me. I enjoyed being in those rooms and often sensed the presence of spirits. 
Yet, these encounters never truly frightened or unsettled me. There was only one instance where 
a spirit’s displeasure felt directed at me. I had the television on, whereas I usually preferred the 
radio or CDs left by guests. The moment I switched off the TV, the oppressive feeling dissipated. 
Another particular suite always had its radio playing when I entered. We housekeepers would 
typically do two sweeps of the rooms. The first, a quick pass for tips or gifts before the ballots 
could snatch them, and the second, a thorough cleaning. It was a common occurrence to find 
the radio already on during my morning shifts, which I would then switch off after I finished 
cleaning. This specific room was also uniquely notorious among the sixth floor suites. It was 
perpetually left in disarray by guests, often wreaking of smoke with strange messages scrolled 
on surfaces unlike any other room on my floor. After several months at the hotel, the demanding 
nature of the work took its toll. One afternoon, I returned home utterly drained and decided to take 
a nap. As I slowly emerged from a heavy sleep, my eyes barely open, I caught sight of a shadowy 
outline. Given that I slept on a futon mattress, I was positioned close to the floor, and what I 
saw was distinctly the lower half of a figure. I knew instantly it wasn’t human. Faint, almost 
translucent little legs seemed to shimmer, and my mind instantly recognized it as the presence 
of an old man from the hotel. It was a strange sensation. I could perceive him, yet he wasn’t 
fully corporeal, a form both there and not there. A flicker of fear ran through me and I consciously 
avoided trying to make out his face. Instead, I mustered a firm go home and the apparition 
vanished. I found that many of my spectral encounters occurred during that liinal state 
between waking and sleeping. Perhaps because   the mind being less prone to panic when drowsy 
is more receptive to a dreamlike reality, allowing sensitivity to phenomena 
that would otherwise be imperceptible.   My current employment is at a nursing home, a 
setting that has also presented its share of unsettling events. We frequently hear loud door 
slams echoing from the back hallway. Each time, upon investigation, we discover that all 
residents capable of walking are already safely tucked into their beds. Given the significant 
mobility limitations of many of our residents, it’s simply impossible for them to have reached 
their beds in time after causing such a commotion. Furthermore, all our linen and trash rooms, where 
such noises might originate, are kept securely locked. Our nursing home harbored an unnerving 
pattern. Whenever those inexplicable door slams echoed from the rear corridor, someone invariably 
passed away within the next 24 hours. There was also the distressing case of an elderly resident 
consumed by dementia, whose aggressive outbursts and incessant screaming were a constant challenge 
for the staff. After her death, though no windows were opened, her piercing cries persisted for 
another 3 weeks, an auditory phantom haunting the halls. It also struck me how some individuals 
possess an uncanny sixth sense, an intuitive grasp of impending mortality. I recall one aid, a 
kind woman, who once observed a patient whose vitals were stable, appetite healthy, and general 
conditions seemingly robust, a woman in her early 70s, far from elderly. Yet the aid approached 
me, a peculiar gravity in her voice, urging, “You might want to say goodbye before you leave. 
I don’t believe she’ll be with us tomorrow.” I visited the patient, finding her peaceful 
and seemingly well. The following morning, an hour after our shift ended, she was found 
deceased at 8:00 a.m. The aid later confided that she occasionally felt an irresistible compulsion 
to enter a resident’s room, a feeling so potent it would override her usual routine. Invariably, on 
those occasions, she would discover the resident had passed away. Shifting to a childhood memory, I 
recall a night as a young child when my dog Kota, a large and boisterous companion, needed to go 
outside. I opened my bedroom door, leaving it a jar for his eventual return, and tried to 
drift back to sleep. A short while later, I noticed the door was now fully open, allowing the 
hallway light to stream in, a distracting beacon. Assuming Kota had re-entered, I thought little of 
it. Yet, Kota was a big dog. His presence on the bed was unmistakable. This time, however, whatever 
settled onto my mattress was unnervingly silent, impossibly light, and brought with it an 
immediate, profound coldness. I lay facing the wall, my mind blank with confusion, then growing 
terror. I knew with an instinctual certainty that Cota wasn’t in the room. He always slept in a 
familiar way beside me, and I heard nothing. Then a faint shallow breathing began, almost directly 
behind me. I decided then and there that I had to escape. Without so much as a backward glance, 
I scrambled out of bed and practically sprinted to the furthest end of the house to Sarah’s room. 
I hammered on her door, babbling about something in my room. She quickly pulled me inside, secured 
her door, and eventually after about half an hour, we both drifted off. Waking later that day, a 
deep chill clung to me as I walked back towards my bedroom. The fear that the unseen presence still 
lingered. Passing the living room, I discovered the front door was a jar, a detail that amplified 
my terror. Whatever it was, it never manifested again in that house. But the memory of that night, 
and the unsettling question of what it could have   been has stayed with me. Our parents’ home was a 
sprawling ancient structure riddled with age. and as many of us suspected, spectral inhabitants. 
It wasn’t an exaggeration to call it profoundly haunted. Over the years, countless inexplicable 
occurrences had been reported. Liam, my living brother, once distinctly saw our deceased 
grandfather occupying his favorite armchair,   a silent, comforting vigil. My father, in his 
restless sleep, would feel his blankets violently seized and shaken by an unseen force. Sarah, 
our mother, frequently heard footsteps pacing the front porch, accompanied by the distinct creek 
of the front door opening and closing, followed by the faint sound of a twig snapping, or perhaps 
even a pigs or some small animals cry before a wispy pillar-like form, possibly humanoid, 
would coales from the misty air. I, the watcher, also sensed other presences on multiple occasions, 
and once during childhood saw a fleeting figure that I initially mistook for another dog. However, 
the most vivid personal encounter at that house occurred when I was 10. I was playing on the lawn 
with our new puppy when my gaze drifted to the back porch. There, framed within what would have 
been a doorway when the house operated as a hotel, stood a man in a strikingly elegant tan 
yellow suit. He simply stood watching us with an unnerving stillness. I didn’t recognize 
him. I glanced down at our puppy, then back up, and he was gone. A decade later, another curious 
incident unfolded. I was relaxing in the lounge, engrossed in television, when an unmistakable 
sensation washed over me. The distinct impression that my father had quietly approached and paused 
behind my seating, observing what I was watching. The lounge was an expansive openplanned space, so 
it wouldn’t have been unusual for him when he was alive to linger in that transitional area, subtly 
separating the active viewing space from the more casual part of the room, often just taking in the 
scene as I idly flipped channels. The vastness of the Australian outback at night is a peculiar 
beast, both breathtaking and profoundly isolating. I remember one particular night years ago, deep 
in its remote heart, driving with a local friend and two women in the back. They were all enjoying 
a few beers, but I, as usual, was stone cold sober at the wheel. The car was filled with chatter. I 
was trying to spin a yarn to my friend beside me when the conversations from the back seat seemed 
to swell, growing louder and more insistent. I found myself raising my voice, leaning closer 
to my passenger to be heard above the den. He turned to me, a strange, almost bewildered look 
on his face. “Why are you shouting?” he asked, his voice low. “I frowned. The girls are practically 
yelling back there.” He shook his head, his gaze unwavering. “They’re not saying a word. Can’t 
you hear that, too?” My blood ran cold. I glanced into the rear view mirror. The two women in the 
back were indeed silent, their mouths closed, their eyes fixed on me with an unnerving blend of 
apprehension and sheer wonder, but the chattering and laughter continued, clear as day, a symphony 
of female voices speaking in a language I couldn’t understand, coming from nowhere. Panic began to 
claw at my throat. “Yes,” I stammered, my voice barely a whisper. “I can hear women talking.” “You 
do, too.” He exhaled sharply. Holy hell. Yes. Just drive. Go now. I didn’t need another command. I 
slammed the vehicle into gear, tearing down the barely there two-track road, dodging low-hanging 
branches and swerving wildly down turns I couldn’t possibly see. Every bump and jolt was a frantic 
beat against the invisible current of those spectral voices. As we finally broke free onto the 
main road, the impossible chorus faded, leaving behind an oppressive silence. Seat belts clicked, 
a small act of normaly in a moment of utter chaos. What in God’s name was that? I gasped. My friend, 
still visibly shaken, explained. It was a sacred site, a gathering place for the women of the 
local Aboriginal tribes. We’ve always been told there are spirits there, he confessed. But I never 
really believed it until tonight. He went on to apologize for bringing me, the only white person 
in the car, to such a place, saying the voices had urged him to leave before something bad happened. 
It was a chilling reminder of how some places hold ancient energies unseen and unheard by most, but 
deeply felt by those connected to them. That brush with the inexplicable lingard, but the tapestry of 
my life is woven with many such threads. My family owned an old, weather-beaten cottage nestled deep 
in the mountains, a place where summers were spent in quiet retreat. Its age was evident in every 
creaking floorboard and drafty corner, and its thin walls, while offering no insulation from the 
mountain chill, also offered no barrier to sound. I was a teenager then, immersed in a book late one 
evening, my grandparents already asleep upstairs. The house was prone to the usual nocturnal 
symphony of an old building, amplified by   the thin walls, the occasional groans of settling 
timbers, the distant murmur of the stream outside. But on this particular night, a new sound began 
to filter down from the staircase. A short, almost hesitant tremor, then distinctly the soft thud 
thud of bare small feet. Children’s footsteps. My heart lurched. I froze, straining to listen. They 
weren’t moving quickly. Each step was deliberate, gentle, yet utterly out of place. And then, midway 
up the stairs, they stopped. Complete silence. An oppressive stillness descended, far heavier 
than any sound could have been. I instinctively burrowed beneath my blankets, praying for sleep to 
reclaim me, terrified and alone in the downstairs room. The next morning, I braced myself for the 
familiar teasing about my overactive imagination. Instead, my grandmother approached me, a furrow in 
her brow. “What were you doing on the stairs last night, dear?” she asked. My grandfather, equally 
perplexed, chimed in. We both woke up to the sound of someone walking, but when we checked, there 
was no one. It wasn’t the first strange thing that cottage had witnessed, but for me, hearing 
that shared experience from my grandparents   solidified a chilling realization. Our quaint 
mountain retreat was undeniably deeply haunted. The watcher’s long journey into the desolate 
heart of Wisconsin had always been fraught with   a peculiar unease and unsettling certainty 
that something unseen stirred in the night. The house itself possessed a strange aura 
amplified by its unique features. Most notably, a narrow crawl space connected the watcher’s 
bedroom directly to Liam’s, each end sealed by   a small door. Its purpose remained a mystery, too 
constricted for storage, too tight for comfortable passage. One evening, as the watcher prepared 
for bed, faint whispers and almost imperceptible whimpers drifted from beyond the walls. 
Initially, these strange sounds were dismissed, common as the nightly prowl of coyotes seeking the 
barn cats. But as the hours dragged on, the noises intensified, ebbing and flowing until sleep became 
an impossibility. Seeking respit, the watcher descended to the kitchen for a glass of water. 
Upon returning, a jolt of dread. The crawlspace door, which had been firmly shut, now stood a 
jar, and the whimpering had ceased entirely. Startled, the watcher scrambled back into bed, 
desperately willing sleep to return. Eventually, unconsciousness claimed them, only for the watcher 
to be abruptly jolted awake by a distinct sinking sensation at the foot of the bed. Assuming a house 
cat had slipped in, the watcher kept their eyes closed, attempting to drift back to sleep. Then 
a sharp resounding slam shattered the silence. The crawlspace door. Eyes snapping open. The 
watcher saw it. A towering pitch black figure. Its form stark against the dim light. Two piercing 
white eyes fixed in an unwavering stare. Terra propelled the watcher from the bed, sprinting 
downstairs where they spent the remainder of the   night huddled on the couch. The next morning, 
Liam corroborated the chilling experience, confirming he too had been woken by the sound of 
the crawlspace door slamming shut. That unsettling night marked one of the watchers final stays in 
that house. Adding to the dread, 5 years later, when the watcher’s father and stepmother 
added an extension, the foundation yielded a   grim discovery. Gravestones from the 1800s. Years 
passed, and when the watcher was 16, another eerie awakening occurred. It was a Wednesday night, 
roughly 2:00 a.m. when a ghostly figure manifested in the middle of their bedroom floor. Paralyzed 
by fear, the watcher fumbled for the bedside lamp, but it remained stubbornly dark. As a desperate 
coping mechanism, the watcher pulled the duvet over their head, hoping the apparition would 
simply disappear. After 10 agonizing minutes, the watcher cautiously peaked out. The light was 
now on, the room empty, and thankfully the sheets were dry. The spectral figure, dressed in black 
with a discernable outline of a face, had spoken softly, its voice an ethereal whisper, “Don’t mind 
me.” Far from comforting, the words only deepened the watcher’s terror. The following Saturday, the 
watcher was entertaining friends, proudly showing off a new camera phone. Days later, reviewing 
the casual snapshots, the watcher saw her, the same spectral woman, now subtly seated 
at the kitchen table, directly behind one of their friends. It was undeniably her. A profound 
sense of disorientation settled over the watcher, convinced they were losing their mind. For the 
next week, strange occurrences plagued the house. kitchen cupboards mysteriously left open, the 
front door found unlocked despite the watcher’s meticulous securing and a relentless barrage 
of nightmares. Finally, unable to bear the escalating dread, the watcher confided in their 
parents, presenting the chilling photograph as   undeniable proof. To the watcher’s surprise, their 
parents immediately took them to a parish priest. The priest without hesitation returned with them, 
opening the front and back doors of the house, offering prayers, blessing each room, and speaking 
a few solemn words. He then offered an intriguing observation about the area’s history, a comment 
that seemed to hint at a deeper, more unsettling truth. The priest, after blessing our home, shared 
some unsettling insights. He alluded to his own extensive experience with the supernatural in 
the region, hinting that what I’d endured was   but a ripple compared to deeper currents of dread. 
Pressing him for more, the watcher learned of the land’s grim history. Our mountainside home, now 
part of a thriving, developed town, stood on what was once the unhallowed burial ground for victims 
of a nearby 3,000-year-old fortress, narrow water castle in Warren Point County, Northern Ireland. 
This ancient edifice, infamous for its cruel past and spectral residents, explained the profusion 
of lost souls and lingering activity in the area. Even the hill itself, Bridal Lon, bore a 
tragic legacy, named, as Lore suggested, after a knight’s new bride. Fleeing the castle 
with her husband, she witnessed his beheading by pursuers. Yet somehow, still grieving, she guided 
their horse, her bridal gown stained with sorrow, along the path that now carried her husband’s 
headless ghost. The very ground was soaked in centuries of suffering. Beyond these 
historical echoes, the Watcher’s personal roster of unsettling encounters began early. One 
indelible memory from around age six involved our isolated home, alone dwelling for miles around. My 
sister, cousin, and the watcher were engaged in an evening game near the detached garage. The moon 
a muted lamp in the rural darkness. My sister and the watcher, in a burst of childish energy, were 
attempting to clamber onto our taller cousin’s back. A joyful tangle of limbs that left us all 
facing the garage wall. A prickling sensation of being observed compelled the watcher to turn. 
There, stark against the night, a man stood before our house. His form was diiaaphinous, 
translucent, yet undeniably present, his eyes fixed in an unwavering gaze upon the watcher. 
Paralysis seized the watcher. Instinctively, the watcher swayed backward, a silent plea for 
confirmation. For four excruciating seconds, an eternity, our gazes locked. The watcher’s mind 
raced, desperate to hold eye contact until the others noticed. But the boisterous laughter of 
my sister and cousin had inexplicably vanished, replaced by a profound, suffocating silence. Panic 
clawed at the watcher’s throat. Calling for my cousin, receiving no reply, a chilling thought 
emerged. They were dead. The watcher’s focus fractured, eye contact with the apparition lost, 
and a frantic scream tore from the watcher’s lips, calling my cousin’s name again. Suddenly, their 
laughter erupted, shattering the stillness. The watcher spun back. The transparent man was gone. 
Tears streamed down the watcher’s face as the watcher implored my cousin to seek the safety 
of the house. He merely giggled. Years later, when the watcher recounted this to Sarah, she 
calmly revealed that two different living maids,   residents of our guest house, had on separate 
occasions been driven to screams in the dead of night by the sight of a similar spectral man. 
The watcher was grateful to have left that house. Its quiet isolation harbored a relentless parade 
of the inexplicable. Another summer memory, this one from my grandmother’s yard, offered its own 
brand of chilling impossibility. The watcher and cousins were playing when a man in a crisp suit, 
clutching a briefcase, approached the front door, a portal that had been permanently sealed for 
years, its screen door locked and a heavy cabinet   barricading it from the inside. We children 
called out, directing him to the accessible side entrance. He ignored us completely, pressing 
the broken doorbell button, then stood there, seemingly engaged in conversation with an unseen 
presence within. A faint smile touched his lips. He then opened the impossibly sealed screen door 
and stepped through the barricaded main door,   vanishing inside. One of my cousins, eyes wide 
with disbelief, bolted through the side door to alert my grandmother. The watcher and the other 
cousins raced onto the porch, peering through the now closed yet still hermetically sealed front 
door. Beyond the cabinet, the watcher could see my cousin, justesticulating wildly, attempting to 
explain the spectral visitor to my grandmother. They both insisted no one had entered. Years 
later, my uncle revealed a disturbing detail. In the early 1950s, a door-to-door salesman had 
terrorized the area known for assaulting women. The revelation cast a sinister Paul over the 
phantom visitor. Some childhood memories, however, are etched not with supernatural mystery, but with 
stark, devastating reality. When the Watcher was a mere three or four, a family friend’s daughter 
came over to play. We were innocently exploring, fascinated by some heavy metal pipes propped 
against a shed. In an instant, they toppled, claiming her life right before the watcher’s eyes. 
That chilling, indelible image remains as vivid today as the moment it occurred. The memory of 
Kyla’s final moments, the crushing weight of those pipes, remains imprinted on my soul, an enduring 
source of profound guilt. Even at that tender age, though I couldn’t grasp the permanence of death, 
I instinctively knew something was terribly wrong. Months later, the innocence of childhood returned, 
and I found myself playing alone outside, as I often did. Upon re-entering the house, I burst 
into my room, a strange urgency propelling me, and found Sarah. Kyla needs help. I cried, my 
small voice trembling. Her chest hurts. She can’t breathe. Sarah, bewildered, asked what I meant. 
I explained with the simple conviction of a child that I had been playing with Kyla, and she had 
told me her head hurt. To this day, Sarah remains convinced that I, her young son, had been playing 
with the ghost of my departed friend. It was a few years before that, 5 years ago to be precise, when 
a different kind of spectral presence entered our lives. Sarah’s closest friend, whom we all 
affectionately considered an uncle, David, tragically succumbed to a drug overdose. Their 
relationship had been strained in his final days, and they lived an hour apart. David, a man known 
for his dark humor, had often quipped to Sarah that if he ever died, he’d return to haunt her. 
He made good on that promise. After his cremation, a series of peculiar events began to plague 
our home. Whenever a light flickered or an object shifted, we’d simply shout, “Go home, Uncle 
David. You’re drunk.” And the disturbances would inexplicably cease. Then one night, just before 
we prepared to move, the poltergeist activity escalated dramatically. I awoke to the startling 
crash of something falling and the shrill shriek of the smoke alarm. My stepfather and I converged 
in the kitchen, finding no smoke, but utter chaos. A pineapple previously perched at top the fridge 
lay shattered on the floor. A stove burner was inexplicably on. The fridge door swung wide, 
and every cabinet stood agape. From her bedroom, Sarah’s voice cut through the clamor, laced with 
a mix of exasperation and amusement. “Go home, David. You’re drunk,” she called out, a laugh 
bubbling up immediately. In that instant, the smoke alarm silenced, the fridge door 
settled, and my stepfather and I, exchanging wideeyed glances, began the surreal task of 
closing all the cabinets. Before those events, when I was much younger, I lived in a mobile 
home in Bluffton, Ohio with Sarah, my stepfather, our dog, Cooper, and our cat Smokey. My friend 
Kathleen was spending the night, a farewell sleepover before her family moved away. It was an 
unusually quiet summer evening, a stillness that, in retrospect felt ominous. Sarah and my 
stepfather were sound asleep at the far end of the trailer. Cooper was nestled in his open cage, 
and Smokey, our cat, was curled up on my stomach. Kathleen and I, having just finished a movie, 
were still awake on my pullout couch. Suddenly, a profound chill permeated the room, and there, 
starkly projected against the hallway wall, were three distinct shadows, one unmistakably a cat, 
another a dog, and a third unsettlingly human. All the trailer doors were shut tight and the 
windows were completely covered. Kathleen, her fingers digging into my arm, whispered, 
“Do you see that?” I was too stunned to do more than squeak out a terrified, 
“Yeah.” We stared, fixed on the hallway, but the shadows had vanished. Kathleen moved away 
shortly after that, but we’ve remained in touch. I’ve always been drawn to the paranormal, shows, 
movies, books, you name it. And I sometimes wonder if that fascination somehow made us more 
receptive. I’ve had my share of truly unnerving encounters, but nothing quite compares to a 
terrifying sleep paralysis dream I experienced. I mean, I’ve seen ghosts and all sorts of 
unexplainable things, but this dream scared me. I was a nurse in the 1940s, you know, pinup hair, 
dark red lipstick, everything in a muted black and white palette. In this dream, an overweight woman, 
also a nurse, was deliberately ending her patients lives, seemingly out of a twisted sense of mercy, 
or perhaps to prevent further suffering. I watched a silent participant in this Macob scene, and her 
hauntingly green eyes filled with an unsettling determination, seemed to pierce right through me. 
She wanted me to participate to do the same to one of the patients. When I refused, she turned her 
chilling gaze and her malevolent intent directly on me. I jolted awake, but the terror wasn’t 
over. She was there, hovering right above me, her piercing green eyes still fixed on mine, and I 
was utterly paralyzed, unable to move a muscle. On another occasion from my childhood, my sister and 
I shared a bedroom. At the far end of the room, positioned so you’d catch your reflection when 
getting out of bed, stood a large mirror. It was late one night when I was suddenly roused not by a 
sound, but by the distinct sensation of something sitting directly in front of that mirror. My 
sleepy mind, grasping for a rational explanation, immediately assumed it was my sister. I vividly 
recall the words forming on my lips, ready to ask, “What in the world are you doing?” It seemed 
to be tending to its hair, though the strands appeared frayed and charred. I was about to 
reach out and tap its shoulder, but then my gaze found the mirror’s reflection. What I saw was 
a grotesque burnt skull, its withered tendrils of hair clinging to it. The entity tilted its head, 
an unnerving gesture of confusion. Beside me, my sister stirred, mumbling a sleepy what, without 
opening her eyes. This figure was barely a foot from her and from me. I recoiled instantly, 
scrambling back into bed, squeezing my eyes shut. Later, when I entered college, I moved into 
a larger house, sharing a room that, according to all previous tenants and current housemates, was 
notoriously haunted. I chose a spot facing the closet, while two other girls occupied a loft 
style bunk bed, their faces towards the door. One night, the girl on the bottom bunk jolted us 
awake with a terrified scream, “Go away! Go away!” When we pressed her, she recounted seeing a woman 
standing over her bed, whispering to her before turning and gliding into the closet. Initially, 
it sounded like a classic case of sleep paralysis, a phenomenon I and the other girl experienced 
quite regularly in that room. For her, however, it was a first, and for me, these episodes were 
becoming disturbingly frequent within a short span of time. We dismissed it, attributing the 
occurrences to the general creeks and groans of the old house disrupting our sleep cycles. 
That explanation held until I moved to the upper portion of the loft. Bear in mind, this was 
a rather unremarkable Southern California town, where the heat could be oppressive, and air flow 
was virtually non-existent in that elevated space. After I’d hung tapestries around the borders for 
a semblance of privacy, I would occasionally feel an unseen presence brush against the back of my 
neck, my arm, or my leg. This only ever happened when I was completely alone in the room. I tried 
to rationalize it as an overactive imagination, and as I spent so little time there 
alone, it didn’t seem to matter much.   Then one afternoon, I was stretched out on the 
bed, engrossed in Netflix, when a bag of colored pencils began to slide slowly off my desk. It 
wasn’t a sudden movement. It was deliberate, as if pulled by invisible strings. The bag had 
been sitting squarely in the center of the desk. There was no fan on, and it was far too heavy 
for any air current to account for its motion. I heard the distinct crinkle of the bag as 
I watched, frozen, it descend from the desk   and onto the loft floor. It then deflated, much 
like squeezing the air out of a sandwich bag, but there was no logical reason for the air to have 
been expelled. It almost looked as if something was pressing down on it. And then I felt it, that 
familiar sensation of an arm brushing against me. I bolted from that room, spending the rest of the 
day in common spaces. From that point on, I was rarely alone in my room, much to the amusement of 
my housemates, who gleefully teased me for being the girl afraid of ghosts. I’ve had several other 
strange encounters. The first, when I was around 9 or 10, involved waking up needing water. As I 
left my room, I saw a dark, almost gaseous shadow figure with piercing red eyes. It glided from 
the hallway towards the kitchen and I propelled by a strange curiosity followed. It dissipated 
slowly like a held breath exhaling into the air fading into nothingness. A more recent incident 
occurred when I was in a hurry to use the bathroom upstairs. I raced past an open bedroom door, 
catching a fleeting glimpse of what I initially thought was Liam. After my trip to the bathroom, 
as I walked back, I realized the absurdity of my initial thought. The figure I’d seen was immense, 
truly gargantuan, with the build of a lumberjack dressed in a checkered plaid shirt. It was a 
mere split-second impression, but it lingered. Fast forward a few years, and Liam himself was 
utterly unnerved. He recounted seeing a colossal man with a red flannel plaid shirt, his height 
staggering, reflected in one of our house mirrors. He was visibly shaken and I ironically happened 
to be on the toilet when he described the man. As he spoke, I felt the blood drain from my face. 
I had never spoken a word to anyone about my own fleeting vision, convinced my eyes were playing 
tricks on me, but he had described the man to an   astonishing degree of accuracy. It was as if we 
were operating on different plains of existence, and somehow the veil between them had momentarily 
thinned, allowing us both to glimpse the same spectral inhabitant. Or perhaps it was simply 
a ghost. The figure seemed to be tending to its hair, but the strands appeared singed and 
brittle. I reached out, about to tap its shoulder, when my gaze snapped to the mirror’s reflection. 
What stared back was a grotesque burnt skull, its scalp adorned with those same charred wisps 
of hair. The entity tilted its head to the side, a gesture of unnerving confusion. Beside me, my 
sister stirred, mumbling a sleepy what? Without opening her eyes, this chilling presence was 
barely a foot from her and from me. I recoiled instantly, scrambling back into bed, squeezing my 
eyes shut until consciousness faded. Years later, during college, I moved into a new house. The room 
I occupied, everyone from my housemates to former residents insisted, was haunted. I positioned my 
bed facing the closet while two other girls shared a loft bed, sleeping with their faces towards 
the door. One night, the girl on the bottom bunk woke us with a terrified shriek. “Go away! Go 
away!” She described a woman standing over her, whispering intently before turning and vanishing 
into the closet. On the surface, it sounded like a typical episode of sleep paralysis, a phenomenon 
I and the other girl in the room experienced quite regularly. Yet, this was her first time. And 
for me, the frequency of such occurrences had escalated dramatically within a short period. We 
initially brushed it off, theorizing that the old house’s sound simply disrupted our sleep cycles. 
The true unsettling nature of the room became undeniable after I moved to the upper part of the 
loft. In that stifling Southern California town, airflow was scarce, especially in the elevated 
space. After I hung tapestries for privacy, I would occasionally feel something brush 
the back of my neck, my arm, or my leg,   but only ever when I was completely alone. I 
tried to dismiss it as an overactive imagination, and since I was rarely in the room by myself, it 
seemed insignificant. Then, one day, while I lay in bed watching Netflix, a bag of colored pencils 
began to slide slowly off my desk. This wasn’t a quick fall. It was a deliberate, almost graceful 
movement, as if pulled by unseen threads. The bag was centered on the desk. There was no fan, and 
it was far too heavy to be moved by a mere draft. I heard the faint crinkling as it descended onto 
the loft floor where it inexplicably deflated like air being pressed out of a sealed bag, though 
there was no discernable pressure. Immediately after, I felt that familiar chilling brush against 
my arm. I shot out of that room, spending the rest of the day in common spaces. After that, I rarely 
found myself alone in there, enduring playful teasing from my housemates about being the girl 
afraid of ghosts. My personal encounters with the inexplicable began much earlier. When I was around 
9 or 10, I woke up thirsty for water. As I made my way through the dark house, I saw it, a nebulous, 
shadowy figure with piercing red eyes. It drifted from the hallway towards the kitchen, and drawn 
by an odd compulsion, I followed. It dissipated slowly, like a wisp of smoke, gradually vanishing 
into the air. A more recent, equally unsettling incident unfolded when I found myself rushing 
upstairs to use the bathroom. As I passed an open bedroom door, I caught a fleeting glimpse of what 
I momentarily mistook for Liam. After my urgent trip, I walked back and realized my mistake. The 
figure I’d seen was gargantuan, truly immense, with a rugged lumberjack-like appearance clad in 
a checkered plaid shirt. It was a split-second vision, but it imprinted itself on my mind. Years 
later, Liam was utterly spooked. He confided in me that he’d seen a colossal man similarly dressed in 
a red flannel plaid shirt, his height staggering, reflected in one of our house mirrors. I happened 
to be on the toilet when he recounted this, and as he described the man, I went utterly pale. 
I had never breath a word about my own sighting, convinced my eyes had been playing tricks on me. 
But he described the man to an astonishing degree   of accuracy. It was as if we were somehow existing 
on different planes, and at certain moments the boundary thinned, allowing us both to witness 
the same spectral presence. Even as a child, the inexplicable had a way of finding me. I recall 
a school camp where the designated restroom felt like a journey to another dimension, tucked far 
down a silent corridor. When I finally reached the small, stark room, an unnerving chill immediately 
prickled my skin, amplified by the absolute quiet and my solitary presence. My imagination, always 
a vivid companion, began to conjure unseen eyes, a sense of being utterly exposed. Just as I 
was about to enter a stall, the door of an adjacent one, without a whisper of a breeze or any 
visible hand, swung open wide. My heart hammered. There was no one else there. Pure panic seized 
me. I rushed through my business, fleeing back down the hall to my friends, the pervasive cold 
clinging to me like an invisible cloak. It was the height of summer, and the building’s air 
conditioning was notoriously defunct, ruling   out any mundane explanation. That day, my youthful 
skepticism evaporated, replaced by the chilling certainty that some things simply defy logic. 
My encounters with the unknown are numerous, and my family would readily vouch for the eerie 
truth of my experiences. Of all the tales I’ve collected, one of my favorites dates back to my 
time living in Los Angeles in a peculiar residence I affectionately dubbed the half house. Literally, 
its address was 11,800 half. It was little more than a renovated shack, cleverly reconfigured 
into a living space, but its layout was essential to understanding the strange events within. The 
front door opened into a compact kitchen, complete with a window overlooking the driveway. Directly 
opposite this window, a half wall delineated the living room. We used this larger space as our 
primary sleeping area as the actual designated bedroom accessed off the living room and bathroom 
was perpetually frigid and disproportionately small. This bedroom in turn connected to what was 
locally known as the garage possessing only two entry points, one from the bedroom and another 
from the exterior a few feet from the kitchen window. I’ve always been a chronic insomniac and 
many nights found me wide awake staring at the ceiling. my boyfriend asleep beside me, our child 
in their own cot. It was during one such restless night that I first heard it. Distinct heavy 
footsteps thutting across the roof. Despite the house’s rather flimsy construction, which seemed 
ills suited to support such weight, not a single tremor shook the structure. The house itself 
wasn’t broad, but it was remarkably long. Yet whatever was up there traversed its entire length 
in just a handful of impossibly swift strides, always unsettlingly pausing directly above where 
we lay. I frequently recounted these bizarre occurrences to my boyfriend’s family during our 
weekend visits, but he would consistently wave   them off. My stories, it seemed, fell on deaf 
ears. After months of my persistent narratives, my boyfriend, exasperated, finally decided to 
prove me wrong. I laid down a single condition, no alcohol that night, and I would wake him the 
moment the stomping began. He readily agreed. True to form, the rhythmic thutting started again. I 
roused him, and to my relief, he clearly heard it, too. He sprang from the bed, pulling on his work 
boots over his boxers, grabbed my formidable Rambo knife, and charged out into the night. I 
swiftly locked the door behind him, pressing my ear against the wood. listening intently. From 
within, I tracked the stomping as it surged from our makeshift living room across the length of the 
house and out towards the driveway. Our driveway, unfortunately, was paved with those charming 
white gravel rocks my boyfriend so admired, creating a distinct, unmistakable crunch 
underfoot. The unseen entity reached the kitchen side of the house, and I distinctly 
heard a heavy thump as it seemingly launched   itself from the roof, followed immediately by the 
unmistakable cascade of gravel crunching directly beneath the kitchen window. I was too terrified to 
even peek through the blinds. A few minutes later, my boyfriend returned slightly breathless. He’d 
seen nothing, he claimed, except our cat, who was, as usual, rubbing against his legs, demanding 
more attention. I insisted, my voice still shaky, that I had heard the thing run across the roof, 
jump onto the driveway, and distinctly heard the rock scatter. We never heard the roof stomping 
again, but its sessation only marked the beginning of even stranger occurrences. After that night, 
his family too, finally began to believe. While many of these accounts are drawn from my personal 
well of experience, this next one, though not mine to remember, I was merely a few months old, 
comes from my family’s history, predating my parents’ divorce. It unfolded in my grandparents 
original house, the one where my mother Sarah spent her formative years. I had a baby monitor 
in my room, a seemingly innocuous detail for an infant. But this particular house already had a 
long-standing reputation for being a place where   the unusual was, well, usual. The house, known for 
its peculiar incidents, had us all convinced that something prednatural was at play. Late one night, 
the specific hour now escapes me. But it was well past 8. The baby monitor in my room began to 
emit strange, unsettling sounds from it. Distinct thuds and scrapes, as if heavy furniture was being 
dragged across the floor. filled the air. What was truly perplexing was that the monitor’s receiver 
was just a floor below my room, yet the sounds   were audible only through the device. Sarah, my 
mother, went to investigate. She opened my door to find nothing a miss, the room undisturbed, 
every piece of furniture in its place, and I, a baby, sleeping soundly. Confused, she returned 
downstairs. A few minutes later, the inexplicable sounds resumed again. Furniture being moved again. 
Upon inspection, nothing had shifted. We would live in that house for a few more years before 
finally relocating. Years later, at the age of 14, I found myself at my friend Melissa’s house, a 
typical 1950s bungalow on an utterly unremarkable small town street. It was a lazy summer day. Three 
bored girls with no known history of strangeness in the house. No one telling ghost stories or 
hyping each other up. That’s when Susie with a spark of mischief suggested we try the old Bloody 
Mary trick with a mirror. I remember scoffing thinking it was utterly ridiculous. A Ouija board 
perhaps held a sliver of plausibility, but Bloody Mary, pure foolishness. As I dismissed her idea, 
Melissa proposed an alternative. we could try to summon her recently deceased grandmother. Still 
silly, I thought, but perhaps marginally better than a long deadad English queen. So, we retrieved 
a small hand mirror from a pile in Melissa’s closet, extinguished the lights, and attempting 
to be serious, I held the mirror while Melissa and Susie flanked me. We began to repeat Melissa’s 
great-g grandandmother’s name. After about 10 repetitions, I noticed it. a wisp of smoke almost 
like a plume from a cigarette curling into the lower right corner of the mirror. I said nothing, 
initially dismissing it in a haze of disbelief. The small hazy ball then began to expand, 
tendrlike form spreading and swirling, seeming to coalesce into something more defined. In that 
instant, all three of us shrieked simultaneously. I flung the mirror away and we scrambled from the 
closet, each of us describing the same terrifying phenomenon in our own words. Melissa and I both 
saw it as cigarette smoke, while Susie perceived it as fog. We were, to say the least, in utter 
shock. I think we had all truly expected nothing to happen. The rest of the day passed in 
a hushed, almost silent days. Even now, I find myself wrestling with the memory, wondering 
if it was some form of shared hallucination,   the potent power of suggestion, or perhaps one of 
us inadvertently projecting our imagination onto the others. But those explanations feel just as 
absurd, especially the idea of group psychosis, given that we all witnessed the phenomenon at 
precisely the same time without any prompting. I know what I saw, and it is something I never 
wish to experience again. When I was 13, Sarah, my mother, my sister, and I participated in the 
AIDS walk in New York. My maternal grandfather had passed away from AIDS when Sarah was my age, 
making it an incredibly emotional day for her. She expressed immense gratitude for having my sister 
and me by her side. For a week following the walk, an intense paranoia clung to me in our apartment. 
It was a bizarre sensation, a pervasive feeling that something unseen was present, something we 
couldn’t quite grasp. This unsettling feeling persisted for about a week before a particular 
incident unfolded. I’ve always been prone to waking up randomly in the middle of the night. 
So, when I stirred from sleep one evening,   I didn’t think much of it. But then, I glanced 
towards the doorway, and there, standing directly in front of it, was a figure. Every detail is as 
vivid in my memory as if it happened last night. It was clearly a man, tall and white, dressed in 
an orange shirt and blue pants. I knew instantly it was my grandfather. I lay there staring, 
unsure how to react. A strange cocktail of fear and almost excitement coursed through me. This was 
unlike any paranormal encounter I’d experienced before. It felt like an eternity before his form 
slowly, gracefully, faded away. I was utterly convinced he had gone into Sarah’s room next to 
see her, too. I recounted the entire experience to Sarah the next day, but she simply Sarah, 
bless her practical heart, simply chocked it up to an overactive imagination, a dream brought 
on by the emotional intensity of the day. But I knew with a certainty that still resonates that it 
was him. My grandfather had returned, if only for a fleeting moment. A memory from the late 80s when 
I was around five, still sends a chill through me. We were living on a sprawling naval base in sunny 
California. One bright morning, my friend and I ditched our bikes at the base of a small incline, 
eager for the playground. As we crested the rise, a startling sight met our eyes. A figure utterly 
devoid of color or feature. A spectral white silhouette was propelling the merrygoround at 
an impossible velocity, a speed no human could match. The park was deserted. It was far too 
early for anyone else to be out. A primal fear seized us. We scrambled back to our bikes and 
pedled furiously for two blocks to her house. As we turned into her driveway, we both looked 
back and there it was again, the white man, a blur of motion streaking past on the road. It 
wasn’t three-dimensional, just a flat, stark white form, featureless and impossibly fast. We saw it, 
both of us, but our frantic accounts were met with adult skepticism. We never witnessed it again. 
And though I lost touch with her years later, I often wonder if that shared, unnerving vision 
still haunts her memories as it does mine. The Great Depression and Prohibition era were the 
focus of our 10th grade history class, which   led to a field trip to an archaic brewery, once 
a frequented haunt of none other than Al Capone’s notorious predecessor. My friend Cooper and I 
ventured into a small, sparsely furnished office. Above the fireplace hung a faded photograph of 
the brewery’s original owner. A desk with a quaint lamp sat in the corner. We positioned ourselves 
behind the desk, facing the portrait, the lamp now at our backs. Cooper, ever irreverent, glanced 
up at the stern-faced man and quipped, “God, he was hideous.” But with the kind of money 
he was pulling in, “I’d probably marry him, too.” We shared a nervous laugh and turned our 
attention to the desk. I distinctly remember its rough, unvarnished appearance, a stark contrast 
to the modern office furniture we were used to, looking as if it had been crudely assembled 
by a craftsman in the late 1800s. Suddenly, I snapped out of my quiet contemplation, Cooper, 
now rigid beside me. He wasn’t whispering, though his voice was barely a strained rasp. It was the 
sound of someone trying desperately to shout, but utterly failing. The sheer terror in his tone was 
palpable. Dude, he choked out. Do you hear that? I listened and then I felt it. The floorboards 
beneath my feet suddenly shifting, accompanied by the unnerving creek of metal. I whirled around. 
The antique lamp, previously still, was swaying violently back and forth on its base. To this day, 
Cooper and I maintain an unspoken pact of silence about that incident. We simply refuse to discuss 
it. I dared to bring it up once at a bonfire after a few beers and his response was a grave. Never 
again. I’m convinced it was a ghost. The way that relic moved defied all natural explanation. Our 
family once gathered at a rented villa perched on a hill in a popular tourist destination. We 
were enjoying a cookout in the backyard as dusk settled, the sky darkening but still holding a 
sliver of twilight. The yard itself had two tiers. The first adjacent to the kitchen where Sarah 
and my aunt had prepared most of the food and a second deeper level bordered by a fence beyond 
which lay dense thicket of bushes and trees. While beautiful by day, at night it took on an almost 
oppressive eerie quality. I was about 9 or 10 years old when this occurred, helping Sarah with 
the grilling on the first tier. That’s when I saw her, a woman with flowing black hair, clad in a 
long, simple white gown, her back to me. She was standing amidst the bushes, leaning against one of 
the trees. For some reason, I instantly assumed it was my aunt. She also had long black hair, and I 
distinctly recalled her wearing a white gown that day. I tugged on Sarah’s shirt, pointing, “Sarah, 
look. What’s auntie doing?” Sarah remained silent as I continued to call out, “Auntie, what are you 
doing?” Without a word, Sarah abruptly pulled me into the dining room. There, seated at the table, 
was my aunt, her long hair neatly pulled back in a bun, wearing a distinctly patterned white floral 
dress, not a plain one. My eyes widened. “Yep,” I thought, the realization dawning. The family spent 
the rest of the evening discussing the apparition. No one had any idea who the woman could have been. 
My father carried a silent sorrow from his youth, a sister named Betty, who had succumbed to 
cancer when he was just a teenager. He was an intensely private man, rarely if ever delving 
into the chapters of his earlier life. This was back when my older sister was four or five, and 
I was just learning to walk long before Mora, our other sister, was born. Our lives were 
unfolding in an old. Our old farmhouse with its long creaking hallway that neatly biseected 
the children’s rooms from my parents’ sanctuary held many a silent observer. One evening late into 
the night, my father was roused by the distinct sound of my older sister’s laughter echoing from 
just outside his bedroom door. Annoyed and keen to get some rest before work the next morning, 
he went to quiet her and usher her back to bed. But as he emerged, she looked up at him, her 
innocent gaze unwavering, and declared, “Daddy, Betty’s here to talk to you.” He glanced around, 
but the hallway was empty. He had never spoken of his deceased sister, Betty, to his young daughter, 
nor had he and Sarah ever discussed his early loss extensively, making it highly improbable she would 
have known the name. The memory of that night, however, gained a chilling echo almost a decade 
later. Sarah, then pregnant with my youngest sister, recounted a profoundly unsettling vision. 
A woman, ethereal and pale in a hospital gown, seemed to rise directly from the floor before 
her, her voice a soft, urgent whisper, “Do not name the child Elizabeth.” Then, as quickly as 
she appeared, the apparition vanished. Sarah, understandably shaken, chose not to name her 
forthcoming daughter Elizabeth. While a rational mind might dismiss this as a vivid pregnancy 
dream, perhaps influenced by my older sister’s earlier encounter, for my mother, it was a 
directive she implicitly obeyed. Roughly 10 years ago, Sarah and I journeyed to Washington, D.C. to 
stay with her cousin, a pastor who presided over an ancient Georgetown church. His residence, a 
venerable house tucked behind the sacred building, offered us two choices for our accommodation, 
the attic or a room on the main bedroom floor. I opted for the latter, leaving the 
attic to Sarah. On her very first night, she awoke with a terrifying sensation, an immense 
pressure on her chest, as if an invisible weight pressed down with all its might. She managed to 
rise, found a glass of water in the bathroom, and incredibly managed to drift back to sleep. 
Later, she awoke again, this time with the undeniable, unnerving feeling of being intensely 
scrutinized. Over breakfast the next morning, as she recounted her ordeal, her cousin merely 
chuckled. “Oh, yes,” she said, with an unsettling nonulence. “It’s a very old house, and dozens have 
died here over the years. Her casual dismissal did little to soothe my mother’s nerves, or mine.” 
For the next few nights, I slept fitfully, my eyes wide and alert, every creek and groan 
of the ancient house amplifying my unease. Long before that, in my early childhood, when 
I couldn’t have been older than six or seven, a strange incident unfolded in our backyard, we 
had a swing set and our property bordered an old, dilapidated house, long abandoned and probably 
overdue for demolition alongside a vast empty field. My friends, a few years my senior, loved 
to taunt me, claiming the house was haunted and that a ghost would emerge to get me. Being a 
rather impressionable and imaginative child, I’d feain bravado, but their warnings lodged 
themselves deep in my mind. What if they were   right? I adored that swing. It was my sanctuary, 
a portal for my vivid imagination, a place to escape the loneliness of being a child with only 
two close friends. I would chatter incessantly, playing out elaborate scenarios. One particular 
evening, with the back porch light casting only a weak glow into the encroaching darkness, I swung 
contentedly. The light barely reached my spot, but as long as I could see its distant beacon, 
I felt safe. I was midmon monologue, pretending to converse with an imaginary friend, and at one 
point I distinctly uttered, “Hello.” That’s when I heard it, a sharp, loud whisper, startlingly 
close, respond with a clear, resonant, “Hi. The sound emanated from the direction of that 
oursed abandoned house. A primal terror seized me. I scrambled from the swing, running perhaps 
faster than I ever had in my life, sprinting back to our house, slamming the door shut behind me. 
My parents, lost in their own evening routines, didn’t even notice my frantic entry. I never spoke 
of it to them. I knew my father, ever protective, would have undoubtedly stormed out to investigate 
who could have spoken to me. and I couldn’t bear   the thought of him encountering whatever it was. 
Looking back, I often wonder if my silence was a mistake, if I should have sought an explanation, 
because the whisper felt incredibly real,   not a figment of my imagination. Rationally, 
it could have been a homeless person or another neighborhood child. The town I grew up in, a 
pocket of the Inland Empire in the ’90s, was notoriously rough, home to a fair share of drug 
addicts and wandering youth. Yet the distinctness of that high, its sudden proximity, still makes me 
question the mundane, leaving me with a persistent shiver of the inexplicable. Even now, years 
later, the sheer impossibility of definitively knowing naws at me. I’m still in touch with 
one of those friends, and when I cautiously revisited the memory as adults, he merely shook 
his head. “No way, man,” he’d said. “Our houses out there gave us the creeps, too, and we heard 
plenty of strange things. Where do you think those old stories came from? His words didn’t 
offer comfort, only solidified the persistent, unsettling belief that perhaps it was something 
far more than a startled bovine. During my early childhood, a peculiar nightly ritual unfolded in 
my bedroom. Almost without fail, my parents would discover my lights ablaze and my door a jar each 
morning. When they pressed me for an explanation, my innocent reply was always the same. The woman 
who visits me at night does it. Perplexed, they asked for a description. My recounting of a gentle 
elderly figure, always adorned in a simple dress, struck a chilling cord with them. It sounded, 
they realized with a jolt, exactly like my great-g grandandmother, long deceased. Unsure how 
to proceed, they tried moving me to another room, but the nocturnal visitations, the lit room, 
the open door, persisted in my original space. Desperate, they systematically replaced 
every piece of furniture, the bed, the desk, the bedside table. Nothing changed. It wasn’t 
until they finally removed the old wooden dresser, a piece that had once belonged to my great-g 
grandandmother before her passing, that the   nightly disturbances ceased entirely. Its removal 
brought an end to her subtle, spectral visits. Another memory years later involved a friend’s 
old house, a rambling, poorly maintained structure with a massive curving wooden staircase leading 
to a basement wreck room. The steps were rickety, treacherous. The watcher was descending them on 
the second step when their socks betrayed them. Their feet shot out from under them, and they were 
falling, tumbling down that long, winding descent. Yet in that hearttoppping moment, the watcher felt 
themselves being lifted. It wasn’t an impact, but a sensation of unseen hands gently, surely guiding 
them. The watcher floated, a strange, ethereal descent around the curve of the stairs. When their 
eyes snapped open, the watcher was lying on their back on the basement floor. No pain, no jolt, 
just a profound sense of having been weightlessly delivered. Their friends who were nearby heard 
absolutely nothing. The entire impossible descent had occurred in utter silence. The watcher is 
certain to this day that some unseen force, a benevolent presence, had intervene to protect 
them from harm. As an EMT, the watcher once took a night shift at a retirement facility, and the 
third floor, let me tell you, was notorious. During one patrol, the watcher noticed a 
resident’s room door slightly a jar. The occupant had recently passed, so the watcher assumed staff 
had been in to clear belongings. The watcher locked it, confirmed it was secure, and continued 
their rounds. An hour later, to the watcher’s irritation, the door was open again. “What the 
hell?” the watcher thought, certain they’d locked it. The watcher stepped inside, peered around, 
satisfying themselves no one was there, and then, with deliberate precision, relocked the door. 
Yet another hour passed, and there it was again, wide open. This time, a prickling sensation 
crawled up the back of the watcher’s neck. The watcher didn’t even bother to enter. They just 
locked it and moved on, their pulse quickening. On the opposite side of the building stood a small 
chapel. Its lights were always off by 6:00 p.m., and the plug-in crucifix was invariably unplugged 
at the same time each night. On the watcher’s previous two rounds that night, the chapel had 
been exactly as expected, dark and silent. But on this third circuit, through the gloom, the watcher 
could clearly see the crucifix glowing softly. That was it. The watcher left the third floor 
and never returned to that job. Recounting that night still sends a genuine shiver through the 
watcher. A few years back, the Watcher was driving home from their sister-in-law’s place about 20 
minutes away. It was nearing 11 p.m., and despite being a main road connecting two towns, it was 
exceptionally quiet. Roughly 3/4 of the way home, the road curved over a gentle hill, ending in a 
blind bend. The street lights here were sparse, and as the watcher crested the hill, they saw the 
twin beams of an oncoming vehicle. The watcher courteously dipped their headlights, expecting it 
to pass without incident. But as it drew closer, an icy realization gripped them. The car was not 
in its lane. It was veering half to 3/4 of the way across the dividing line, directly into the 
watcher’s path. The watcher’s mind screamed to swerve, to pull onto the shoulder, to escape. Yet, 
for reasons the watcher still can’t comprehend, they froze, their hands clamped to the wheel. The 
car kept coming, accelerating, until its blazing lights were almost directly in front of them. The 
blinding headlights bore down on me. I tensed, anticipating the crash, but in the split second 
before collision, the vehicle simply vanished. My heart hammered against my ribs, yet an instinct 
compelled me to check the rear view mirror. There, for a fleeting moment, I saw a pair of red tail 
lights rapidly receding before they too dissolved into the inky blackness behind me. To this day, I 
have no rational explanation for that phantom car. I am eternally grateful my sister-in-law was with 
me. Without her shared experience, I’m certain I would have dismissed it as a hallucination brought 
on by fatigue. That particular stretch of road, known for high speeds and frequent accidents, 
already held a grim reputation. Later, when I recounted the incident to my wife, she 
confirmed my unease. A man from her hometown, she revealed, had died there years prior. His car 
had broken down, and as he crouched behind it, pushing, he was struck by an oncoming vehicle that 
hadn’t seen him in time. I can’t definitively link the two events, but the memory of that impossible 
near miss still sends a shiver through me. Among the many tales of shadowy figures by my bedroom 
door or the spectral footsteps of the departed, one particular story stands out, a memory 
that almost broke my composure. It happened in San Angelo, a quiet, unassuming town where 
leaving doors unlocked was a matter of course. My father was in town, an infrequent celebratory 
occasion for the adults, meaning a night of drinking. Being underage, I was entrusted with 
babysitting Timmy, a delightful three-year-old, and his one-year-old brother, Jordan, who was 
already fast asleep. Timmy and I were on the back porch swing, simply chatting, when suddenly 
his bright demeanor crumbled. Tears welled in his eyes and he pointed a trembling finger towards 
the open back door, babbling, “Someone walking back door.” A cold knot of dread formed in my 
stomach. Timmy, clutching my hand, pulled me inside. He led me straight to Jordan’s room where 
he dissolved into a heart-wrenching fit, sobbing, “Grandma! Grandma!” over and over. When the adults 
returned, they confirmed an unsettling detail. Both Jordan’s blanket and Timmy’s hair carried 
the unmistakable scent of their recently deceased   grandmother. It seemed Timmy, still so young, 
had only just begun to grasp her absence, and seeing her, even fleetingly, had overwhelmed 
him. My father once relocated to Charleston for a new job, and his boss generously offered 
him temporary lodging in his own home. The house was situated in a subdivision rumored 
to be built upon old plantation lands, a common narrative in Charleston, a city steeped in the 
somber history of the slave trade and widely   considered a hot bed of paranormal activity. 
On one memorable occasion, after a late night closing up the office, he felt an unnerving chill 
descend upon him. The hairs on his neck prickled, a wave of primal unease washing over him. He 
heard distinct footsteps, then perceived a looming shadow behind him. He spun around, ready 
to confront an intruder, but the space was utterly empty. So shaken was he that he admitted he didn’t 
even bother to lock the doors that night. Beyond that, a more mundane yet persistent nuisance 
plagued his stay. His air mattress, despite his best efforts, would mysteriously deflate every 
single night. It wasn’t a leak. Each morning, the cap would be found inexplicably unscrewed, a 
problem that even industrial strength tape failed to remedy. Our parents also had a friend whose 
home became a sight of extreme distress. He was subjected to a horrific unseen presence that would 
sexually assault him in his sleep, leaving him to wake with disturbing bruises and distinct hand 
marks on his legs and intimate areas. This was a profoundly disturbing and invasive experience 
made all the more terrifying by its apparent sexual nature. His wife corroborated his harrowing 
accounts, providing additional validation for the inexplicable. Following a spiritual cleansing 
of the property and their subsequent relocation, they reported no further incidents. Thinking back 
to middle school, I remember being at a friend’s grandmother’s house, a place that always gave me 
a strange, unsettling vibe. We were in his tiny basement bedroom. I was on the bed and he was on 
the floor immersed in an Xbox game. This was the era of cordless home phones and his was resting 
on the shelf of his headboard plugged into its charging dock. Suddenly, with a sharp clatter, 
the entire phone, dock, and all launched itself from the headboard. It sailed clear across the 
room, landing with a thump on the opposite wall. My friend and I were the only two people in 
that cramped space. There was no one else,   no explanation. We stared at each other, utterly 
bewildered. To this day, no one believes us, and we still rack our brains trying to comprehend 
how it happened. That house always just felt off. While many of these chronicles are deeply 
personal, the tapestry of the unexplained   is also woven with narratives gifted by others. I 
recall an evening when a friend shared a chilling account about her girlfriend’s home, a place 
where the spectral had taken root. Her girlfriend recounted a recurring apparition that had haunted 
their living room for years, always lingering in   the shadowy corner behind the television. It was 
a figure of profound darkness, almost human in outline, yet devoid of discernable features, 
save for two colossal, luminous yellow eyes, unnervingly wide, and a cavernous, circular mouth 
rimmed with startling red lips. This particular encounter had, however, rattled her more than any 
before, for the entity had strayed from its usual post, materializing closer to the room center. 
Another friend present, Sydney, interjected, confirming the girlfriend’s description. Though 
Sydney claimed to have encountered it in the   kitchen and basement, a silent, unblinking 
sentinel observing her in the dead of night. Cydney then confided her own deeply unsettling 
experience. One night, she awoke from sleep, her eyes opening to the impossibly still figure of her 
high school math teacher standing in the corner of   her bedroom. Paralysis gripped her. She could do 
nothing but stare. Locked in a terrifying vigil, utterly unable to move. It wasn’t until the first 
tentative light of dawn began to seep through her window that exhaustion finally claimed her, 
pulling her back into unconsciousness. When she next woke, the teacher was gone. The house 
itself, they learned, harbored a dark past, having once served as the doicile for a cult. 
Details were scarce, but Sydney knew that before their purchase, every wall and ceiling 
had been painted a stark, oppressive black, a feature she found utterly suffocating. Another 
friend, whose partner lived on a sprawling farm with a Civil War era plantation house, spoke of an 
equally oppressive atmosphere. The very essence of the place felt wrong. Animals, for instance, 
refused to ascend the stairs. If carried up, they would tremble violently, scrambling back 
down at the first opportunity. One of the bedrooms remained an unspoken no-go zone, and in 
the depths of the basement, grim evidence of its history persisted in the form of slave shackles. 
For the past year, the house had been eerily quiet on the paranormal front, a dormant presence. Yet, 
my friend’s boyfriend insisted the activity always intensified around the holidays. One November, 
just before Thanksgiving, my friend was spending the night. As she drifted towards sleep, a sound 
from outside startled her. She initially dismissed it as the pack of coyotes that roamed the back of 
the farm, but a few seconds later, it came again, a sound unequivocally not canine. Her eyes snapped 
open, fully awake and aware. She heard it once more, a woman’s voice, clearly distressed, calling 
out for Jon. The cries moved around the yard, laced with panic. Despite the rising unease, she 
snuggled closer to her boyfriend and eventually fell back asleep. The next morning, she recounted 
the eerie incident to him. “That’s a new one,” he mused, seemingly unperturbed. “Fast forward 
exactly a month, and my friend was jolted awake by her boyfriend’s voice. Remember a few weeks ago,” 
he asked, “when you heard a woman calling for someone? What was the name? John. I heard it last 
night. My friend immediately set a reminder on her phone for the following month, but that particular 
spectral plea for John did not recur. The mystery persisted. She struggled to uncover any historical 
records of a John associated with the property. Then there was the strange tale from a friend who 
frequently spent nights at his grandparents house.   A chance to connect amidst the demands of school. 
One particular evening, unable to sleep, he found himself in and out of consciousness, he awoke to 
a sight that initially seemed a product of his half-waking state. A chubby little child standing 
in the corner of the room, silently watching him. Not overly alarmed, he dismissed it as a dream and 
drifted back to sleep. Approximately a week later, at a family dinner, he recounted this odd 
experience to his cousin. As he finished, his cousin began to tremble, his face pale. “Are you 
messing with me?” he demanded, his voice strained. “That’s not funny.” My friend, bewildered, 
insisted he was not. The cousin then revealed a chilling truth. He had witnessed the exact same 
ghostly child in the very same room when he was a boy, spending the night at their grandparents’ 
house. The cousin’s chilling revelation about the spectral child, a story he’d initially 
dismissed, profoundly unsettled me. It wasn’t just a fleeting fright. It burrowed deep into my 
mind, casting a shadow over our family dinner that night and lingering for weeks after. Around my 
11th birthday, my family prepared for another move. Our time in New York drawing to a close. For 
our final night in the shared bedroom, Liam and I invited a few friends over, eager to make the most 
of our last evening in that space. Our makeshift sleeping arrangement had us all packed onto the 
bed, oriented vertically facing the television. To its left, the bedroom door stood slightly a jar, 
while to its right, a toy bin overflowed with Nerf weaponry positioned beneath a window we propped 
open to combat the oppressive heat. Sometime between 1 and 2 in the morning, a peculiar sound 
emanated from the hallway beyond the half-open door. It was a low, resonant hum layered with a 
strange, deep base unlike anything any of us had ever encountered. The silent shared glances among 
us confirmed our collective unease. Something was undeniably off. Within 30 heartstoppping seconds, 
the television abruptly flickered off. The door slammed shut with a violent crack, and the 
open window above the toy bin snapped closed,   all in terrifying unison. Liam, our older 
brother, vanished beneath his sleeping bag, a silent, trembling heap of pure fear. He was 
in a state of shock, his eyes clamped shut, unresponsive to my frantic attempts to rouse him, 
no matter how hard I shook him. My first instinct was to shake Liam, desperate for a reassuring 
word from my usually unflapable older brother. It was a terrifying scene, the kind that 
sounds ludicrously melodramatic in hindsight, like a bem movie trope. Yet, it was horrifyingly 
real. We’d left an open package of cookies from our late night snack stash at the foot of the bed. 
Suddenly, we were under siege. Cookies began to pelt us, seemingly from nowhere. I instinctively 
grabbed one that had struck my blanket, biting into it. Ordinary, reassuringly mundane. But then 
the projectiles changed. Nerf shotgun shells and darts, newly acquired, began to fly from the 
overflowing toy bin. The barrage was brief, culminating with the TV remote, which chillingly 
hurdled directly towards me. I squeezed my eyes shut, burrowing deeper into the blanket. 
Eventually, one of our friends, summoning a surge of courage, rolled off the bed and flicked on 
the light. Instantly, the aerial assault ceased. The source of the airborne objects remained an 
absolute mystery to us. Many peculiar things have happened in my life, but two experiences in 
particular, both within the confines of my current home, stand out with unsettling clarity. I was 
approximately 12 years old, and a persistent bad habit, leaving my closet door a jar, had become 
a minor household contention. Sarah, my mother, frequently admonished me, her words echoing my 
grandmother’s old warning, “You better close that, dear.” Grandma always said, “Things will enter if 
you don’t.” I, of course, paid no mind. One night, a gaggle of friends and my cousin sprawled across 
my room for a sleepover. I generously relinquished my bed to them, opting for a mattress position 
directly against the closed door of my room. In the dead of night, I awoke to a chilling sight. 
A tall man standing eerily in my closet doorway. My immediate thought was that my father, a playful 
prankster, had come to check on us. But then, a cold wave of realization washed over me. The 
position of my mattress pressed tightly against the door made it physically impossible 
for anyone to have entered the room,   let alone be standing in the closet. The doors 
simply could not have opened from the outside. Years later, perhaps around 15 or 16, a similar 
incident occurred. I was home after school, stretched out on my bed, attempting to tackle 
homework. From the corner of my eye, I caught a distinct movement. It wasn’t merely a trick 
of the light. I could clearly discern a person, a solid form, standing just inside my doorway, 
observing me. I looked up, and as quickly as it appeared, it vanished. Again, my mind, seeking 
a rational explanation, jumped to my father, assuming he’d returned early and was checking in. 
But not 5 seconds later, a cacophony of crashes erupted from the kitchen. The unmistakable 
sound of every pot and pan tumbling, smashing, and clattering across the floor. I rushed out, 
bracing myself for a scene of utter chaos. To my bewilderment, the kitchen was perfectly normal, 
everything in its place. These inexplicable crashing sounds became an intermittent, unsettling 
fixture in our home, heard not only by me, but by my parents as well. No damage, but 
something far more unsettling. That exact sequence, they explained, was a common occurrence, 
sending them scrambling outside to investigate, only to find everything perfectly undisturbed. It 
was a bizarre twist, a prelude to a more chilling tale. My own brush with the inexplicable abroad 
occurred during a school trip to Koala Lumpur. We were housed in a hotel bunking in pairs. On our 
inaugural night, my roommate and I were preparing for bed when a firm knock echoed from our door. We 
peered through the peepphole. Nothing. Assuming it was our mischievous schoolmates, we dismissed 
it. The knocking persisted, happening several times until exasperated, we flung open the door, 
ready to scold them. The hallway, however, was utterly deserted. The next morning at breakfast, 
as we recounted our eerie night to our friends, another pair of roommates exchanged a look of 
profound unease. “At least your knocking didn’t come from inside the cupboard,” one of them 
mumbled, her voice barely a whisper. Later, I found myself residing in a student accommodation 
rumored to have once served as an asylum. Though no one ever definitively confirmed its history. 
What was undeniable, however, was the pervasive strangeness of the place. It exuded a truly 
unsettling atmosphere, and many of us experienced peculiar phenomena. One resident consistently woke 
at 3:00 a.m. every night, while I frequently heard the distinct sound of running on the floor above 
my room. I initially dismissed these as fellow students antics. Yet, even after that entire floor 
emptied out, the phantom footsteps persisted, usually around midnight, despite there being no 
one there. A friend, normally skeptical about supernatural occurrences, visited one weekend and 
was visibly unsettled by the unexplainable sounds. My most disturbing experience, however, transpired 
during my final week in the building. By then, I had grown accustomed to a particular spirit 
that would follow me from the room adjacent to   mine to the doorway of my own room at night, 
particularly if I ventured to the kitchen or bathroom. It was unnerving, but I had learned to 
live with it. I was also aware of its occasional presence within my room, as my wall posters 
frequently had a habit of falling down. This specific night, I was wide awake at 3:30 a.m. when 
an overwhelming sense of presence washed over me. I felt with absolute certainty that someone was 
standing at the very edge of my bed just watching me. I was paralyzed with fear, utterly petrified. 
All I could do was cower under my covers, turning my back to the unseen observer. The terror 
was absolute. Eventually, I drifted back to sleep, but the experience profoundly unsettled me. 
Thankfully, it was the only time such an intense encounter occurred, but once was more than enough. 
Back at home, my father occasionally spoke of a fleeting, unexplainable vision, a face staring at 
him from the foot of his bed, only for a moment, and always just before Sarah entered the room. 
Adding to this strangeness, the bedroom shared a wall with our neighbors, and their side had 
been the sight of its own bizarre occurrences   over the years. Objects flying, not merely 
falling, offshelves. It felt too intertwined to be coincidental. Separately, a few colleagues 
and I embarked on an urban exploration adventure to an abandoned RAF airfield. The driver of our 
group had previously mentioned experiencing eerie phenomena there, notably feeling a heavy weight in 
his bag while walking around, later showing us a photograph where a distinct orb was visible within 
the bag, obviously the source of the weight. Armed with our phone flashlights, we approached 
the desolate buildings. As we drew nearer, an undeniable, horrific sensation enveloped us. 
It was an oppressive feeling, as if the very air around us was occupied. A chilling certainty that 
we were being watched, no longer alone. We could discern the dark, imposing bulk of the structures 
ahead. Myself and another guy had our phone torches on, but as we edged closer, his phone 
inexplicably began to cut out. He’d restarted, only for it to fail again. It was a device 
that had never malfunctioned before nor since. We decided to retreat, fleeing from the ominous 
building, and his phone immediately resumed normal function, working perfectly for the remainder 
of the night. Apparently, RAF airfields are steeped in such lore, countless tales of lingering 
spirits abound in that area. A somber testament, I believe, to all the air crew who never made 
it home. Beyond these chilling adult encounters, the whispers of the unexplained reached even 
into the innocence of childhood. When my oldest daughter was around three, she began to speak of 
someone named Alex. We initially dismissed it as the typical imaginary friend phase, not giving 
it much thought. Then strange things began to happen regularly. Her electronic toys, nestled 
securely in her cot, would inexplicably spring to life in the dead of night. It was impossible 
for her to activate them. She was far too young to scale the crib side, let alone climb back in. 
One of the most bewildering incidents involved her bath routine. My usual custom was to undress 
her on the upstairs landing, then toss her soiled clothes over the banister to land at the bottom 
of the stairs. On this particular occasion, we were the only two souls in the house. After 
her bath, I descended, expecting to retrieve her clothes from their usual spot, only to find them 
neatly folded on the kitchen floor, several meters away, to the left of the staircase. It defied all 
physical explanation how they could have ended up there. The climax of this period came when we idly 
mentioned our little one’s imaginary friend to our elderly neighbors. They had resided in their home 
since its construction at the same time as ours. When we recounted that her friend’s name was Alex, 
they shared a chilling piece of information. The house’s original owner was named Alex, and 
he had passed away there one evening while   watching television. Our neighbors, a genuinely 
sincere couple, left us no reason to doubt their story despite its unsettling nature. Over time, my 
daughter naturally stopped speaking of Alex, but the revelation profoundly unnerved us. We never 
spoke of it to her as she grew older. Certainly not the detail of Alex being the house’s deceased 
former owner. No malevolent events ever occurred, just these subtle, illogical happenings that truly 
made me question the boundaries of reality. A few years ago, at approximately 3:00 a.m., my wife 
and I were deep in slumber when I slowly began to surface from a profound sleep. As my eyelids 
fluttered open, my gaze instinctively locked onto the lamp on my dresser. To my astonishment, 
it slid off the surface and shattered on the floor. My wife jolted upright, and we exchanged 
a horrified glance, both wideeyed at the sudden, jarring noise. We silently agreed to deal with 
the broken glass in the morning, and still shaken, drifted back to sleep. Yet, when we awoke a few 
hours later, the lamp was no longer in pieces. It sat perfectly intact and completely unbroken at 
the foot of our bed, a full 5 ft from where it had fallen. We were both left utterly bewildered, 
unable to reconcile what we had witnessed with the reality before us. Before my girlfriend and I 
decided to live together, she resided alone in her own home. Throughout our courtship, as I began to 
spend more nights there, she gradually shared the peculiar phenomena that plagued her house. There 
were unexplained banging sounds at all hours, unsettling whispers, and fleeting glimpses of 
figures caught in her peripheral vision. On more than one occasion, she had seen a robed entity, 
almost like the grim reaper, moving through   the house. There was also the pervasive sense of 
being watched from behind, that familiar prickling sensation that raises the hairs on the back of 
one’s neck. But the most profound dread emanated from an unused bedroom, a constant oppressive 
feeling of forboding. These occurrences terrified her so deeply that merely describing them would 
bring her to tears. As a natural skeptic, one who dissects paranormal television shows for logical 
explanations, I wanted to impress her. I decided to demonstrate my bravado and utter lack of fear 
for whatever lurked in that room. Get out of this house, you bastard. I roared into the ominous 
bedroom. Do not bother her again. Do you hear me? Or you’ll have to deal with me and you don’t 
want to mess with me. It was a colossal mistake, a truly monumental miscalculation. Later 
that night, while staying at her house, I was abruptly jolted awake by a terrifying 
night terror. I’d experienced them before, but nothing nothing like this. The defiant 
challenge hurled into the spectral void had a swift and terrifying consequence. The watcher 
felt an unseen energy lash out as if a slumbering beast had been prodded and was now intent on 
demonstrating its formidable power. That night, the watcher was plunged into a suffocating 
night terror. Paralysis seized their limbs, their heart from a frantic rhythm against their 
ribs. Though eyes were open, surveying the dimly lit room, and their girlfriends steady breathing a 
comforting sound beside them, the true horror lay in the auditory. A distinct urgent scurry erupted 
from within the room, followed by the undeniable thump of something descending the stairs. It 
was fleeing, rushing not out of the room, but straight towards that desolate and used bedroom. 
Every desperate attempt to break free, prayers whispered, the girlfriend’s name silently pleaded, 
failed. The terror was absolute. Yet somehow a muffled whisper from the watcher pierced the veil 
of sleep paralysis, rousing their girlfriend, who in turn shook the watcher back to conscious 
reality. Sleep was a luxury the watcher couldn’t afford for the rest of that night. The watcher’s 
grandparents, independently and without knowledge of the other, shared a haunting family anecdote 
that resonated with an uncanny similarity. Decades ago, as teenagers, the Watcher’s 
grandfather and his two younger twin sisters, driven by a youthful blend of curiosity and morbid 
fascination, forged a solemn pact. They vowed that the first among them to depart this life would 
endeavor to reach out from beyond, a supernatural   handshake across the veil simply to confirm the 
existence of an afterlife. Around 30 years later, Fate claimed one of the sisters in a tragic 
car accident. Roughly a year after her passing, a peculiar ritual began for the grandfather. 
Whenever his remaining sister would call on his antique wall-mounted telephone, an odd event would 
precede his answering. As he rounded the corner, heading for the insistent ring, the phone would 
inexplicably fall silent. Upon reaching it, he would find the earpiece dangling by its cord, 
severed from its cradle. This bizarre occurrence, the watcher’s grandfather insisted, was 
exclusively tied to calls from that particular   sister, leading to the unsettling implication 
that perhaps the pact had been honored, albeit in a most unusual fashion. In a secluded, unassuming 
town in Mexico, the Watcher’s grandparents resided in a sprawling, venerable house, a structure 
with a quiet menace embedded within its walls. One room in particular was notorious, isolated 
from the main living areas, perpetually cloaked in shadow thanks to its minuscule windows, and always 
unnervingly cold. The watcher’s aunt and uncle, frequent visitors from a neighboring city, always 
chose this enigmatic chamber for their stays, often accompanied by the watcher’s then 
three-year-old cousin. One night, during a large family gathering, a piercing shriek tore through 
the house. It was the watcher’s young cousin. her voice laced with pure terror, screaming, “Tell him 
to go away. He doesn’t want me here.” Her parents, after much effort, managed to soothe her in 
another room where she recounted seeing a scary little kid. The adults naturally dismissed it as 
a child’s vivid imagination. Yet 3 years later, the watcher’s grandmother’s sister, unaware of the 
prior incident, also stayed in that very room. The next morning, she described a sleepless night 
plagued by the relentless cries of a little kid emanating from the far right corner of the room. 
The watcher’s grandparents, connecting the dots, realized a pattern. Another 6 years passed, and 
the watcher’s aunt, again, completely oblivious to the room’s chilling history, spent a night there. 
She, too, was terrorized by the sound of weeping, emerging understandably frantic. Despite 
its unsettling reputation, the watcher has never personally experienced anything untored 
within that room. However, a mere month ago, the watcher’s cousin arrived with her one-year-old 
daughter. The toddler, just beginning to walk in babble, was being entertained by the watcher while 
the cousin ate. As the little girl, hand in hand with the watcher, toddled innocently towards the 
doorway of that infamous room, the watcher, with a mischievous grin, leaned down and playfully asked, 
“Do you want to play with the little kid in?” The young cousin, drawn by an unseen force, steered 
towards the coldest corner of that infamous room, her tiny finger pointing. As we neared the spot, 
she erupted into inconsolable sobs. The watcher, seizing her, fled the room, a chilling dread 
preventing their return ever since. The watcher is still terrified to even approach that doorway. 
A story from the watcher’s family concerns their father and his then pregnant stepmother. They were 
at home when the stepmother’s friend arrived with her three-year-old son. The boy, left to play 
alone, was soon heard giggling and conversing with an unseen companion. When asked, he named his 
playmate Shima. The adults, initially confused, carried on with their day. However, the boy’s 
interactions continued. He later announced he was playing with Shima again. The watcher’s father, 
growing curious, asked who Shya was. The boy walked directly to the stepmother, pointed, and 
declared, “Shya Gretle.” This struck a chord. The watcher’s stepmother’s real name was Chan, but her 
mother Gretle, like Hansel and Gretle, had passed away in September 2014. This incident occurred 
in early 2015, making the chilling implication clear. The child was communicating with the 
spectral presence of the stepmother’s deceased   mother. The watcher recounted a particularly vivid 
account from a former friend’s home. The house was a nexus of activity. Two shadowy figures stalked 
the hallway while two more malevolent entities occupied the upper floor. On one occasion, the 
watcher, the six months pregnant friend, her mother, and grandmother were gathered downstairs. 
The friend went to the bathroom, the grandmother stepped out for a cigarette, leaving the watcher 
and the mother chatting. Suddenly, from the empty upstairs, save for the friend’s brother’s bed 
and belongings, the distinct tinkling melody of a music box, a baby mobile, or a lullaby toy began 
to play. This wasn’t the only oddity. The watcher and the friend’s mother had often witnessed two 
shadow men patrolling the hallway at night. These figures would emerge from the bathroom, a place 
the watcher meticulously avoided alone due to   objects routinely flying off shelves, cross to the 
friend’s brother’s room, and stand sentinel at the foot of his bed while he slept. If the brother was 
intoxicated, a tangible sadness seemed to emanate from these entities. One night, a disembodied 
whisper echoed from the dining room. A sound so unnerving that the watcher and the friend’s mother 
seized their belongings and fled. The watcher’s childhood home was a constant source of unnerving 
occurrences. Chairs would be found inexplicably relocated to other rooms when the watcher was 
alone. Kitchen cupboards would mysteriously open late at night, even when no one else was awake. 
The watcher recalled sitting at their computer in a lit room, only to witness a dark cloud-like 
entity float through a closed door, hovering silently across the room. Footsteps echoed 
from outside their door, accompanied by heavy, disembodied breathing. This pervasive terror led 
the watcher to sleep with music playing, a habit that persists to this day, a desperate attempt to 
drown out the inexplicable sounds. As the watcher aged, they tried to rationalize these events, to 
dismiss them as imagination, but the undeniable certainty of what they experienced remained. One 
morning around 11:00, the watcher and Liam were waiting for Sarah to return home. Gazing out the 
front window. Suddenly, the unmistakable sound of a radio playing drifted from Liam’s bedroom. Both 
were bewildered. Why was it on? Liam, younger and more easily spooked, hung back, letting the 
watcher enter first. The moment the watcher crossed the threshold, the radio fell silent. 
Upon inspection, it was utterly disconnected from power and devoid of batteries. There was no 
earthly reason for it to have been playing. Liam, a meticulous child with his Matchbox cars and 
playmat, insisted he’d left them neatly parked in rows, but now they were scattered half-hazardly 
across the room as if by an unseen hand. The radio’s inexplicable serenade and Liam’s 
shared memory of it remain a powerful reassurance that my childhood fears weren’t merely born of a 
restless imagination. Prior to those days, I had lived in a different house for several years, one 
where an undercurrent of the supernatural was a   constant presence. Objects would vanish from their 
accustomed places only to reappear elsewhere. Doors would close on their own accord, and 
fleeting glimpses of figures and shadows were not   uncommon. Yet one particular incident eclipsed all 
these mundane oddities. I was settled in bed one night, engrossed in a book, when an abrupt drop 
in temperature seized the room. It was swiftly followed by that visceral, prickling sensation 
one gets when something is profoundly aiss. My curiosity, overriding the nent dread, prompted 
me to lift my head and survey my surroundings. There, at the foot of my bed, hovering slightly 
off the far wall, was an immense, perfectly black void. I struggled to comprehend its nature. It was 
less a shape and more an absence, a complete void of light and warmth that radiated an undeniable, 
bone chilling malevolence. Fortunately, panic didn’t entirely paralyze me. I recalled an old 
adage I’d read, that spirits and entities could only affect you if given permission. With a sudden 
surge of defiant terror, I roared at the abyss, commanding it to depart, declaring it unwelcome 
and punctuating my demand with a volley of angry expletives. After a tense, agonizing moment, the 
formless darkness seemed to converge upon itself, shrinking and dissolving, taking with it 
the oppressive, evil sensation. To this day, I cannot logically explain what I encountered, and 
it remains arguably the most unsettling experience of my life. I also at one point foolishly 
experimented with a Ouija board, a venture I found far less entertaining than popular culture 
suggests. Another night driving home from work, my journey took an unnerving turn, I spotted a small 
girl on a tricycle pedaling across the street and veering towards a dense patch of woods that sloped 
steeply down into a creek. My heart leaped into my throat. I slammed on the brakes, the car skidding 
to a halt, and sprinted towards where I was convinced she must have fallen. No one was there. 
Just then, a police car pulled up. I explained my frantic search, telling the officer exactly what 
I’d seen. Without missing a beat, he informed me that I had witnessed the same apparition 
countless other drivers had reported. Decades ago, over 40 years in fact, a child had been tragically 
killed on her tricycle in that very spot. She had been seen repeatedly over the years, sometimes 
walking, sometimes with her tricycle. He added that curiously, since recent construction and the 
installation of new barriers, all sightings of her had ceased. In a house I once inhabited, nestled 
against a vast public open space crisscrossed with hiking trails, I experienced a series of 
peculiar dreams. One evening, a disconcerting dream woke me. An old woman had entered my room, 
quietly attempting to coax me outside. Shaken, I rose to get water, switched off my phone, 
or so I thought, as it was perpetually cold, and drifted back to sleep. The dream resumed, the 
same old woman calmly reiterating her desire for me to join her outdoors. Again, I refused, citing 
the cold. I woke once more to find my phone screen illuminated, convinced I’d either forgotten to 
turn it off or the button had jammed. I remedied it, lay back down, and the dream returned. But 
this time, the woman was noticeably older, her demeanor agitated, almost frantic, as she insisted 
I go outside. In the dream, I finally conceded, following her into the hallway. The moment 
I reached it, she vanished. Then I woke up, not in my bed, but standing in the hallway of my 
actual house. My phone, I noticed with a fresh wave of unease, was on again when I returned to 
my room. Thoroughly unnerved, I spent the next few hours distracting myself with food and television 
before finally returning to bed around 5 or 6. The dream did not recur. The chilling postcript 
to this surreal experience arrived a few days later when I observed police cars gathered in the 
open space behind my house. Upon questioning Sarah about the police activity, she revealed a grim 
discovery. An elderly woman reported missing days earlier had been found deceased on the nearby 
trail, likely succumbing to a heart attack or   stroke. Her body had only just been located 
when I experienced my own unsettling events. Around my 10th birthday, I relocated from the 
bedroom Liam and I had shared since my birth, moving into the newly renovated attic. It 
was a fantastic space, long and narrow, with large bay windows at each end, reminiscent 
of Kevin Mallister’s bedroom in Home Alone, albeit slightly less spectacular. At first, it 
was wonderful. I cherished my newfound privacy, the freedom to stay awake long after the rest 
of the household had retired, and my very own   television. However, almost immediately after 
moving in, a recurring dream began to plague me. I would awaken in the early hours, drawn to 
the bay window overlooking the backyard. There, on our patio set, a woman would always be sitting 
alone. She emanated a pale bluish luminescence as if bathed in moonlight even on moonless nights. 
I remember her absolute stillness, barely moving. Her back always turned to me. Though I couldn’t 
comprehend what I was witnessing, her presence deeply unnerved me, and I made a conscious effort 
to remain utterly silent as I observed her. For a time, the dream consisted solely of this silent 
vigil, watching the luminous woman seated on our patio. Several months into my stay in the 
attic, the dream returned. It unfolded as usual, the pale woman seated with her back to me and me 
watching her in silent apprehension. This time, however, as I shifted slightly, I accidentally 
knocked the television remote control off the bay window seat. It clattered to the floor, instantly 
switching on the TV. The screen blared loudly for a hearttoppping second before I scrambled to 
retrieve the remote and turn it off. When I cautiously looked back down towards the patio, the 
woman was no longer turned away. She was standing looking up directly at me. I had never seen her 
face before, and it was a vision of pure horror, a hideous old woman, her features contorted with 
an indescribable rage. Fear, sharp and cold, seized me. I instinctively clamped my eyes shut 
for a second, desperately hoping she would simply vanish. When I dared to open them again, I 
watched in abject terror as the pale woman walked through the wall, directly into my house, 
precisely beneath where I stood. In a panic, I scrambled towards the stairs leading to the 
main floor, my only thought to hide in my parents’   room. But as I reached the top landing, there 
she was, standing at the bottom of the staircase, gazing up at me with murderous intensity. I let 
out a final piercing scream and woke up in my bed soaked in a pool of cold sweat and urine. I never 
had that dream again. To provide some backstory, when Sarah was 13, her grandfather suffered a 
massive heart attack while walking in front of his house and tragically passed away at the local fire 
station. Roughly 15 years later, her grandmother, afflicted by Alzheimer’s, passed away peacefully 3 
weeks later, surrounded by her son, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Since 1998, our parents, 
Liam, and I have resided in my great-grandparents house. Around the age of 16, I witnessed a 
ghostly woman in a wedding dress glide through our kitchen, then phase directly through the 
back door. Naturally, I freaked out immediately, asking Sarah and Liam if they had seen what I had. 
Of course, they hadn’t. My gaze drifted to the top right corner of our living room, where a wedding 
photograph of my great-grandparents hung, their   smiling faces staring back at me. I was in a state 
of utter panic, but I tried to push the incident from my mind. Later that same day, as my father 
returned home from work, I began to walk upstairs when I noticed a 6’1 shadow suddenly appear behind 
me. Feeling a surge of apprehension, I glanced back, but it was nowhere to be seen. I quickly 
hurried upstairs, put away my clothes, and rushed back downstairs. Entering the living room, I asked 
my father if he had just been in the restaurant, knowing he was also 6’1. He simply told me. No, he 
simply told me. His denial sending another jolt of panic through me. That night, I couldn’t shake the 
chilling sensation of unseen eyes upon me. 3 weeks later, the others were asleep, and I was in the 
kitchen, lost in the digital world of Skyrim on my laptop, when an inexplicable cold wind ghosted 
across my back. I spun around, half expecting nothing, only to see a shadowy hand manifest in 
the dim light of the back room. My mind, by now accustomed to the absurd, simply registered, of 
course, there’s a ghost in the back room. Why wouldn’t there be? I cautiously approached, 
peering into the shadows, half hoping, half dreading that I’d find my father playing a prank. 
But the space was empty, the silence profound. The supernatural disturbances eventually faded, only 
to resume about 3 years later. On March 25th, as I unloaded laundry from the dryer in that very back 
room, my ear near the window, a soft female voice whispered directly into it. I fled, the sudden 
intimacy of the spectral encounter driving me out of the house at full speed. It was clear then 
my great-grandparents still lingered, and I had no doubt they would continue to do so for years 
to come. My life took an adventurous turn when, as a college junior, I spent six months studying 
abroad in Rome. It was an exhilarating time filled with breathtaking sights and I admit a fair amount 
of youthful revalry. But the most memorable aspect was undoubtedly the ghost. Our apartment, which my 
roommates and I shared, was located in a building rumored to date back to the 1700s. A truly ancient 
edifice. It came pre-furnished, decorated by a family who had lived there just a few years before 
our program leased it. My particular room, I must note, was designed like a child’s sanctuary, 
adorned with ABC wallpaper and cheerful butterfly stickers. For the first few months, everything was 
unremarkable. Then, as our school’s final exams loomed, the atmosphere shifted. One evening, lying 
in bed, I noticed a corner of the room had become unnaturally dark. There was a street lamp outside, 
usually sufficient to cast a faint glow, but this was a profound inky blackness. As I strained my 
eyes, a figure began to coalesce within it, a man in a flatbrimmed hat. Fear, primal and immediate, 
sent me scrambling to switch on the light, but by the time I flicked the switch, he was gone. 
I returned to bed, my sleep elusive that night. This unsettling pattern persisted for the next 
week or so, and I saw the man a few more times. Over time, he seemed less threatening, merely a 
silent sentinel in the dark. One day, I mentioned my spectral visitor to my roommate, whose bed 
was directly above mine. She, to my shock, confessed she had seen him, too. We rationalized 
it as collective stressinduced hallucinations from our upcoming finals. But a few nights later, as 
I lay awake, I felt the mattress dip beside me, as if someone had gently sat down. I saw nothing, 
yet an undeniable intuition told me it was him. I lay frozen for a minute, then felt a hand rest 
softly on my leg. It wasn’t a menacing touch, but a comforting, almost paternal gesture. Eventually, 
despite my apprehension, I drifted into sleep. The next morning, convinced it must have been a 
dream, I recounted the experience to my roommate, only for her to reveal the exact same thing had 
happened to her. Convinced we were both spiraling into madness, we decided to consult our elderly, 
very Italian neighbor. Without a hint of drama, she told us about the little girl who had 
once lived in our room. The child had drowned   in the very bathtub we’d been using all semester. 
Overcome with grief, her father had taken his own life, and his spirit had lingered in the apartment 
ever since. Our neighbor, seemingly unperturbed by this grim tale, offered us homemade bread before 
calmly returning inside. Subsequent inquiries with other neighbors corroborated her story, confirming 
that the father’s benevolent spirit continued   to comfort anyone who stayed in his deceased 
daughter’s room, a perpetual act of paternal love. After my time in Rome, my family and I moved into 
an apartment where the living room and my bedroom windows directly overlooked a busy corridor. 
Privacy became a necessity, hence the heavy curtains. I positioned my computer desk beside 
the window, perfect for my late night gaming sessions. My right side. My right side of the bed 
pressed against the wall. The window a shadowy rectangle behind the heavy curtains. It was past 
midnight and the watcher was immersed in a PC game when a sound began to intrude. Soft at first, then 
growing more distinct, a deep, resonant breathing, continuous and heavy, originating from directly 
outside the window, just inches from the watcher’s right ear. A cold dread snaked through the 
watcher. The watcher instinctively recoiled from the curtain, refusing to pull it back and confront 
whatever monstrous presence lay beyond. Panicked, the watcher roused the family, and as they 
gathered in the room, their faces blanching,   they too heard the unnerving exhalation. Given 
the late hour, our home was sealed, all curtains drawn tight in both the living room and the 
watcher’s bedroom. We crept towards the main door, easing it open just enough to peer into the silent 
corridor. Nothing. No one. A brief flicker of rational thought suggested a passerby. Perhaps 
someone running past and descending the stairs, but the lingering sound, still echoing from the 
watcher’s bedroom window, quickly dispelled such logic. We retreated, a shared terror keeping us 
from that side of the room until eventually the phantom breaths faded, leaving behind a profound, 
unsettling silence. On another occasion roughly 12 years ago, the watcher was chatting with a friend 
via MSN webcam, showing off an outfit the watcher worn to the watcher’s first club visit. The 
watcher stepped out of the room, a different bedroom this time. As the watcher relocated within 
the house to fetch another item of clothing. When the watcher returned to the camera, the watcher’s 
friend’s eyes were wide. “Hey,” she blurted. “I just saw your sister walk past.” The watcher’s 
blood ran cold. “That’s impossible,” the watcher insisted. “She’s not home. It’s just me here.” 
The watcher’s friend shook her head, adamant. “No, really.” Short hair just above the shoulder, 
wearing a plaid blouse. The watcher vehemently denied it again, explaining that no one else was 
in the house. She stood her ground, certain of what she’d seen. Though we eventually resumed 
our conversation, the image of a spectral girl, so clearly described by the Watcher’s friend, 
lingering in the Watcher’s room’s periphery,   haunted the Watcher long after the call ended. 
While the Watcher never personally believed the Watcher’s house was haunted, the very street 
the Watcher grew up on, where the Watcher’s   family lived, was undeniably cursed. It was 
a new development, a row of about 10 large, newly built properties. Yet, tragedy seemed to 
cling to each one like a shroud. One house saw a suicide. Another a fatal hit and run. A family was 
struck by cancer leading to death. A man fell from a ladder, breaking his neck. A teenager suffered a 
mental breakdown declared clinically insane. There were even more harrowing incidents, the specifics 
of which now elude the watcher, but the pattern   was undeniable. Each dwelling on that street 
harbored its own singular calamity. Our home, by comparison, seemed to escape lightly. No deaths or 
paralysis within its walls while we lived there. Yet, it became a crucible for a different kind 
of horror. The Watcher’s father descended into   abusive behavior towards Sarah and the Watcher’s 
older siblings, irrevocably fracturing our family. Sarah and the children eventually moved away, 
leaving the tainted property behind. The next family to occupy our former house built a large 
garage and shed, and within a year, their teenage son tragically took his own life there. We later 
uncovered the chilling reason behind this pattern of misfortune. An Aboriginal elder whose wisdom 
resonated deeply within that Australian landscape, had found ancient rock markings in the vicinity, 
stark warnings to steer clear of the area, for it was home to exceptionally malevolent spirits. 
My sixth grade year brought another unsettling sleepover at a friend’s house. He and his older 
brother had often boasted about a resident ghost, even their mother admitting to seeing the 
spectral presence. We were in his bonus room trying to immerse ourselves in stand by me. When 
the watcher heard it, the distinct thump thump of footsteps directly on the roof above us. The 
watcher looked at my friends, my eyebrows raised in question. They merely shrugged unperturbed. 
Oh, we’re used to it, they said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. After the 
movie ended, we headed downstairs for snacks. As the watcher opened the door to let their puppy in 
from outside, the watcher’s blood ran cold. There, shimmering on the surface of their pool cover 
stood not one but two shadowy figures. The watcher panicked, utterly losing my composure, and 
immediately called Sarah to come pick the watcher up. From that day on, the watcher refused to set 
foot in their house unless the sun was high in the sky, the light offering a thin veneer of safety 
against the terror the watcher witnessed. For a significant portion of my childhood, from the 
tender age of three until the watcher turned 13, the watcher’s family resided in a pleasant, 
if isolated, home tucked away near Yusede National Park. It was a spacious four-bedroom 
house complete with a dining room accessible by a long dirt road, a place truly miles from any 
semblance of civilization. Throughout those years, the Watcher became accustomed to a recurring 
visitation, a girl clad in white who never spoke, yet her presence was undeniable. The watcher 
would simply awaken in the dead of night, sensing or seeing her in my room. Each time 
the watcher confided in the watcher’s father, his response was always the same, delivered with 
an almost mystical somnity. The men in our family can see ghosts. As a burgeoning skeptic, my 
attempts to rationalize these encounters. My attempts to rationalize these encounters were 
always met with my father’s almost mystical   conviction. The men in our family possessed the 
site. It wasn’t merely a family legend. I knew from personal chilling experience that there was 
indeed something off about the silent pale girl who frequently materialized in my room. A presence 
that defied ordinary perception. After my father’s passing, Sarah made the difficult decision 
to sell our family home. We dealt with the new buyers exclusively through a realtor, never 
meeting them in person, knowing them only by name. It was through our old neighbors, who were 
close family friends, that we later learned a   profoundly unsettling detail. The buyer’s son, who 
attended the same school, began arriving exhausted day after day, complaining of disturbed sleep. 
He spoke repeatedly of a girl who watched him nightly, insisting he needed to get out. Each time 
I recall this, a shiver snakes down my spine, a horrifying confirmation that the spectral resident 
had merely found a new target. This period was a whirlwind. My boyfriend and I had a child, and 
then he left to serve as a firefighter in another state. Before his departure, our home had seen 
its share of minor oddities, a glass inexplicably toppling from a counter in the dead of night, for 
instance, but nothing genuinely intense. However, once I was alone, the activity escalated. One 
evening, I was by myself in the dining room when the overhead light abruptly dimmed, extinguished 
completely, and then flickered back to life. I brushed it off as a strange electrical quirk. 
A few days later, my daughter fell asleep in her car seat during a drive. I carried her inside 
and left her to finish her nap in the living room. Our living room boasted a massive window, so I 
ventured outside to play fetch with our dogs, still able to see my daughter sleeping peacefully 
inside. As I glanced through the window, I noticed a nebulous white mist, ethereal and slow, drifting 
from the stairs and through the living room. I spun around, checking the sky to ensure it wasn’t 
a cloud reflection, then peered back inside. The mist was still there, swirling quietly. 
Pure terror seized me. I rushed back inside, snatched my daughter, and drove the 45 minutes to 
Sarah’s house. I never spent another night alone in that apartment. Around that same time, I found 
myself craving a steak at 3:00 in the morning, a spontaneous trip to a 24-hour diner. On my drive 
up Harlem Avenue towards Niles, I passed an old cemetery. As I approached, I saw the translucent 
form of a woman walking slowly along the side of the road. Just as my car drew parallel to her, 
she simply vanished. I slammed on my brakes, and to my astonishment, the car beside me 
did the same. We both exited our vehicles, exchanging wide-eyed glances, each asking if the 
other had just witnessed the impossible. We stood there for several minutes until a Park Ridge 
police officer pulled up asking if everything   was all right. We explained our shared sighting. 
He calmly nodded. “Oh yeah, she often does that, but you two need to move along now. You’re 
blocking the road.” 3 years prior, I experienced a disorienting encounter with a shadow person in 
an apartment I occupied. One night, I was out on the balcony looking through the window into the 
apartment. From my vantage point, I could see the kitchen, a small hallway leading to the bathroom, 
and the doorway to the bedroom. The kitchen lights were on, but the hallway was dim. I was waiting 
for my then boyfriend to emerge from the bathroom, needing to tell him something. I glanced down, 
adjusting my shirt for perhaps 5 seconds. When I looked up, I distinctly saw a figure resembling 
him walk into the bedroom. I immediately opened the balcony door, intending to call out to him. At 
that precise moment, the bathroom door swung open and he stepped out. I stood there, dumbfounded, 
trying to reconcile what I had seen mere seconds before. I went inside, cautiously entering the 
bedroom, fully expecting to find an intruder, but it was empty. I was certain I had seen a man, 
or at least a silhouette in the dim light. It took me a full 20 minutes to even begin to explain it 
to my bewildered boyfriend. The following nights, I tried to recreate the conditions, hoping for a 
repeat, but I never witnessed anything remotely similar. I had never truly believed in ghosts, and 
even now, I’m still not sure what to believe. But I can tell you what happened in that apartment. 
My next move took me to a friend’s apartment in Newton. He enthusiastically informed me that it 
boasted an entire and used third floor. Great, I thought. What a sweet deal. Cheap rent, a 
whole floor, plenty of space. For the first week, nothing out of the ordinary occurred, save for the 
occasional creeks and groans of an old building   settling. But then, the closet door in the room 
adjacent to mine began to inexplicably pop open on its own. The watcher’s new living arrangement 
in Newton, sharing an apartment that boasted a peculiar and used third floor, began innocently 
enough. For the first month, the old building offered only the predictable symphony of creeks 
and groans, its sundrrenched rooms feeling utterly benign. Yet an insidious sense of unease began to 
curdle in the watcher’s mind. Mornings found the watcher waking with a start, convinced of phantom 
footsteps echoing through the apartment. One dawn, still a drift in the liinal space between sleep 
and wakefulness, the watcher saw their friend’s   girlfriend glide through an adjacent room, her 
gaze unsettlingly blank and fixed. “Hey,” the watcher mumbled, pushing off the bed to 
follow, only to find the room empty. “A trick of the mind,” the watcher rationalized, a 
lingering fragment of a dream. But the unsettling incidents escalated. One afternoon, standing 
poised to descend the stairs, an intensely cold, almost aggressive gust of air struck the 
watcher’s face, raising every hair on their   body. The watcher calmly walked downstairs, only 
to be met by their friend’s girlfriend, asking if everything was all right. “Oh, nothing,” the 
watcher replied, attempting a jocular tone, just that the upstairs is haunted. The casual remark 
ignited a familiar argument between the couple. C. I told you, the girlfriend exclaimed, affirming 
the watcher’s unstated suspicions. It turned out the landlord had explicitly forbidden tenants from 
using the third floor, a detail starkly outlined in the lease paperwork, which clearly designated 
it as a haunted space. This revelation brought to mind a chilling narrative the Watcher’s uncle 
had once shared, a story that unfolded after the passing of the Watcher’s paternal grandfather. 
The grandfather’s final weeks had been a somber, drawn out affair, confined to his bed, steadily 
fading until one morning, he simply didn’t awaken. Though the family believed he had finally found 
peace, an unsettling truth soon emerged. That very night, with his room directly adjacent to his 
father’s, the watcher’s uncle began to hear faint, persistent scratches against the connecting 
wall. Wearily, he would rise to investigate, convinced a stray animal had found its way inside, 
only to find the room empty, silent. This eerie scratching endured for a week, a private torment 
he kept to himself, afraid to voice the unspoken dread. Then one night, sleep brought a vivid, 
unsettling dream. A figure, its presence palpable, clasped his hand and guided him towards a heavy 
wardrobe in his father’s room. The dream was steeped in an unnerving darkness, leaving him 
deeply unsettled upon waking. The next morning, compelled by the dreams intensity, he approached 
the wardrobe. Inside, he found his father’s neatly folded clothes, but no obvious message, no clear 
purpose for his search. That evening, the spectral activity intensified dramatically. The subtle 
scratches gave way to a violent shaking from the adjacent room. As if the very foundations were 
trembling, mirroring the tremors of an earthquake. A bizarre anomaly in an isolated space. Despite 
the pervasive darkness and a chilling cold that settled over him, an irresistible urge propelled 
him forward. He remembers the hallway stretching impossibly, the air growing colder, denser as 
he walked the short distance to his father’s room. His own heartbeat thundered in his ears. 
a frantic drum against the encroaching terror. As he entered, his eyes found the wardrobe, and 
there, just as in his dream, a shadowy figure stood beside it. Too afraid to directly confront 
the entity, he averted his gaze and focused on the wardrobe, meticulously searching through his 
father’s garments once more. Deep within the breast pocket of a well-worn coat, his fingers 
brushed against some folded papers. These were letters, apologies penned to his beloved wife. the 
watcher’s grandmother, details of which his uncle chose not to disclose. The moment these heartfelt 
words were discovered, the inexplicable noises ceased. The eerie presence dissipated entirely. 
His uncle, to this day, carries a profound regret for not having faced the shadowy figure by the 
wardrobe, certain it was his father, a loving guide ensuring his final message of peace reached 
his wife before he could truly rest. And so, my fellow travelers, into the eerie and unknown, we 
reached the conclusion of this sprawling journey   into the realm of the unexplained. To each of you 
who has persevered, listening intently to every chilling detail and whispered secret, I extend my 
sincerest appreciation. Assembling these accounts, weaving together the threads of fear and 
mystery, has been a monumental undertaking,   and your unwavering attention is truly a 
testament to the enduring power of these stories. I genuinely hope you found them as captivating as 
they are unsettling. If this exploration of the spectral has resonated with you, please consider 
leaving a like or a comment. Your feedback fuels this endeavor. And to ensure you don’t miss a 
single dispatch from the shadows, remember to subscribe and click that notification bell for 
new tales of the supernatural await. Should you yourself harbor stories that defy explanation, I 
encourage you to share them through the provided   submission channels. Your experiences are a vital 
part of this collective understanding. For now, my voice, weary from recounting these many 
encounters, must rest. Until we meet again, stay watchful, stay curious, and may your 
nights be filled with only peaceful dreams.

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