Kirsten's (too scared to start a) GHOST STORY thread

Actually I do have one I just remembered. I was trying to sleep but there was some kind of tinkling sound in the house, like someone shaking keys or something, and then I was pretty sure that I saw a light flash by (I thought it was a flashlight) my door (which I leave open when I sleep), and for the rest of the night I couldn't sleep for fear.

Oh dear, now I'm on the spot. Okay, well I'll try to make this the abbreviated version...
My old roommate used to live in a really old farmhouse in Michigan, and she had a little sister who was about four years old, and every morning around two or three, the little sister would run to her parents' room and get into bed with them and say she couldn't sleep.
This went on for a few months, and the parents weren't really alarmed by it until one morning, when it was well past three and the little girl hadn't come into their room. The mom got up and went to check on her, and she wasn't in her bed. There was a light on at the end of the hall, so mom went down and found her daughter in the bathroom, hiding under the sink with all her stuffed animals. "He won't let me sleep," she said. "He won't let me sleep until I play with him and I'm so tired."
So of course, this woman was really creeped out, and the girl told her that this man would stand by her bed every night and stare at her until she woke up, and then he would make her play with him. She drew a picture of a man's figure with lots of wispy things at the bottom.
The mom didn't really believe in ghosts, but she figured it wouldn't hurt to go to the local library and see what she could learn about the house. She spoke to a historian and found that the last person to live in the house was a man named Philo, who never married or had any children of his own, so he often invited the children in the neighborhood to lunch and stuff.
So she went home and asked her daughter if the man ever told her his name, and she said, "He makes me call him Philo."
Which is really terrifying in itself, but a few weeks later, this woman went into her basement, which they'd added a new room onto a few years earlier, and she was moving some boxes. And on a pillar, behind the boxes (in the NEW part of the basement) was the name "PHILO" and bunch of children's handprints.

Yeep. I always tend towards healthy skepticism but there's no denying the hackles-raising nature of that one.

it was a dark and rainy night,

and a big horrific monster with ten heads gorged senselessly on a feast of baby flesh.

This is kinda cliched Blair Witch storytelling, but it gave me the creeps, cause I'm really claustrophobic (it takes a while to read it all but read to the end for scary "punchline"):

http://www.holyshiite.com/caver/

That's scary. I think the scariest part is when the girl didn't come to her parents, if I was the mother I'd be SO freaked out. I don't like to lock my bedroom door at night because the prospect of being caught with something *in* the room and having nobody able to come in and help me seems a lot scarier than having somebody come in*to* the room. This is really illogical and may result in my being murdered in my bed someday, but better by a human than a ghost perhaps....

Is that Boy George?

what's j/k ?

it looks more like phil oakey.

I like to think of 'j/k' as a contraction of 'joke' even though I know, now, that it is not.

and, yes, it is phil o.

j/k = just kidding, right?

Hah, I always read it as "joke" too. I feel stupid now :/

joke it a pretty short word to start off with.

Aw man, I can't see the photograph. I like Phil Oakey, too.

Hmmmm.

Danke for posting the story, Kirsten! Oh man, I love hearing about that sort of thing. I figure as long as the ghost isn't causing any harm, it's a good feller to have around.

The very first house I ever lived in was haunted as well. I could see this apparition standing in the hallway that faced my bedroom and looking in on my parents and on me. The features weren't clear to me, but I could see this greenish glow in the shape of a human every night, and I think it might've been a female.

Whoever it was must've been helping to protect us from harm, because the neighborhood we were living in at the time was getting to be crime-ridden and we had experienced more than a few instances of random shots being fired in the direction of our house. We were almost the victims of a burglary, and I just knew that the alley behind our house was dangerous at night and my big fear when I was a little girl was that someone would sneak into my bedroom late at night and kidnap me at knifepoint. Thankfully, nothing ever happened to us in the end, and I think it was partly because of the ghost.

So yeah, ever since then I've had warm feelings about most ghosts.

That caver story is a little fishy in the trite way answers are just out of reach. Though I like how page 10, when they're going back in, has a link to "next page", which IS NOT FOUND ON THIS SERVER!!

A post from snopes re: this story:

I think the part about finding Floyd's Tomb and digging into it was probably true, hence all the photos and the extremely long details about how they dug the hole. I guess the author has never seen "Stir of Echoes" or he would know that scenes of digging a hole can run too long.

The truth about ghosts.

They're real, yet utterly boring.

I just read that Caver story after it was linked to on Slashdot, and just the claustrophobic aspects alone made my skin crawl, fiction and all.

the caver story is really neat; it's total fiction, adapted from a short story that some guy wrote in 1989. it was kind of an interweb experiment when it went up in 98 or whenever. i love it.

That was spooky. It reminded me of the novel by Poe's brother, but actually kind of scary instead of gimmicky.

Can anyone recommend any good ghost story sites? I need some reading material for the ghost train home from work now that the evenings are getting darker.

Please?

Here are some by famous Victorian types:
http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/ghost-stories.html