It is October,let's talk about the supernatural.

[Tinner]

Well, I would have liked to just point you towards Creepy Cleveland where I had my stories posted, but it looks like they're down for the count.

Here's a few of my stories.

As background, I grew up in Harpersfield, Ohio. Which was the first area settled in the Western Reserve of Ohio. Our house was over 150 years old, and across the street was the Alexander Harper Memorial Cemetery - the oldest cemetary in the state.
Lots of old, spooky places in this area.

As a kid, my best friend and I spent a lot of time wandering the nearby woods. We did the usual little boy activities of getting into mischeif and building forts. But we explored a lot or territory too. It was fairly common for us to camp out in the woods on a regular basis once we were like 10 years old.

We once found a stretch of train tracks that ran for just a few hundred yards, and ended at the side of a hill. No idea if this was a planned RR extension that never was finished or what. All I know is we spent the night by the tracks once, and in the middle of the night we were startled awake by the sound of an old steam whistle. This was NOT the sound of a modern train. It was the sound of an old steam locomotive. We never saw a thing, and never spent the night there again.

On another excursion, we saw what I can only describe as Herne the Hunter. We were exploring an old abandoned shack in the woods. My friend was inside the shack, and I was outside, looking around the building. I looked in through the window and saw a tall, pale figure with the head of a stag standing just behind Matt. I yelled, and he turned, and the figure vanished. He saw it as well, and the two of us ran like mad.

There was a family in the area that lost a son when I was just a baby. The official report was that he was depressed and hung himself out back behind the family barn. However, rumors maintain the fact that while the boy was found hanging from a tree, the area around the tree was literally covered in footprints, but no one was ever questioned about the death, and the family (wealthy local meatcutters) swept the whole incident under the rug.
The creepy part was that the area where the boy was hung (back in those same woods) ALWAYS had a noose hanging from that tree. It was regularly taken down (I know this because I cut it down myself a few times) but it would inevitably reappear soon enough.

I could go on for quite a while. Melon-Headed mutants, bigfoot, ghost cows, I've seen a lot of bizarre crap. I'm sure there's a good explanation for some of them, but I'm more inclined to agree with Jester47.

 

[frankthedm]

"I know enough about strange things not to laugh at them." The best line in the entire 1970's Dunwich horror movie describes my opinion the supernatural.

 

[DarrenGMiller]

Some more stories (I have always seemed to be a magnet for wierd happenings, especially whenI am with others who have also had their share of strange experiences):

While in college, I was in a group of about a dozen friends walking around campus at about midnight. We were near a HUGE cemetary that dominates one end of the campus (actively used since before the American Civil War) and walking very close together on the sidewalk, when several of us became aware of a stranger walking towards us on the same side of the street, wearing a hat and trench coat. He was alone and silent and we all felt a sense of unease as we elbowed and tapped each other to let everyone know this guy was headed right at us. We kept our eyes on his approach, ready to cross the street if necessary. There was a large building (the gym/arena) on our right and a wide, empty street on our left (parallel parking spaces on boths sides, all empty and no traffic in either direction). Suddenly, this guy disappeared. No warning, no shimmering, nothing. One second he is there and the next he is gone. We were all freaked and headed indoors immediately. My wife was among those who saw this and she was a firm disbeliever in the supernatural.

I had seen someone disappear before. I was about 14 or 15 and sitting on my best friends' (they were brothers) porch with the younger brother and his even younger brother and sister and the sister's friend, just hanging out. The guy next door was VERY mean to kids and had a classic car slowly falling apart in the driveway that he was extremely protective towards. So, we were sitting there and we see another teenager crossing the street towards this guy's driveway. He is crouched down a bit and walking quickly, looking in every direction. He clearly saw us and knew we saw him. He walked to the car and knelt down next to the back tire on the side closest to us. He then began to let air out of the tire. We SAW the caar settling as he let it out. My friend and I called out quuietly, loud enough for him to hear us, but not to disturb the neighbor in his house. It was probably 11pm or so. When we called out, he looked at us. We told him that he shouldn't mess with the car, because the guy would blame us, or worse yet, catch him in the act. In short, we warned him. He stood up, and in a crouching run, ran out into the street in the direction from which he came. When he entered the circle of the streetlight, he disappeared. The tire stayed flat for a few weeks.

Another story:

One night when I was locking up the school where I teach (7 years ago), I turned off all of the lights and was about to set the alarm, when doors on the back half of the first floor started slamming. Many of them. My wife and I ran out and jumped in the car to circle around the building. Upon arriving around back with a police officer I flagged down (there is a police station behind the school), we found nobody. There have been many stories of people hearing strange things in that school building and I know at least one person has died in the building. I have heard drums from the gym, voices and the elevator door opening and closing.

One more:

Once when gaming in a community center, we had all manner of strange occurences during one session. Almost everyone at the gaming table saw/felt some of the incidents that night. Among the things that happened:

- The sound of a bell ringing. There was a bell on the wall in the room we were using, but the sound was distant and the bell never moved.

- Voices and laughter (and footsteps) in the empty building. This made us open other rooms (I had a key... my mother works in the building).

- EXTREME cold spots in two rooms with no A/C on in them. When the two of us who entered those rooms came back out, all of our hair was standing on end.

- A car pulled up out front. We all saw two people inside with the dome light on. Then, the car was gone. We then heard a revving engine and squealing tires.

- As gamers, we were all pretty excited about the evening, so we drove around the neighborhood in three seperate cars (there were 7 of us) with no communication with each other until we stopped at the highway to talk about what we had seen. The occupants of all three cars saw a man standing behind a bush in a yard nearby. We all saw him disappear at the same time. The next day, I called my mother about it and she told me that the guy who lived in that house had died a few days earlier.

That is all the time I have right now.

DM

 

[ForceUser]

The following is an excerpt from a short story I wrote for a creative writing class, based upon actual conversations I've had with my family. I was going to rewrite it as a post, but, well, I'm lazy. It was eerie listening to people I've know my whole life talking about supernatural things they believe they saw. I still get the heebie-jeebies.

~~~~~

My dad saw a spirit last year. My brother saw it too. They saw the same spirit on different occasions. According to them, it’s not a ghost. I learned about it while visiting them in Louisiana.

This is my dad’s story. He awoke one morning to sunlight streaming through his floor-length bedroom window. He was lying with his back to the window, then he rolled over in an effort to get more comfortable. This is when he saw the spirit. He told me that it was naked and silver-skinned. He told me that it must have been no taller than two or three feet because it stood at eye level with him while he lay in bed. It was standing amid the flowers outside his bedroom window, looking in. He described it as impossibly thin, with huge almond-shaped eyes, spiky black hair and tall pointy ears. Its outline was hazy and indistinct. It looked like air.

The spirit stared at my dad for several seconds, and he lay there staring back at it. He says he couldn’t seem to focus on it. Finally, it turned its head to the right and sunk rapidly into the ground and disappeared. In profile, he said it had a long nose.

On shift that night, my dad spent hours drawing and redrawing the creature. He settled on an image he felt best represented his encounter and hung it over his bar when he got home from work. This is how I learned he’d seen a spirit. I was lounging in his bar and saw the image and commented on it, and he filled me in. To me, the picture he drew looked like a black silhouette of a slender, pointy-eared, spiky-haired creature. He’d drawn a haze around it using a cross-hatching technique. He’d drawn it in ballpoint ink and framed it. I thought it could be a fairy.

I asked my dad what he thought it was. “Sh-t, son, I don’t know,” he replied.

I was on the verge of skepticism, but then he added, “Eric’s seen it too.”

My brother is an extremely rational person. He works with some Air Force covert ops group. My dad is a nut. “You sure?” I asked. I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe so badly.

That night Eric and I drove to see some friends in Baton Rouge. Our conversation went something like this:

“Dad told me about the thing he saw. The fairy.”

“It’s not a fairy.”

“How do you know it’s not a fairy?”

“We don’t know what it is.”

“So it could be a fairy,” I pressed. I played Dungeons & Dragons twice a week. I needed this.

“It’s not.”

“Well, it’s supernatural at least.”

“How do you know it’s supernatural? We don’t know that. We don’t know anything.”

I began to feel exasperated. “Well, what do you think it is? An alien?”

“It’s not an alien. It’s…I don’t know what it is.” He shrugged and smoked a cigarette. I slouched in the passenger seat, annoyed. I wanted to know.

I decided to try another tack. I felt surreally outside of myself, like I was watching a movie starring us, and our characters were driving along a dark road at night, talking about spirits by the dim light of the dashboard. I said, “So tell me what you think it is.”

“I dunno.”

“Can’t you take a guess?”

He puffed his cigarette and shifted his grip on the wheel. I think he was getting irritated at me. I didn’t care. I demanded validation of my interpretation. I knew what I wanted the creature to be. I felt cheated for not having seen it myself. Wasn’t I the one who lived in a fantasy world half the time? It wasn’t fair. I wanted to experience everything I could about this creature vicariously. I pulsed with excitement and vague fear.

“I don’t know what it is,” he repeated, “I only know I saw it. It exists. It’s presumptuous to call it supernatural, though, because you’re assuming that just because humans haven’t documented and categorized it, it must be abnormal. There’s a lot we don’t know about the way the universe works. It could be as natural as anything and we’ve just never seen it before. It might have a purpose that we’re unaware of.”

What a rational answer. I remained unfulfilled.

I decided to believe that the creature was some sort of nature spirit. I hesitate to call it a fairy. I wish I could do so without feeling inauthentic. I didn’t tell Eric that I wanted to know how it belonged in the universe as I perceived it. I lacked the humility to accept what was told to me for what it was. I took their stories as incontrovertible proof. Of what, I couldn’t exactly say. I only knew that I desperately needed to believe that there was something more to the 21st century than fast food, American Idol and Iraq.

 

[Tinner]

Here's a few more from college.

My roommate and I were both in our bunks one night when his radio suddenly cut out. He tried to start it again, concerned that I was eating his cassette.
Then the window which had been wide open slammed closed. This is a sliding window, so it couldn't have just fallen closed, or been blown closed by wind.
Then the lights dimmed, and the fan on the floor turned on and a green light started to emanate from the fan.
Well needless to say both of us freaked out. My roommate (who was studying to be a minister) began praying and reciting the Bible. As suddenly as it started, the lights came back on, the fan stopped, the window opened again, and the green light faded away.
We got up to check things and realized the fan hadn't even been plugged in.
Didn;t get much sleep that night.

Another time I was coming back to the dorm very late after working off campus. I let myself into the room, and was surprised to find my roommate not only still awake, but sitting up in his bunk, looking at an empty chair and having a conversation with it.
He didn't respond when I entered, so I asked him who he was talking to. He still didn't respond, and just continued talking. I called him by name, and he looked at me, but didn't seem to recognize me. I called his name again, and he shook his head like he was just waking up.
"Where'd he go?" he asked me.
"Where'd WHO go?" I asked.
"He was just here." he said.
"WHO was just here? You were talking to an empty chair?!"
"The Son of Light."
"The WHO???"
"He was telling me it was all gonna be OK."
This was really strange, because my roommate had been going through some tough times at that time, and sure enough things did all work out alright later, just as this "Son of Light" had assured him.

There was also a black/grey "mist" with glowing red eyes that would follow people to and from the showers. If you ignored it, it would soon go away, but if you paid it any attention, you could count on seeing it again and again for a week or more at a stretch.

That was one creepy dorm.

 

[Einan]

Tinner, If I may ask: Where did you go to college, Miskatonic U?

Einan

 

[Tinner]

Tinner, If I may ask: Where did you go to college, Miskatonic U?

Einan

Lol. Not quite.
I went to an ultra-conservative private Bible college in Owatonna, MN.
It was an old military academy that was closed down, then converted to a college later.
It was a very strange environment. Old bell towers, steam tunnels, native american monuments, library full of ancient religious texts ...

Hey, maybe it WAS Miskatonic U?!?!

 

[Kanegrundar]

A couple friends and I were out cruising one night about 10 years ago when we passed a family walking down a lonely country blacktop road at 2AM. It was a latino family consisting of parents and 2 kids. We thought it was weird, but drove on. A few days later one of my friends calls me up and tells me that earlier that day a car crashed on the really bad blind curve in that road. A father, born in Mexico, his wife and two kids were killed in the wreck. It sent chills down my spine.

 

[Kanegrundar]

Anybody here watch the show Ghost Hunters?

Final episode had some pretty interesting stuff. 95% of what they do is debunk ghost legends. This one...not so much on the debunking.

I watched it. The figure in the converted morgue made me jump...

 

[DarrenGMiller]

The fan story made me think of another:

While in high school, we were gaming in my bedroom when the VCR turned on and began to hum. It was clearly the sound of a tape being rewound or fast forwarded. It started slowly and sped up little by little. We turned to look and sure enough, the counter was counting up its little blue numbers... only, there was no tape in it. We quickly unplugged the machine, but it continued to count up for about another 30 seconds before stopping and going dark.

Also, while in high school, after a late night gaming session, my friend and I decided to walk to the convenience store at the front of the neighborhood to get something to drink. His mother decided to come with us, as it was about 2 am. When we left his house, we had a strong feeling of being watched and followed. When we got quiet, we could hear footsteps following us. It sounded like a large dog, but there was nothing there. The sound was very audible, as if coming from very close by, yet nothing was around. When we stpped, the footsteps stopped soon after. It continued all the way to the store and then when we came out of the store, it continued all the way back to my friend's house. His mother read cards for people and lots of strange experiences happened with her (or her son) around. He was present for many of the stories I have related so far in this thread.

DM