to start a new spooky thread even though it's the wrong time of year?

[SunkenDream]

Mine is not terribly exciting but it seems only polite to make a contribution

I live a few doors down from the house where I was born, very close to the village church. I grew up listening to the sound of the bells. When I moved back I was pleased to hear their familiar chimes again, until I discovered that the church had long been derelict and the clock stopped years ago.

Still, I continued to hear the bells nearly every night, until the church was finally demolished last year.

there is probably a completely rational explanation for what I was actually hearing but tonight I am living in the land of woo and whimsy

Anymore for anymore?

www.reddit.com/comments/hopqt/what_are_some_true_scary_experiences_that_you/

For anyone else that got through the nurse thread and wanted something else!

I believe SundaySimmon's nightclub story and the older/younger girl guide one are both in the big woo thread in classics, worth a read.

I don't get particularly frightening by ghost stories - I find them interesting or reassuring, but that werewolf story is one of the most terrifying things I've ever read.

All these spooky stories had me over thinking tonight. I was convinced someone was in my flat or one of my kids was awake. I came face to face with what I think was a weasel. Gave me such a fright after reading these. How it got up into my 3rd floor flat I have no idea but it jumped out the window when I was trying to catch it.

I need to find that thread in classics but not now. I somehow need to sleep before work. Still a bit freaked out though.

You know how sometimes when you are drifting off to sleep and you suddenly jump out of your skin? If there was a camera pointed at you and you saw what happened at that moment, you'd never sleep again.

(Can't take credit for that - found on Reddit!)

Disregard my last post. I think I imagined that thread being put into classics. I can't find it now.

Walk, a shitting werewolf?! I should not have read that while up alone in the night feeding my DS!!

I had a boyfriend in my teens who had odd parents and an odd house. The whole family were quite blasé about weird stuff happening regularly, but I was really freaked out on a couple of occasions. One night it was just me, the bf and my dog there and I woke up in the night and had to go to the loo. There was a streetlight outside the bathroom so I didn't put the light on. As I was sitting on the toilet I clearly heard someone say "lights!" and the bathroom light went on. The switch for it was outside the door - the door itself was glass and there was no-one standing there. I came out and my dog was standing at the bedroom door looking quite unnerved, so I ran back to bed and told my bf off for trying to freak me out. Only he was fast asleep.

On another night there a couple of friends stayed over too, so it was just the 4 of us there while the rest of the family was away on holiday. They slept in bunk beds in my bf's brothers room. The girl was in the bottom bunk and her bf was on the top. She woke up and saw "things moving about on the floor", little dark shapes which really terrified her - more so when a couple of them leapt onto her bed. She screamed and clambered up in beside her bf who saw them too, but it was very dark and they couldn't make out what it was and were too scared to come down. They both fell asleep a few hours later and when they woke up, they also woke us up by shouting for us to help them. During their few hours sleep a heavy old wooden chest of drawers had been moved over the door and they couldn't get out. They hadn't heard it move. It took them a good 20 minutes to move it and get out of the room. It was then that I realised that when I'd felt like something was running across the duvet during the night (or once when just watching a film in the livingroom with the lights off - incidentally lots of video boxes where flung off the top of the tv unit towards us that night) I might not have been imagining it, and it wasn't rodents...

We never stayed there again

CheckpointCharlie - a friend of my older cousins was killers there in the early 80's on his stag night.

We did wonder.....

another one from the adventure centre was when I had a large school in who were all staying on the top floor of the mansion house.

one of the boys came hurtling down the corridor to get me, scared witless, to say someone was watching them from the attic. I went along to investigate and they told me they had heard banging from above them so had climbed up onto on the top bunks and moved the hatch door for the attic, and seen someone watching them from up there.

of course this was a bunch of excited 10 year boys, it could have easily have been their imagination.

what scared me though was they were staying in the room that had apparantly burnt down when it had been a borstal, killing all the boys in it at the time

catthief I go there! Maybe not anymore though...

OK, mine's not as scary as some I've read on here, but it still freaked me out at the time! It's also a bit long - Sorry!

I work in a clothing store, which around 10 yrs ago had been a Woolworths. Lots of members of staff hated using the basement stock room, as they claimed it was creepy and something was down there, watching them, and some had claimed they'd seen a figure of a woman. I personally had never experienced this, but the basement did have a sense of unease about it, which I chalked up to the fact that it was below ground level and the back storage areas had a 'cave like' appearance and a claustrophobic catacomb sort of layout. All the staff jokingly referred to the ghost in the basement as Mary/Scary Mary - the name had been passed on by one of the women who'd worked in the store when it had originally been Woolworths, as that's what the Woolies staff had referred to the ghost as.

Anyway, 2 years ago the store moved premises to a much bigger, brand new purpose built store, just in time for the Xmas period. However, the lease for the old building didn't run out until several months later, so whichever manager was on duty also had the keys to the old building, in case the alarm went off, as they had to maintain it until they handed the keys back.

One night the staff were working night shift over Xmas and the alarm went off in the old premises. The on duty manager and another member of staff who had his car with him drove to the building to reset the alarm and check it hadn't been broken into. They got there and had to check the building floor by floor, starting with the attic stock room, offices, 2 sales floors and then finally the basement. When they got to the basement they could distinctly hear the sound of clothing rails being pulled back and forth on the sales floor above them and footsteps of people walking around above their heads. This completely freaked them out, as there was nobody in the building and all the clothing rails had been moved to the new store, so they quickly locked up, set the alarm and got out.

They drove back to the new store and all the staff were in the new stock room, completely immersed in this creepy story in the middle of the night, as they recounted what happened. As they finished the story one of the women said 'It must of been Mary, she must be lonely' and just as she said it, a full box of equipment fell to the floor with a huge bang. Everyone was completely terrified at the time!

Lemonfairydust, your story reminds me of when I used to work in Woolies. Have NC'd for this. The Woolworths building used to be used to process lavender (the town's main industry of old) but had long since been converted into your usual shop like.

There'd always been stories of the "Lavender Lady" - in fact, I remember being told about her and the other town ghosts at school - who would walk up a now non-existent staircase. There's always be a strong smell of lavender if anyone saw her.

I'll be honest, the 4 years I worked there I never saw a thing, but you would get a strong scent of lavender a couple times a week (not just in lavender season) which would linger for hours. The legend of the 'Lavender Lady' was so big we'd always have people asking us staff if we'd ever seen her.

One December, in the middle of our staff Christmas party at the local pub, my manager got a call on the call-out mobile to say that the alarm had been set off. As we were so close, and our manager had had a bit too much to drink already, we all said we'd join her to investigate. We couldn't see any reason for the alarm to go off, but the place absolutely reeked of lavender - and bear in mind this was a pretty big shop. We thought it might be one of our colleagues playing a trick on us, and our manager went through the CCTV in order to find out who (and to give them a bollocking).

Turns out the cameras overlooking the part of the store where the old staircase used to be had all switched themselves off somehow about 20 seconds before the alarm was set off, then come back on about 30 seconds later.

Still gives me the creeps to remember that...

CatThiefKeith - blimey - no wonder you had a vested interest! That's quite a 'connection'.

Bump

A ghost haunts a road close to where I live. It is a country road, with lots of farm houses and barns and fields. It is pitch black at night. The ghost is female, and when you drive at night she appears in front of you, in the middle of the road. People swerve to avoid her, thinking they are mad or they had a lucky escape.....except the ghost then appears beside them on the passenger seat.

Yikes, which area do you live In?

Pepper that is scary as hell. I agree, which area do you live in? I want to make sure I'm never driving down that road!!

pepper that's made me not want to drive at night now

Pepper, that sounds like a Dartmoor ghost?

Lemonfairydust, was it in the northeast were that shop was/is?

AIBU to be keeping this open on my phone and constantly refreshing wanting more?

I remember a post on one of the previous spooky threads, about how when she was younger, the poster and her friends had been out and followed some girl guides (I think.) Then a man came out of the bushes with a crossbow and started firing arrows at them. To me, that's scarier than the ghost ones - afaik ghosts haven't yet progressed to murder (waits to be murdered by ghost out to prove a point), but men with crossbows undoubtedly have!

Ugh - reading this thread in the house alone. A Cd just rolled out of the rack and bounced off the shelf below. I picked it up, guess what it was? The Walking Dead .....

While travelling in NZ I went to a museum about a catastrophic earthquake in Napier that was in one of the few original buildings left standing. All was fine until we went to the bit that had a lot of rescued stuff in it, laid out into different shops which was up a spiral staircase in the middle of the gift shop. As soon as I poked my head through the floor I felt sick and dizzy, like I'd put my head into a bowl of cold water and tried to breath. It was horrible. Something was looking at me and not liking me at all.
I ended up outside with my head between my knees holding a bowl. Truly awful.
DS's French teacher told them a story about the time he was living in France and had a spooky encounter.
He was driving along a road he didn't know well and used a particular house on the side of the road to navigate. He'd seen people in the garden, waved to them etc. the first time he drove that road with someone else in the car the house wasn't there, just rubble and an overgrown bit of land. Apparently it was well known in the area that this house would appear sometimes, I think it's known as a time slip.. He's seen it since as well