To start the spooky stories thread?

[SurpriseItsMeHorseyNeighNeigh]

Of course I'm not, it's Halloween, let's get scared.

So what is the spookiest/most unexplainable experience you had? We're talking paranormal here.

Placemarking!

May I see your photo, please and thank you

About 12 years ago, we bought our first home
which was a really nice flat in an old converted mental hospital.
the hospital was an old Victorian institution, so amazing architecture, grand sash windows, huge grounds. One of the bedrooms was in a tower. It was the only room in the tower, so nothing above or below it and you accessed it internally.

We knew the hospital had a bad reputation - for how it used to treat people, in the social club there was old black and white pictures of people chained to beds, in photos on the walls. It had a reputation for mistreatment, and it had a creepy feel to it. things like the gym were in the old morgue - situated underground without windows.

it was the kind of place, that gave you the creeps. Sometimes when it was at the gym on my own my hair would stand up on my arms and I’d have to leave too afraid to look back.

One night I was asleep with my Oh next to me. My baby was asleep in the tower, when the baby monitor crackled on and started playing old fashioned creepy music. It woke us both up, completely startled and was loud and immediately frightening. The music sounded like a grand piano, and on top of that was loads of voices laughing. But not laughing like we do today, laughing in an old fashioned creepy way lots of ‘ha ha ha’s - If you know what I mean. After five minutes it crackled off again. This was at 3-4am on a Thursday morning. In disbelief we were both sat bolt up, wide eyed and completely frozen, creeped out.

The baby monitor it was linked to our babies room in the tower.

A few minutes later it happened again. Crackling on, with the strange spooky laughing, laughing over and over - lots of different voices, with this old fashioned music in the background. Hairs stood on the backs of necks and a complete feeling at the time that it wasn’t right. This time my OH jumped up and ran straight to the tower and got our baby back. We, all three of us huddled together in our bedroom, terrified. We switched the baby monitor off at the wall and eventually went back to sleep with all the lights on…

It was Completely terrifying, but never happened again.

Loving this thread. I lived in a student house many decades ago 😆. It was a very dark house and had quite a foreboding atmosphere. I had the smallest room built as an extension and even though the other girls had bigger rooms we would all cram into my box room to talk. Everyone used to say my room “felt light” whereas there’s felt strange. One friend stayed over and slept in the lounge and said she had the worst night’s sleep as she felt she was being watched. She was a no nonsense science student and was t prone to flights of fancy or anything.

It was likely a hypnopompic hallucination then, @Giggorata

https://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/what-are-hypnagogic-hallucinations

Yes, we've had toys going off behind the sofa, just as you settle down in the evening.

"Hello, puppy calling, do you want to play with me?" Yeah, probably not just now, mate.

Was it Danny Baker on his radio show that used to get people to send in recordings of spooky sounding toys, as the batteries wound down?

The spookiest one, apart from the "Hello Puppy calling" walker was the VTech caterpillar, which would emit a low, tired, "WIGGLE WIGGLE."

I remember watching Arthur C Clarke's World of Strange Powers when I was about 9 years old, and the episode about ghosts scared me for years. Particularly the story of the monk figure in the bedroom and the Newby church photo.

https://burialsandbeyond.com/2019/03/05/the-spectre-of-newby-church/

Agree

Maybe we need to try and focus on that next time we're experiencing it. A MN solidarity thing . I'll imagine you all giving It a Paddington hard state while tilting your heads and asking "Do you mean to be such a dick?"

Oh that is interesting about Hagrid

See I'm waaaaay too chicken to a) buy a home in a building with such an awful history. Would feel like I'm almost complicit IYSWIM? Therefore I'd deserve any haunting I got

And b) to put my baby's room in a tower!!! It's like Rapunzel!

You have got much bigger lady balls than me.

The caterpillar one sounds equally scary and hilarious

I've just had my 3 rd baby.
Was sitting on my bed with the door open
My 2nd won was about 11 years old.
I saw him walk from his bedroom to the toilet and back again.
Literally 2 minutes later the same won walks up the stairs in to his bedroom.

There's no way he got downstairs and back up that quick.
So I put the baby down, checked in on my son ,he was in there.

Asked him if he was in the loo,he said no.
He was downstairs all day.
Went and checked with my dp,and he said he was down there all morning.

I don't know what it was but he was the image of him.

Won = son.
Fat fingers

I am the most skeptical person and can explain most things away. Saying that I once woke up to a dark shadowy child holding a knife to my throat. I could feel the pressure. It was definitely sleep paralysis as I have experienced a lot of that in my life but still really scary at that moment until I properly woke up!

a lot of Victorian mental institutions have been converted into flats these days. I just couldn't live in one. Not even a fear of ghostly goings on thing, but just knowing the miserable lives people lived in those buildings. Too much sadness.

I did laugh at the baby sleeping in the tower

It was! It was like "Haha...aaargh" at the same time.

Why would you buy a flat in a place with that background?

This is weird, it's just reminded me of when I had DD2 and DD1 asked why I was checking on her with the baby in the night. I said I hadn't checked on her the night before but she was convinced that I had been standing in her room holding the baby watching her

Heh.

"Did you mean to be so rude? I was having a nice sleep there.

Stop looming like that, sit down and I'll make us a cuppa. Ginger biscuit?"

Slightly more seriously, I have had some success with taking pity on dream "monsters", I guess it involves achieving partial lucidity in the dream. I had a really good chat with a male "ghost" while I was sitting on the toilet in one dream - I remember telling him he was rude to burst in on me like that but I was happy to talk to him if he stayed behind the door and stopped peeping. Can't remember the rest of the conversation but he backed off and apologised.

Occasionally I'm not even scared to begin with these days as I realise the ridiculousness my sub-conscious has dredged up straight away.

Had one dream about a squid face man standing in my garden, looking in at the kitchen window. In the dream I remember thinking "How likely is it that Cthulhu-head man is standing in my garden right now in broad daylight?" and woke myself up having a good laugh.

As teenagers we used to go on all day bike rides during the school holidays.

One summer around 1980 we were riding round some old villages in Northamptonshire and saw this long tree-lined track. We headed off down there and came to this enormous house, partially tumble down, but windows open and you could hear people talking and the occasional shout.

We parked our bikes and tried to look through the gaps between the gate hinges and the stone wall. It looked and sounded like a film was taking place for a filmset. Curious we walked around the place, but it was surrounded by a tall stone wall. At the back was a tall bank covered in bushes with some farm equipment stored next to it so we were able to climb up these and look in. What we saw was truly weird, frightening and bizarre.

The courtyard was marked out like a giant chessboard. People were dotted around this arena being moved about like chess pieces by others who were obviously the players. The 'pieces' were wearing simple clothes, mostly worn or dirty. The players were wearing nice clothes, modern and crisp. None of the 'pieces' looked like they wanted to be there. They were tied up with hands behind their backs, standing in marked out spots. One man was tied up in a kneeling position. Some were crying, shaking and all were very unhappy. One had a very clear nose bleed. One of the players started hitting one of the male 'pieces' with a thick cane. The players were mostly sitting down on deck chairs or sun loungers on one edge of the arena, but one of the 'pieces' had been taken over there and was kneeling down as the players all rested their feet on her.

We felt really uncomfortable and ran back to our bikes. We were about halfway up the long track when we heard a vehicle approaching at speed. We shot down a bank with our bikes and hid among the kek and foliage. A navy blue minibus drove past towards the public road and the next village. We felt we needed to stay there hidden. After about 10 minutes the minibus came back slowly, braking every so often for the driver and passenger to look around. It was obvious now we had been spotted somehow and they were trying to track us down. Eventually we left and headed off home sticking to main roads all the way peddling as hard as we could.

Years later I read about a religious cult in that area that has since been disbanded. There were rumours of bad treatment of members and I always wondered if we had stumbled across the same or similar organisation.

The architecture of old asylums is phenomenal. I would buy a flat in one in a heartbeat and definitely will in my lifetime.
Ive spent a lot of time in them and for the most part they are completely serene and peaceful.

@Seychal was that south northants?

I just had to check a map of Northamptonshire, but yes it was. We grew up in a village near there just over the border. We would cycle all day then and could easily be 15-20 miles from home in the summer days.

When I was a teenager, we lived in a village south of Manchester which was converted farm buildings. One end had been a cottage and the rest was barns and so on.

The cottage end had a really odd feeling - it held the dining room, which we never used and always ate in the kitchen, and an upstairs room which was supposed to be for us teenagers to have a spare tv in but we never ever used it, I hated going in there.

The only properly supernatural experience we had was one evening when my parents went out. Their room was directly above the sitting room, where my brother and I were watching tv. Then there was this immense noise - imagine someone pushing over a bookcase full of books and them all thundering to the floor. We both heard it. After five minutes of arguing I made him go up and look. Not a piece of paper out of place.

But what makes this really odd is what's happened to the house since. We went away to university; my parents moved back south. But the house has been derelict for years - I've been watching it on Google Maps. It is just sitting there and falling apart, despite three separate planning permissions.

This happens, of course it does. Except this is in one of the most expensive villages in Cheshire, the footballer kind. That land is worth a fortune but the house still moulders on...

I suffered with awful sleep paralysis.
The last one I had was really bad.
Got the kids to school,went back to bed.
Got woken up by loud talking downstairs.
It was my dp and kids.
2 things.
They were in work/ school
And I'm deaf without my hearing aids.
Then I saw something crawling up the stairs and opening my door.

I was scared shitless so I did what I always do.
Wiggle my little toe and slowly wake up.
That one really upsete as I was in the house on my own.