August 15, 2025 • 49 mins
On this episode, we unlock the doors to some chilling real-life haunted house experiences ever told. From ghostly apparitions drifting silently through dim hallways, to objects moving with no human hand to guide them, to strange, unexplainable sounds that seem to echo from somewhere just out of sight—these stories will leave you questioning every creak and shadow in your own home. These are the tales of families who swore they weren’t alone… and the lingering spirits who made sure they knew it.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, campfire crew, Let's get it on, Hey gang, Enjoy
these true scary haunted house stories and stick around. At
the end, I'm sharing a piece of music for my
buddy Gus Walters. It's a flat top Riot and a
new tune called put You in the Stars. And you
may remember Gus has been in a couple of other bands.
(00:22):
I featured here two of his band's Dirty Smile and Murder,
So stick around for that. Fifteen years in a Haunted
House by Kim Can I grew up in a haunted house.
(00:48):
It was an old brick house in a historic neighborhood
nestled in the Fox River Valley, about forty five miles
outside of Chicago. We moved there when I was just five,
and it wasn't until I moved out as a young
woman that I realized just how unusual our experiences in
that house really were. The first time I remember really
being frightened by the house, I must have been about six.
(01:12):
My little sister and brother and I were still young
enough that we were all sharing a large back bedroom.
My sister and I had bunks, and my brother in
his own little bed. It was the middle of the
night and with a start I found myself wide awake.
I didn't know what woke me up, but immediately I
could sense that something wasn't right. I was on the
(01:34):
top bunk, and I was convinced that someone was standing
beside my head staring at me. I was afraid to
even breathe. I just squeezed my eyes shut and refused
to look. Suddenly there was a loud clatter of noise
in the closet. Petrified, I just lay as still as
I could, and after what felt like hours, I finally
(01:55):
fell back asleep. From that point on, I remember a
pretty steady stream of frightening incidents. For example, when I
would leave my room for a moment, I would often
come back to find my radio turned all the way up,
or the radio and the TV turned on at the
same time, or the shades on all the windows flung upwards.
(02:18):
In a few instances, when the radio turned on or
the shades would drop, I was still in the room.
My sister would often leave her room for only a
moment to return to the door locked from the inside.
And in the closet that I mentioned earlier, books were
constantly falling off the shelf, and hangers would fall off
the rod for no apparent reason. One night, I was
(02:42):
up late reading in my bed when I heard someone
pacing in the hallway. The pieces were short, like someone
was just walking back and forth in front of my
parents' room at the opposite end of the hall. Since
my mom was prone to worry, I assumed it was her,
and I climbed out of bed to go see what
was the matter. As I pulled my bedroom door open,
(03:02):
my heart froze. The hall light was on and I
could see to the end of the hall where my
parents door was shut, and the hallway was completely empty.
I quickly shut my door and returned to bed and
stubbornly resumed my reading. I help it with a pounding heart.
Most of the activity seemed to happen on the second floor,
(03:24):
where the bedrooms were. One night, our family was hanging
out in the dining room after dinner when a tremendous
bang in the bedroom above us shook the entire house.
We all cried out. It was so loud, and for
a stunned moment, we just looked at one another in shock.
My dad insisted that it must have been a sonic boom.
(03:46):
We went up stairs and found nothing amiss. I accepted
his explanation. It wasn't until I finally experienced a sonic
boom in two thousand one that I realized that that
is not what we felt that night. The only way
I can describe it is as if a very heavy
trunk or armoire had been dropped from a good height
out of the floor above our heads. After we'd been
(04:10):
in the house for several years, my mom confided in
us that when we first move in, she woke up
several times to see a woman standing at the foot
of her bed watching her. She wondered if it could
possibly be the ghost of her mother, who had died
when my mom was a kid. After talking it over
with my dad, she decided that even if it was
her mother, it was too frightening for her to handle,
(04:33):
and so the next time her visitor appeared, she told
her to leave and never come back. The woman obliged.
It's the only time my mother has ever talked about ghosts,
and since then she said she doesn't believe in them.
I do have another funny story about that, but I'll
save it for another time. I most often experienced things
(04:54):
in bed, and often I would be sleeping and suddenly
find myself rudely awoken by some unseen force hitting the
bed to the right out of the left of my feet.
Sometimes it was a gentle push to the mattress, but
other times it was like a fist or heavy book
hitting the bed. Sometimes it felt like an animal jumping
into bed, and I would reach down, thinking it was
(05:16):
one of our cats, only to find that I was
alone in bed. The summer after my freshman year in
college was the worst. I would wake up to the
very jarring sensation of my entire bed hitting the floor,
as if it had been lifted up just a tiny bit,
and then drop down. It was also during that summer
(05:38):
break that I saw something I will never forget. It
was a sunny morning and I was in bed slowly
coming around when I heard whispering in my bedroom. I
opened my eyes to see who was in my room,
and standing directly beside my bed and looking down at
me were two distinct shapes, an adult and a child.
(06:01):
I was squinting up at them because sunlight was pouring
in the window to the right of my bed. But
the strange thing was that, even though they were standing
opposite the window, they were completely dark and featureless, like silhouettes.
Startled and confused, I started to push myself up out
of bed and said what and at that moment they vanished.
(06:25):
That was the only time that I ever saw anything
that might have been a ghost in that house. But
my brother was not so lucky. As a teenager, he
saw a group of hooded figures on our front porch,
hovering lights in his bedroom, and my sister experienced that
as well. He also saw a bizarre animal looking creature
in the living room and eventually started receiving verbal taunts
(06:48):
and threats from some demon in his own bedroom. While
whatever was in the house threatening my brother overtly, it
was a little slier with my sister and I. On
several occasions, we both woke up to find chunks of
our hair missing, and it was as if someone had
snuck into our rooms while we slept, and with choppy,
(07:08):
imprecise strokes, cut our hair less than an inch from
our faces. At first, we suspected our little brother, I mean,
that was the less frightening option, but he vehemently denied it,
even tearfully, until we finally accepted that there had to
be another explanation. Another incident was the axe One morning
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when I was a senior in high school, we came
down for breakfast, and sitting in the middle of our
beautiful antique dining room table was an axe and had
not been there the night before, and there was no
reason for it to be there then. In fact, I
didn't even remember having ever seen it before. We didn't
have a fireplace, we lived in suburbia, and my dad
(07:52):
was not exactly mister handyman. Everyone denied having put it there,
and so it sat in the dining room for several
days until someone finally had the good sense to put
it out in the garage. The axe was something that
seemed to appear out of nowhere. Not some things would
simply disappear and then reappear. I once had a whole
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week's wages disappear out of a coat pocket, only to
have the full amount reappear in the same coat pocket,
which had been thoroughly searched by me, my mom, and
my sister, and by the way, the money showed up
in that pocket two weeks later. My sister had a
similar incident with her keys and other things around the
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house would just be rearranged. When my sister and her
husband were still dating, he lived for a while in
my parents house in my old room. One day he
asked my mom who had been coming into his room
and moving things around, and my mom was shocked. No one,
she insisted. She told him that we respected his privacy
and would never go into his room, and at the time,
(09:00):
she and my dad were the only other people living
in the house. He then explained that almost every night
when he came home, he would find the objects on
his headboard shelf rearranged. He would write them, but the
next day they'd be moved around again. He said that
the object that was moved the most was a framed
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picture of my sister, and would often be faced down
or turned around. Completely Mystified and exasperated by the events
in the house, my brother and I tried to research
its history but found nothing significant. However, my parents, who
were always skeptical of the idea that the house was haunted,
came home from a visit to a neighborhood pub one
(09:43):
night with the interesting news that they had run into
a young man whose parents had rented the second floor
of the house before we'd bought it. He had asked
them how they liked living in a haunted house. I
wish I knew what his experiences in the house were,
but I think I can get alarmingly. Things seemed to
(10:04):
get worse the older we got. After the summer, with
the whispering silhouettes and the dropping bed, I decided I'd
had enough. When I went back to school that fall,
I really worked on my prayer life. I mean I
prayed constantly, and when I got home the following summer,
I felt confident and less afraid than I had ever been.
(10:25):
I made it a habit whenever I got home of
sitting down on the front stoop, laying my hands on
the steps, and praying for our house and our family,
I would pray in the house as well. Whenever I
felt watched or uneasy, I posted my favorite Bible verses
in my bedroom where I could see them, and prayed
out loud with my family members. This was new behavior
(10:47):
in our household, and at times I was embarrassed to
do it, but I'd tell you the truth, and it
worked for me. I had a series of very frightening dreams,
and that after that things seemed to really calm down.
My parents owned that house for several more years, but
I never felt helpless or danger in there ever again
(11:08):
after my prayer thirty three point fifty three Sexton Drive,
A haunting by Pretty Nobody. I lived here from November
nineteen ninety four to June nineteen ninety nine with my mom, dad, brother,
(11:30):
and sister. We moved from the neighboring city of Merced
and into the small town of Snelling, California. I'm the oldest,
so I have the most memory of this house and
the happening surrounding it. I included the address and the
title of the story to hopefully connect with anyone who
lived in this house before or after I did. We
(11:51):
moved in when I was four, so I don't remember
if it was a new build and we were the
first occupants, but it could have been due to the
rest of the street having multiple vacant lots while we
lived there that were built on during our time there.
We moved in and I had the middle room on
the front of the house. There's a hallway connecting the
master bedroom at the back to the living room by
(12:11):
way of the guest bathroom and the two smaller bedrooms.
While we lived there, we had hanging slat style blinds
that covered the patio, sliding glass doors and there was
a fruitless pear tree planted by my dad where the
driveway extension is currently. I'm including all of this to
hopefully verify my truth to anyone that knows about this house,
(12:32):
so they're assured that it's a real story and I'm
actually who I say I am. Now the story. Shortly
after we moved in and got settled, I started to
be woken up in the middle of the night, seemingly
at random. I was young and had an infant little
brother in the next room, so it could be explained
away that he was waking me up, and at least
(12:53):
that's what my parents told me at the time. Later on,
my sister was born in ninety six and she was
in the other room, and my brother and I shared
my room with a bunk bed. That was when I
started retaining my memories. I would wake up at night
feeling like my feet were being tickled, and nobody would
be around. When my mom asked me why I was
(13:15):
wearing socks to bed, I told her so the tickle
monster doesn't get me. She asked me what that was,
and I explained to her what was happening, but she
just told me it was her tucking me in for
the night, and I shouldn't be afraid. Even then, I
knew that was not the answer, as when I would
wake up, the house was silent, and she and my
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dad would regularly have around thirty minutes of conversation before
falling asleep that I could hear. I stayed up one
night to see if it was them, and they went
to bed like normal. I fell asleep and then got
woken up like normal by the tickle monster. If I
wore socks, then it wouldn't happen. Around that time, the
(14:00):
movie A Bugs Life came out and my grandma bought
my brother and I two motion activated characters from the movie.
They would sense movement and say some lines from the movie,
and they were constantly going off, even when we put
them in the closet or toy chest that was built
into the bay window. No matter where they went, they
still activated. I think we all just thought it was
(14:23):
shoddy nineties electronics, but knowing more, it may have been
another layer to this haunting. We moved out in the
summer of ninety nine and I tested my sock theory
the first night at the new house, and nothing happened
to me. Nothing happened to me. Ever, again like my
Tickle Monster events. Later in life, I would come back
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to California to visit my family and we would talk
about my childhood. I would talk about the shenanigans I
got up to while my parents weren't looking, and my
mom would be shocked that we were up to so
many random things without her knowing. We got out of
the the topic of the Atwater house and that reminded
her about the tickle Monster, and she said it was
(15:06):
funny that I mentioned that. She told me that everyone
that visited our house would comment that there seemed to
be something off about it. If you sat on the couch,
you could see the hallway out of your periphery, and
multiple people said that they had to constantly look down
the hall because it looked like someone was standing there,
(15:26):
but when they turned there was nothing and nobody. They
swore though there was a shadow or presence. My parents
wouldn't prompt this conversation. It was always brought up by
other people. They too had the same experience, but didn't
want to tell anyone for fear of being deemed crazy.
(15:47):
Those hanging slats I mentioned would move and clink together
seemingly on their own all the time, no windows open,
no AC or heat on, no doors opening or closing.
They would move like in the breeze of someone walking past.
And we got a dog at one point, a docson
that was blind and mostly deaf from birth. We only
(16:09):
found out after we adopted her, so we just dealt
with her the best we could. It was normal for
the outside cats to mess with her and make a noise,
just to move away and watch her take off barking
in their direction. But she would also just go crazy
barking inside a lot. I'm not sure what to make
of that, but lots of people say animals can sense stuff.
(16:32):
My mom went on to stay friends with a woman
that lived down the street named Wendy b if I
remember correctly. Wendy said that the people that had moved
in after us were talking about having strange things happened
in the house like we had. My mom said that
she started by asking if we ever had strange things
happen to us, and then explained what the new owners
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were saying. It all seemed so real to me, but
I was young and impressionable. My parents corroborating was the
biggest reassurance In all of this. I'm not sure what
that exactly was, and I still don't know if I
believe in ghosts, But maybe someone can offer their own
story about this house, or even an explanation growing up
(17:24):
in a haunted house By Joyful. I've had some odd
experiences in my life, but it really all started when
I was nine years old and my mother's sisters and
I had just moved into a new house. My parents
had divorced a few years earlier, and we had been
renting places to live until my mom could afford a
home of her own. I went to look at the
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house with my family before my mom bought it, and
a young family lived there who were hunters. They had
a lot of stuffed animals hanging on the walls, which
I thought was rather grotesque. Before we moved in, my
mom and aunt painted the kitchen in a true pious
color of yellow and did some basic touch ups around
the place to make it cozy. It was and is
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a split level home with three bedrooms upstairs and a
partially finished basement. From the first night, it was a
pretty active place. Footsteps in the hallway, a weird continuous
sound at night, like a pencil rolling on a table.
I often felt watched, particularly from the left hand upper
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corner of my bedroom, and the longer we stayed there,
the more obvious or active whatever was there became. I
would hear someone calling my name at night while I
was trying to sleep. Things began to fall off the
walls for no apparent reason. There was knocking on the walls.
I mean that kind of thing. I would relate my
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feelings and experiences to my mother and sisters, who would
either laugh or try to convince me about my overactive imagination.
I did have a pretty vivid imagination back then, but
these things were different. Things really picked up when we
got a dog. She would suddenly in the middle of
the day start to whine, shiver, and try to hide.
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As that continued, I realized it was a sign that
something was about to happen, like the TV switching off
or the banging on the walls. One time, our dog
freaked out while we were all sitting in the living
room watching TV one winter evening as it was snowing.
We were watching Dallas for all of you who are
(19:30):
old enough to remember that show. As we watched, the
dog cowered with fear as our front doors open, first
the outer screen door, then the heavier inner door, and
it sounded like someone had come in. We all sat
there looking at each other, sort of stunned, and I
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should mention none of us saw the doors open. Being
a by level, the door was down a flight of stairs.
My mom wasn't checked, but no one was there. It
was all so off, and slowly we figured out why
you had to go through a gate to get to
our door, and at the sound of the gate, our
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dog would bark. No gate, no barking, no person, no
footprints in the snow. I realized that may seem kind
of cliche, but that's what happened. I never wanted to
tell any one what was going on in our house,
but one day I confessed to a friend who lived
on the block before we moved in, told them all
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about the strange house. She told me she never wanted
to go to my house because someone had killed themselves
in it before we moved in. Apparently, the mother and
wife whom I had met had her brother living there
and he shot himself in their kitchen. It explained why
my mom could afford a new house in a nice neighborhood,
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and it also explained why she and my aunt had
used that all full shade of yellow. It was to
cover the stains. When I asked my mother about it,
she confirmed the death, but reassured me there was nothing
to fear, and I was just imagining things. I mean,
many other things did happen, but the last and strongest
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event was one evening when I was well into my
teenage years and both my older sisters had moved out.
I had graduated into my sister's older room that had
been built in the basement. It had that kind of
partition hanging ceiling thing, the kind with rectangles sitting in
a grid. I don't know what it's called, but I'm
(21:37):
sure you can picture it if the window was open
and a breeze blew and the ceiling would make a
wishing noise as the tiles lifted, or if the door
was opened quickly. Anyway, a friend and I were sitting
in my room chatting late one night, when all of
a sudden we heard footsteps coming down the stairs. If
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it was my mum coming to tell us to go
to bed, we would have heard leaving her room, but
these footsteps had just started at the top of the steps.
Couldn't explain it, but what happened was just as electric.
My dog started to whine and cower under the blankets.
We heard the steps come across the basement floor towards
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my door, and without the window being opened or the
door opening whosh, the tiles lifted as though someone had
just come in the room. The entire time, as the
dog was freaking out, my friend and I just locked
eyes and all the hairs on my body stood up.
I couldn't explain the feeling, but it felt electric and very,
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very primal like. My physical response was animal like. Everything
just seemed to stop, and we roared out of there,
ran upstairs, and didn't go back down for the rest
of the night. Years later, after I was an adult
and we hadn't lived there for years, my mother confessed
to me that she knew that the house was active.
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She woke up one night with the intense feeling of
someone staring at her and saw a light human shape
form move quickly back and disappear through a wall. She
also explained the dreadful color choice in the kitchen. My
sisters never experienced anything, but they now believe me when
I tell them about it. Another story, I just remembered
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was a night a friend stayed over and ping pong
balls were rolling across the floor for no apparent reason
in the middle of the night. Me, needless to say,
not too many sleepovers after that. The kids at school
were scared of my house. After all these things and
other similar experiences throughout my life, have come to believe
that some of the occurrences were poltergeist activity due to
(23:51):
all the female energy and some personal upsets, as you
can well imagine with a single mother and three daughters. However,
or other things are totally unexplainable and more of a
supernatural nature, and I think that the longer we were there,
the more the activity gradually became hostile and very negative.
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I can happily say that my current home of more
than six years is very peaceful, and I haven't known
this kind of stillness anywhere I've ever lived. The house
on North Street by Lost Voyage eleven. The following is
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a story I've been waiting to tell for years. It
centers around a home that was in my family for years,
and the experiences encountered there occurred over the years to
many different family members. I'll do my best to relay
the events as best I remember them, and as chronologically
as I can too. The home was purchased by my
(24:58):
great aunt in nineteen forty six and hosted a sort
of extended family there. In addition to my great aunt,
my grandparents on my father's side, my dad and his siblings,
and assorted cousins lived there on and off over time.
There was a cluttered front porch that opened up into
a dining room. The right back corner of the dining
(25:18):
room would contain the entrance to the one bathroom in
the house. There were two doors that opened off the
dining room, one leading into the kitchen and another into
a middle living room, and there were actually two small
living areas leading toward the front of the house. The
kitchen had an enclosed back porch that accessed the back yard,
and the kitchen also had an enclosed staircase, complete with
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a door that led to the second story. The upstairs
had a unique layout. The stairs led into a short
hallway that opened into a large open area that was
used for sleeping. At the opposite side of this room,
and parallel to the small hall, was another hallway. The
first room off that hall overlooked the front porch and
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street and was the only one that wasn't wired for electricity.
The hall led to an attic and off the back
of the house three different bedrooms which all linked together.
To get to the third bedroom, which was my great aunt's,
you would have to walk through the other two. It
wasn't really designed for privacy apparently. I'm not sure when
(26:23):
the events actually started, but some of the neighborhood children
playing alone upstairs would come downstairs confused, wanting to know
who the woman was that was standing at the other
end of the upstairs hall. They were certain that all
the adults were downstairs, and my great aunt would go
upstairs and look around, and of course no one would
be up there. There was only one set of stairs,
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and they were in the kitchen, as I mentioned, and
that's where my grandparents would camp out most of the day.
It was a small town and many parents would just
kind of watch the neighbor's children by unspoken mutual consent.
No one thought of kids wandering in and out or
remaining unattended in the house if their playmates, mostly cousins,
would wander off. But things got stranger from there. One morning,
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every one was ready to leave for a fishing trip,
and only my great aunt and another aunt were going
to stay behind. My aunt went upstairs to be sure
the beds had been made, and in one of the
rooms some one was apparently asleep, huddled under the blankets.
When my aunt went downstairs, she mentioned it to my
other aunt that some one stayed behind, to which great
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aunt replied she had just seen every one off, and
it was every one who was in the house. She
knew every one had left. This alarmed my aunt, who
went upstairs and saw the bed was now empty, but
the sheets were rumpled, as if some one had just
been in it. My great aunt had been downstairs and
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had seen no one come out of the stairway while
my other aunt was up there. The bed thing seemed
to be a recurring issue, and many times after all
the beds had been made, later on in the day,
they were found messed up again with only one other
person in the house. My relatives were sure it wasn't
the kids wandering in and out, because the kids always
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announced their presence and they could be heard wherever they
were playing. This thing with the beds had also happened
while all the kids were in school, too. The sightings
continued one day, one of my cousins wanted to know
who the woman upstairs was who had gone into the attic.
Of course, another search found no one up there. One
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cousin stated that she had been pushed downstairs, but most
of my family said she was kind of clumsy, so
they just wrote that one off too. One of the
cousins staying there had gone downstairs to get a drink
of water, but as he entered the stairwell he saw
a woman standing at the bottom of the stairs. He
didn't recognize her, but when she started to fly load
(29:00):
up the stairs towards him, that's when I put an
end to his desire for a drink, and he fled
back to his room. My great aunt would be woken
up many nights to find a woman rummaging through her
trunk at the end of her bed. This unidentified woman
would finally look up at my aunt and then fade away,
and footsteps could be heard on the stairs at night,
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too many to be discounted as the house settling. On
many nights, my aunt would come down in the middle
of the night and hear the sound of dishes being
washed or the floor being swept. At first, she was
very confused, but didn't question it too much, just went
back upstairs. But the next morning the floor was still
dirty and there were dirty dishes still sitting in the sink.
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Many people had this kind of encounter over the years,
and to my knowledge, no one actually investigated while the
noises had been heard. I finally heard years later from
different family members that while they were having these experiences,
they rarely spoke about them for fear of being ridiculed,
and some just flat out refused to believe it was
happening at all. Finally, one day, my dad, when he
(30:11):
was a teenager, was upstairs getting something from under his bed.
His bed was in the big open area upstairs. When
he turned around, she was right there. It was the
closest of the encounters that had occurred to my knowledge
my great aunt and grandparents. His parents had been sitting
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at the kitchen table when he came downstairs, apparently white
as a sheet. He talked about it then, but was
clammed up about it over the years. He described a
woman as wearing a purple dress, old fashioned, maybe like
something from the twenties or thirties. He said that she
also wore a cameo pen, but what scared him so
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bad was that she had no face, just a dark
spot where her face should have been. Prior to that,
most people had only seen her in the dark, but
my dad saw this in broad daylight. I had heard
the story from my grandmother and was fascinated, and I
asked my dad about it, but he got kind of
(31:15):
short with me and said it was so long ago
he couldn't really remember. My uncle Pete, who was dating
my youngest aunt, had some interesting encounters as well. One night,
while he and my aunt were snoozing on the couch downstairs,
he felt someone tap him on the shoulder and trying
to wake him up, whispering his name. He came to
(31:37):
and saw only my aunt near him, sleeping soundly, But
he caught the movement of someone moving up the stairs,
and he knew full well that they were alone, and
so leaving my aunt, he pursued this intruder upstairs. He
saw someone at the end of the hall go into
one of the bedrooms, but when he went into it
(31:58):
turned the lights on, no one was there. As he
turned around, he saw this person go into another room
further down the hall, and when he got to that room,
no one was there. Either. This game went on for
some time before he finally gave up, and another night
he came to the house drunk, and though his memory
isn't the best, he thought my aunt, his future wife,
(32:21):
had thrown him out in the snow. In the morning,
my aunt told him that she had stayed in her
room the whole night and no one else had been
at home at the time. My uncle swears there was
a stern, angry sounding woman who tossed him out in
a snow bank. I mean, no one admitted to doing
this incident, and my aunt says she didn't really know
(32:41):
what happened at all. In the eighties, my great aunt
leased the house to my aunt, my dad's sister, to
have for her growing family while she moved into an apartment.
One night, my aunt woke up to see someone standing
over her, and she screamed and turned the light on,
but as usual, no one was there. My cousin claimed
(33:04):
someone grabbed him one night while he was upstairs in
the dark, and both of my cousins stated that on
more than one occasion they had seen a man lying
on the floor upstairs, and when they attempted to approach him,
he just got up and went into another room and
then lay back down. My aunt and uncle began to
remodel the place and knocked out the walls to the
(33:24):
downstairs rooms, including the kitchen, as well as moving the
stairs from the back of the house in the kitchen
to the front in the living room. They were making
the hole downstairs one huge open area, and in doing
so they found what appeared to be the bones of
a hand, which they assumed to be a monkey's paw.
(33:46):
They threw whatever it was out and didn't have them
analyzed or notified any one of what they had found.
My other uncle had told me that he had knocked
a hole in the wall in the bedroom upstairs without electricity,
and had also found a mummified hand there. He too,
tossed it without telling anyone. I mean, God knows why
they did that. I mean, this same uncle once entered
(34:08):
my great aunt's bedroom while she was still staying there
and saw a woman standing near the trunk, and she
appeared to be looking for something inside it, but then
promptly disappeared upon being discovered. The footsteps on the stairs
stopped and eventually resumed. I guess moving the stairs must
have confused the ghost for a little while. At least
(34:31):
most of this time, I remained unaware of what had
happened at the house. My parents would take us over
a lot when we were younger to play, as it
seemed to be a popular family hangout, so many people
were always staying there, and this was in the early
to mid eighties. I did spend the night more than once,
and I know my brother and cousin and I slept
on the fold out couch in the big living room
(34:53):
the night before we went to Arizona for her vacation.
I didn't even start hearing the stories about the place
until my aunt uncle got ready to move and we
were going to rent the place out. I do remember
the bathroom gave me the creeps, as when I was
at the toilet, I always fell watched from the area
of the bathtub, but there was never anyone there. One time,
(35:16):
my brother and I had been asked by my aunt
and uncle to watch their dogs while they went away
on vacation, and as we approached the house, I felt
like we were being watched from the window of the
upstairs bedroom, the one without electricity. We only found the
dog up there, lying on the bed in that room. Again,
this was before I knew it was haunted. We found
(35:37):
one of the dogs had gotten off his chain, so
while my brother was out looking for him, I remained
behind in the living room. I had that feeling of
being watched again from the area of the kitchen this time,
and I kept turning around to see who was there. Then,
as I went back to watching TV, I felt a
brush of air behind me, like someone walking right behind me,
(35:59):
going all the way towards the stairs. I shrugged it
off as my imagination. I found out later this was
a common experience for a lot of other people. My
brother told me years later that the night we camped
out in the living room and he was walking to
the feeling of someone shaking the bed. He opened his
eyes to a rather stern looking man standing at the
(36:22):
end of his bed, and he was wearing a white
shirt and brown slacks, and he straightened up when my
brother saw him and turned around and walked into the kitchen.
There was some light from the light over the kitchen sink,
and he whispered to my cousin, asking him if he
was seeing this. My cousin calmly replied, anah, that happens
all the time, like it was a common occurrence. I
(36:46):
was there but a sleep sandwich between the two of them.
My brother watched this man start to walk straight up
into the open air right where the stairs used to be.
My brother told me that later that night I got
up to go to the bathroom and that I ran
into the infamous lady in the purple dress. Apparently it
(37:07):
scared me. But I don't remember a thing. I mean,
I do remember that night, but not meeting anyone in
the hallway. My aunt and uncle moved out around nineteen ninety,
and they rented the place out and then they sold it.
I heard that the new owners had admitted to some
strange goings on, but never elaborated. But I've been fascinated
(37:29):
with the place ever since. I know almost every family reunion,
someone inevitably comes forward with another story about the place.
It seemed many of them had kept it under wraps
until others came forward, and then the floodgates opened up,
so to speak. On the various experiences, as far as
my own experiences, they were mild, at least the ones
(37:51):
I remember. I can't say whether what my brother said
happened with me seeing a ghost or not really happened
as I don't remember it, but I do know some
of my memories of my time there seemed to be missing.
And there are other issues in my childhood dealing with
anxiety starting at that time with no real determinable cause.
(38:11):
I can say for sure that for years my dreams
were haunted about that house. I'd be alone there, and
I knew that she was there waiting for me. The
upstairs was her domain. I knew that when something traumatic
happened to any of us, if it was bad enough,
our minds can block it out. And again this is conjecture.
I have no real proof, but I do think there
(38:33):
is something to that. But I did try to search
for answers. The library records held no help, and even
my cousin, who became one of the regular contributors to
the historical Society of that town, couldn't find anything. I
know it was built in eighteen ninety five. A contacted
the county historian, who at the time was writing a
book about unsolved murders in the area I grew up in.
(38:57):
I figured she'd be interested, and she researched what she
con could and informed me that the house had been
owned in the early nineteen hundreds by a wealthier individual
who had rented it out. She came up with a
list of names of women whom she could trace to
living there in an attempt to find out who this
mysterious purple woman was. She found out, though, that they
(39:17):
had all moved out and died in other places, and
she couldn't come up with anything ever happening in that house.
She surmised that in those early days, if a murderer
anything like that had taken place, it might have been
covered up, as the wealthier owner certainly wouldn't want his
name associated with such a scandal. The look of the
woman's dress had been of the nineteen twenties or thirties,
(39:40):
and it was harder to trace the identity of the
various renters in those early years. I even consulted a
psychic who told me that a woman had drowned her
children in a bathtub, and if someone dug under the
house they would find something. If that is in any
way true, no wonder. I got such creepy feelings from
the bathroom through and there is a crawl space at
(40:02):
the front of the house that is accessible from there.
As kids, we played right near there, and it had
kind of a weird feeling to it. In fact, we
played a game called which in the cellar. Ironically enough,
at that spot the neighbors claimed their house was haunted too,
and the kid who lived there and someone I went
to school with claimed to see a fishing pole levitate
(40:24):
on its own in his own home more than once.
The house changed hands once or twice since then, and
had actually fallen into disrepair and been reclaimed by the bank.
It's privately owned now, and even though I still visit
the area and drive by once in a while, I
haven't actually tried to speak with anyone living there to
see if they've never noticed anything. As I mentioned, I
(40:48):
stayed there a lot as a kid, but never found
out about the hauntings until I was a teen. While
staying with my grandparents, I was privileged to listen in
as they retold these old stories and her own experiences.
My grandmother and great aunt would talk about it openly,
though they never did admit whether they believed it or not.
(41:08):
My grandpa would listen but would dismiss the stories as nonsense. Afterwards,
I became fascinated and visited the actual house again once
or twice, just prior to my aunt and her family
moving out and renting the place. It's been a long
time since I've been back there, that that house will
always fascinate me. Heart shaped balloon submitted by Molly s
(41:42):
hey Gang. Before I read this one, I know that
this is not following the theme of true scary haunted
house stories, but Molly just sent this in and I thought, Hey,
I'm going to add it to this one no matter what,
because it is a pretty cool story a little bit creepy.
It was Super Bowl Sunday, twenty eive. I remember not
(42:02):
because I watched the game, but rather because I didn't.
My son was a newborn, just over a month old.
My husband was over at his buddy's house for the
day enjoying the game, so it was just me and
my little man. I decided we'd have a movie night,
so we went up to Family Video and rented some
movies and I brought myself some dots. Remember it was
(42:22):
twenty eleven and we lived in a very rural area.
On the way home, my son fell asleep in his
car seat, so I managed to sneak us back into
our little home and set him by the couch next
to me. I set the DVDs down and just put
some TV show on for now, hoping I would get
a little nap in while he was snoozing. However, some
(42:44):
ghost Hunters show was on and I was immediately sucked in. Now,
for some context, our home that we lived in at
the time was a relocated train depot well over one
hundred years old. It was small but still had plenty
of dark corners. The darkest room was probably the one
next to the bathroom, which was a storage room more
(43:05):
or less, and at that moment in time, that room
was still holding things from our baby shower clothes our
son would grow into toys, diapers, and some cute helium
balloons that were holding strong. But anyhow, on this particular
February day, it was overcast and even a bit spooky.
Late afternoon shadows prowled about as I hadn't turned on
(43:26):
any lights yet, and I began to question my choice
of shows and wondered why on earth I was watching
that while home with just my sleeping newborn. As a
woman of faith, I wasn't one to allow myself to
get too creeped out, but for some reason the show
was getting to me that day. I raised the remote
ready to change the channel, and at the same time
(43:47):
the ghost hunter said, can you give us a sign
you're here? The hair on my arms raised, and right
on cue, out of my peripheral vision I saw movement,
heart pounding. I braced myself and looked over. Floating from
the storage room was the heart shaped helium balloon I
(44:10):
liked so much from the baby shower. Now there was
one room between the balloon and me. It bounced gently
into the dining room, then continued on its way. It
took its time coming over, but as this ghost hunter spoke,
that balloon slowly made its way, not malevolently, almost happily
(44:32):
towards us. And that's not the most bizarre part, though,
not even close the heart balloon that never once moved
since we had placed it in that room in November.
It danced slowly but merrily through our dining room, coming
closer and closer until it finally stopped right above my
sleeping son's head. Well, at this point you're probably thinking,
(44:56):
big deal. The heat kicked on, so the balloon moved.
That's all good and all, But that balloon had been
in the exact same spot since the end of November.
There were no events by it to this day. I'm
not sure who was saying hi, but I believe someone
either in our family or the house found the balloon
(45:17):
to send their love to our son. The unnerving part
is not knowing who, and it was definitely scary at
the time, but I got the feeling no harm was
meant and nothing like that ever happened again. We live
in a different house now, just up the road. I
can't explain what happened with that balloon, and I try
(45:38):
not to think about it too much. Hey, Gang, thanks
for listening to this episode. If you have a true
(45:58):
scary story of any you'd like me to narrate, send
it to Uncle Josh True Scary Stories at gmail dot com.
I read them all. If you'd like to take your
support of this channel, step further, find the link to
my Patreon page and the description and pick up some
Uncle Josh and Campfire Crew merchandise. A link to my
(46:19):
tea public storefront is down there as well. And without
further ado, while we're listening to the music of my
buddy Ryan Wilson here, I'm ready to play a track
by Flat Top Riot and my buddy Gus Walters, and
it's a tune called put You in the Stars. Hope
you guys dig it. I like it. It's got a
really cool rockabilly feel to it. And yeah, hope you
(46:40):
guys dig it. Everyone be excellent to each other and
until next time, be wary of things that go bump
in the night. It could be anything a ghost, a monster,
or the guy next door.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
Costume' here he starts on the bedroom fret the way
you last.
Speaker 3 (47:22):
Cruising the air. I'll reach out to you when I
dressed off Dislie.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
You know him, you'll never be.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
I want to put you in the stars. I can
know right where you are. I'll tell everyone you're coming
back to see so please don't go too far from me.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
I'll put you in the stars. I feel your show
on the window. Things I speak to you, lock your bed.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
You'll not through rhythm of the stepstet I teach you
like that goes lost in me. Agg I wanna put
you in the stars.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
I gonna know like where you are. I'll tell everyone.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
You're coming back to see you, so please don't go
too far from me.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
I'll put you in the stars.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
I wannad you.
Speaker 3 (48:55):
With the Doctor's carriage.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
The win distance went a little wind and Okay, when
I'm feeling lost, I.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
Look me up.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
Do you know when you're staring down, I'll put you
in the stars. I don't know right where you are.
I'll tell everyone you're coming back.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
They'll see so please don't go to the fall from me.
I'll put you in the stars.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
In the stars, I don't know where you are. I'll
tell everyone you're coming back. They'll see you, so please
don't go too far from me.
Speaker 3 (49:40):
I'll put you in the stars.
Hey, campfire crew, Let's get it on, Hey gang, Enjoy
these true scary haunted house stories and stick around. At
the end, I'm sharing a piece of music for my
buddy Gus Walters. It's a flat top Riot and a
new tune called put You in the Stars. And you
may remember Gus has been in a couple of other bands.
(00:22):
I featured here two of his band's Dirty Smile and Murder,
So stick around for that. Fifteen years in a Haunted
House by Kim Can I grew up in a haunted house.
(00:48):
It was an old brick house in a historic neighborhood
nestled in the Fox River Valley, about forty five miles
outside of Chicago. We moved there when I was just five,
and it wasn't until I moved out as a young
woman that I realized just how unusual our experiences in
that house really were. The first time I remember really
being frightened by the house, I must have been about six.
(01:12):
My little sister and brother and I were still young
enough that we were all sharing a large back bedroom.
My sister and I had bunks, and my brother in
his own little bed. It was the middle of the
night and with a start I found myself wide awake.
I didn't know what woke me up, but immediately I
could sense that something wasn't right. I was on the
(01:34):
top bunk, and I was convinced that someone was standing
beside my head staring at me. I was afraid to
even breathe. I just squeezed my eyes shut and refused
to look. Suddenly there was a loud clatter of noise
in the closet. Petrified, I just lay as still as
I could, and after what felt like hours, I finally
(01:55):
fell back asleep. From that point on, I remember a
pretty steady stream of frightening incidents. For example, when I
would leave my room for a moment, I would often
come back to find my radio turned all the way up,
or the radio and the TV turned on at the
same time, or the shades on all the windows flung upwards.
(02:18):
In a few instances, when the radio turned on or
the shades would drop, I was still in the room.
My sister would often leave her room for only a
moment to return to the door locked from the inside.
And in the closet that I mentioned earlier, books were
constantly falling off the shelf, and hangers would fall off
the rod for no apparent reason. One night, I was
(02:42):
up late reading in my bed when I heard someone
pacing in the hallway. The pieces were short, like someone
was just walking back and forth in front of my
parents' room at the opposite end of the hall. Since
my mom was prone to worry, I assumed it was her,
and I climbed out of bed to go see what
was the matter. As I pulled my bedroom door open,
(03:02):
my heart froze. The hall light was on and I
could see to the end of the hall where my
parents door was shut, and the hallway was completely empty.
I quickly shut my door and returned to bed and
stubbornly resumed my reading. I help it with a pounding heart.
Most of the activity seemed to happen on the second floor,
(03:24):
where the bedrooms were. One night, our family was hanging
out in the dining room after dinner when a tremendous
bang in the bedroom above us shook the entire house.
We all cried out. It was so loud, and for
a stunned moment, we just looked at one another in shock.
My dad insisted that it must have been a sonic boom.
(03:46):
We went up stairs and found nothing amiss. I accepted
his explanation. It wasn't until I finally experienced a sonic
boom in two thousand one that I realized that that
is not what we felt that night. The only way
I can describe it is as if a very heavy
trunk or armoire had been dropped from a good height
out of the floor above our heads. After we'd been
(04:10):
in the house for several years, my mom confided in
us that when we first move in, she woke up
several times to see a woman standing at the foot
of her bed watching her. She wondered if it could
possibly be the ghost of her mother, who had died
when my mom was a kid. After talking it over
with my dad, she decided that even if it was
her mother, it was too frightening for her to handle,
(04:33):
and so the next time her visitor appeared, she told
her to leave and never come back. The woman obliged.
It's the only time my mother has ever talked about ghosts,
and since then she said she doesn't believe in them.
I do have another funny story about that, but I'll
save it for another time. I most often experienced things
(04:54):
in bed, and often I would be sleeping and suddenly
find myself rudely awoken by some unseen force hitting the
bed to the right out of the left of my feet.
Sometimes it was a gentle push to the mattress, but
other times it was like a fist or heavy book
hitting the bed. Sometimes it felt like an animal jumping
into bed, and I would reach down, thinking it was
(05:16):
one of our cats, only to find that I was
alone in bed. The summer after my freshman year in
college was the worst. I would wake up to the
very jarring sensation of my entire bed hitting the floor,
as if it had been lifted up just a tiny bit,
and then drop down. It was also during that summer
(05:38):
break that I saw something I will never forget. It
was a sunny morning and I was in bed slowly
coming around when I heard whispering in my bedroom. I
opened my eyes to see who was in my room,
and standing directly beside my bed and looking down at
me were two distinct shapes, an adult and a child.
(06:01):
I was squinting up at them because sunlight was pouring
in the window to the right of my bed. But
the strange thing was that, even though they were standing
opposite the window, they were completely dark and featureless, like silhouettes.
Startled and confused, I started to push myself up out
of bed and said what and at that moment they vanished.
(06:25):
That was the only time that I ever saw anything
that might have been a ghost in that house. But
my brother was not so lucky. As a teenager, he
saw a group of hooded figures on our front porch,
hovering lights in his bedroom, and my sister experienced that
as well. He also saw a bizarre animal looking creature
in the living room and eventually started receiving verbal taunts
(06:48):
and threats from some demon in his own bedroom. While
whatever was in the house threatening my brother overtly, it
was a little slier with my sister and I. On
several occasions, we both woke up to find chunks of
our hair missing, and it was as if someone had
snuck into our rooms while we slept, and with choppy,
(07:08):
imprecise strokes, cut our hair less than an inch from
our faces. At first, we suspected our little brother, I mean,
that was the less frightening option, but he vehemently denied it,
even tearfully, until we finally accepted that there had to
be another explanation. Another incident was the axe One morning
(07:32):
when I was a senior in high school, we came
down for breakfast, and sitting in the middle of our
beautiful antique dining room table was an axe and had
not been there the night before, and there was no
reason for it to be there then. In fact, I
didn't even remember having ever seen it before. We didn't
have a fireplace, we lived in suburbia, and my dad
(07:52):
was not exactly mister handyman. Everyone denied having put it there,
and so it sat in the dining room for several
days until someone finally had the good sense to put
it out in the garage. The axe was something that
seemed to appear out of nowhere. Not some things would
simply disappear and then reappear. I once had a whole
(08:14):
week's wages disappear out of a coat pocket, only to
have the full amount reappear in the same coat pocket,
which had been thoroughly searched by me, my mom, and
my sister, and by the way, the money showed up
in that pocket two weeks later. My sister had a
similar incident with her keys and other things around the
(08:36):
house would just be rearranged. When my sister and her
husband were still dating, he lived for a while in
my parents house in my old room. One day he
asked my mom who had been coming into his room
and moving things around, and my mom was shocked. No one,
she insisted. She told him that we respected his privacy
and would never go into his room, and at the time,
(09:00):
she and my dad were the only other people living
in the house. He then explained that almost every night
when he came home, he would find the objects on
his headboard shelf rearranged. He would write them, but the
next day they'd be moved around again. He said that
the object that was moved the most was a framed
(09:21):
picture of my sister, and would often be faced down
or turned around. Completely Mystified and exasperated by the events
in the house, my brother and I tried to research
its history but found nothing significant. However, my parents, who
were always skeptical of the idea that the house was haunted,
came home from a visit to a neighborhood pub one
(09:43):
night with the interesting news that they had run into
a young man whose parents had rented the second floor
of the house before we'd bought it. He had asked
them how they liked living in a haunted house. I
wish I knew what his experiences in the house were,
but I think I can get alarmingly. Things seemed to
(10:04):
get worse the older we got. After the summer, with
the whispering silhouettes and the dropping bed, I decided I'd
had enough. When I went back to school that fall,
I really worked on my prayer life. I mean I
prayed constantly, and when I got home the following summer,
I felt confident and less afraid than I had ever been.
(10:25):
I made it a habit whenever I got home of
sitting down on the front stoop, laying my hands on
the steps, and praying for our house and our family,
I would pray in the house as well. Whenever I
felt watched or uneasy, I posted my favorite Bible verses
in my bedroom where I could see them, and prayed
out loud with my family members. This was new behavior
(10:47):
in our household, and at times I was embarrassed to
do it, but I'd tell you the truth, and it
worked for me. I had a series of very frightening dreams,
and that after that things seemed to really calm down.
My parents owned that house for several more years, but
I never felt helpless or danger in there ever again
(11:08):
after my prayer thirty three point fifty three Sexton Drive,
A haunting by Pretty Nobody. I lived here from November
nineteen ninety four to June nineteen ninety nine with my mom, dad, brother,
(11:30):
and sister. We moved from the neighboring city of Merced
and into the small town of Snelling, California. I'm the oldest,
so I have the most memory of this house and
the happening surrounding it. I included the address and the
title of the story to hopefully connect with anyone who
lived in this house before or after I did. We
(11:51):
moved in when I was four, so I don't remember
if it was a new build and we were the
first occupants, but it could have been due to the
rest of the street having multiple vacant lots while we
lived there that were built on during our time there.
We moved in and I had the middle room on
the front of the house. There's a hallway connecting the
master bedroom at the back to the living room by
(12:11):
way of the guest bathroom and the two smaller bedrooms.
While we lived there, we had hanging slat style blinds
that covered the patio, sliding glass doors and there was
a fruitless pear tree planted by my dad where the
driveway extension is currently. I'm including all of this to
hopefully verify my truth to anyone that knows about this house,
(12:32):
so they're assured that it's a real story and I'm
actually who I say I am. Now the story. Shortly
after we moved in and got settled, I started to
be woken up in the middle of the night, seemingly
at random. I was young and had an infant little
brother in the next room, so it could be explained
away that he was waking me up, and at least
(12:53):
that's what my parents told me at the time. Later on,
my sister was born in ninety six and she was
in the other room, and my brother and I shared
my room with a bunk bed. That was when I
started retaining my memories. I would wake up at night
feeling like my feet were being tickled, and nobody would
be around. When my mom asked me why I was
(13:15):
wearing socks to bed, I told her so the tickle
monster doesn't get me. She asked me what that was,
and I explained to her what was happening, but she
just told me it was her tucking me in for
the night, and I shouldn't be afraid. Even then, I
knew that was not the answer, as when I would
wake up, the house was silent, and she and my
(13:37):
dad would regularly have around thirty minutes of conversation before
falling asleep that I could hear. I stayed up one
night to see if it was them, and they went
to bed like normal. I fell asleep and then got
woken up like normal by the tickle monster. If I
wore socks, then it wouldn't happen. Around that time, the
(14:00):
movie A Bugs Life came out and my grandma bought
my brother and I two motion activated characters from the movie.
They would sense movement and say some lines from the movie,
and they were constantly going off, even when we put
them in the closet or toy chest that was built
into the bay window. No matter where they went, they
still activated. I think we all just thought it was
(14:23):
shoddy nineties electronics, but knowing more, it may have been
another layer to this haunting. We moved out in the
summer of ninety nine and I tested my sock theory
the first night at the new house, and nothing happened
to me. Nothing happened to me. Ever, again like my
Tickle Monster events. Later in life, I would come back
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to California to visit my family and we would talk
about my childhood. I would talk about the shenanigans I
got up to while my parents weren't looking, and my
mom would be shocked that we were up to so
many random things without her knowing. We got out of
the the topic of the Atwater house and that reminded
her about the tickle Monster, and she said it was
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funny that I mentioned that. She told me that everyone
that visited our house would comment that there seemed to
be something off about it. If you sat on the couch,
you could see the hallway out of your periphery, and
multiple people said that they had to constantly look down
the hall because it looked like someone was standing there,
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but when they turned there was nothing and nobody. They
swore though there was a shadow or presence. My parents
wouldn't prompt this conversation. It was always brought up by
other people. They too had the same experience, but didn't
want to tell anyone for fear of being deemed crazy.
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Those hanging slats I mentioned would move and clink together
seemingly on their own all the time, no windows open,
no AC or heat on, no doors opening or closing.
They would move like in the breeze of someone walking past.
And we got a dog at one point, a docson
that was blind and mostly deaf from birth. We only
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found out after we adopted her, so we just dealt
with her the best we could. It was normal for
the outside cats to mess with her and make a noise,
just to move away and watch her take off barking
in their direction. But she would also just go crazy
barking inside a lot. I'm not sure what to make
of that, but lots of people say animals can sense stuff.
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My mom went on to stay friends with a woman
that lived down the street named Wendy b if I
remember correctly. Wendy said that the people that had moved
in after us were talking about having strange things happened
in the house like we had. My mom said that
she started by asking if we ever had strange things
happen to us, and then explained what the new owners
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were saying. It all seemed so real to me, but
I was young and impressionable. My parents corroborating was the
biggest reassurance In all of this. I'm not sure what
that exactly was, and I still don't know if I
believe in ghosts, But maybe someone can offer their own
story about this house, or even an explanation growing up
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in a haunted house By Joyful. I've had some odd
experiences in my life, but it really all started when
I was nine years old and my mother's sisters and
I had just moved into a new house. My parents
had divorced a few years earlier, and we had been
renting places to live until my mom could afford a
home of her own. I went to look at the
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house with my family before my mom bought it, and
a young family lived there who were hunters. They had
a lot of stuffed animals hanging on the walls, which
I thought was rather grotesque. Before we moved in, my
mom and aunt painted the kitchen in a true pious
color of yellow and did some basic touch ups around
the place to make it cozy. It was and is
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a split level home with three bedrooms upstairs and a
partially finished basement. From the first night, it was a
pretty active place. Footsteps in the hallway, a weird continuous
sound at night, like a pencil rolling on a table.
I often felt watched, particularly from the left hand upper
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corner of my bedroom, and the longer we stayed there,
the more obvious or active whatever was there became. I
would hear someone calling my name at night while I
was trying to sleep. Things began to fall off the
walls for no apparent reason. There was knocking on the walls.
I mean that kind of thing. I would relate my
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feelings and experiences to my mother and sisters, who would
either laugh or try to convince me about my overactive imagination.
I did have a pretty vivid imagination back then, but
these things were different. Things really picked up when we
got a dog. She would suddenly in the middle of
the day start to whine, shiver, and try to hide.
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As that continued, I realized it was a sign that
something was about to happen, like the TV switching off
or the banging on the walls. One time, our dog
freaked out while we were all sitting in the living
room watching TV one winter evening as it was snowing.
We were watching Dallas for all of you who are
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old enough to remember that show. As we watched, the
dog cowered with fear as our front doors open, first
the outer screen door, then the heavier inner door, and
it sounded like someone had come in. We all sat
there looking at each other, sort of stunned, and I
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should mention none of us saw the doors open. Being
a by level, the door was down a flight of stairs.
My mom wasn't checked, but no one was there. It
was all so off, and slowly we figured out why
you had to go through a gate to get to
our door, and at the sound of the gate, our
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dog would bark. No gate, no barking, no person, no
footprints in the snow. I realized that may seem kind
of cliche, but that's what happened. I never wanted to
tell any one what was going on in our house,
but one day I confessed to a friend who lived
on the block before we moved in, told them all
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about the strange house. She told me she never wanted
to go to my house because someone had killed themselves
in it before we moved in. Apparently, the mother and
wife whom I had met had her brother living there
and he shot himself in their kitchen. It explained why
my mom could afford a new house in a nice neighborhood,
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and it also explained why she and my aunt had
used that all full shade of yellow. It was to
cover the stains. When I asked my mother about it,
she confirmed the death, but reassured me there was nothing
to fear, and I was just imagining things. I mean,
many other things did happen, but the last and strongest
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event was one evening when I was well into my
teenage years and both my older sisters had moved out.
I had graduated into my sister's older room that had
been built in the basement. It had that kind of
partition hanging ceiling thing, the kind with rectangles sitting in
a grid. I don't know what it's called, but I'm
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sure you can picture it if the window was open
and a breeze blew and the ceiling would make a
wishing noise as the tiles lifted, or if the door
was opened quickly. Anyway, a friend and I were sitting
in my room chatting late one night, when all of
a sudden we heard footsteps coming down the stairs. If
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it was my mum coming to tell us to go
to bed, we would have heard leaving her room, but
these footsteps had just started at the top of the steps.
Couldn't explain it, but what happened was just as electric.
My dog started to whine and cower under the blankets.
We heard the steps come across the basement floor towards
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my door, and without the window being opened or the
door opening whosh, the tiles lifted as though someone had
just come in the room. The entire time, as the
dog was freaking out, my friend and I just locked
eyes and all the hairs on my body stood up.
I couldn't explain the feeling, but it felt electric and very,
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very primal like. My physical response was animal like. Everything
just seemed to stop, and we roared out of there,
ran upstairs, and didn't go back down for the rest
of the night. Years later, after I was an adult
and we hadn't lived there for years, my mother confessed
to me that she knew that the house was active.
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She woke up one night with the intense feeling of
someone staring at her and saw a light human shape
form move quickly back and disappear through a wall. She
also explained the dreadful color choice in the kitchen. My
sisters never experienced anything, but they now believe me when
I tell them about it. Another story, I just remembered
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was a night a friend stayed over and ping pong
balls were rolling across the floor for no apparent reason
in the middle of the night. Me, needless to say,
not too many sleepovers after that. The kids at school
were scared of my house. After all these things and
other similar experiences throughout my life, have come to believe
that some of the occurrences were poltergeist activity due to
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all the female energy and some personal upsets, as you
can well imagine with a single mother and three daughters. However,
or other things are totally unexplainable and more of a
supernatural nature, and I think that the longer we were there,
the more the activity gradually became hostile and very negative.
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I can happily say that my current home of more
than six years is very peaceful, and I haven't known
this kind of stillness anywhere I've ever lived. The house
on North Street by Lost Voyage eleven. The following is
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a story I've been waiting to tell for years. It
centers around a home that was in my family for years,
and the experiences encountered there occurred over the years to
many different family members. I'll do my best to relay
the events as best I remember them, and as chronologically
as I can too. The home was purchased by my
(24:58):
great aunt in nineteen forty six and hosted a sort
of extended family there. In addition to my great aunt,
my grandparents on my father's side, my dad and his siblings,
and assorted cousins lived there on and off over time.
There was a cluttered front porch that opened up into
a dining room. The right back corner of the dining
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room would contain the entrance to the one bathroom in
the house. There were two doors that opened off the
dining room, one leading into the kitchen and another into
a middle living room, and there were actually two small
living areas leading toward the front of the house. The
kitchen had an enclosed back porch that accessed the back yard,
and the kitchen also had an enclosed staircase, complete with
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a door that led to the second story. The upstairs
had a unique layout. The stairs led into a short
hallway that opened into a large open area that was
used for sleeping. At the opposite side of this room,
and parallel to the small hall, was another hallway. The
first room off that hall overlooked the front porch and
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street and was the only one that wasn't wired for electricity.
The hall led to an attic and off the back
of the house three different bedrooms which all linked together.
To get to the third bedroom, which was my great aunt's,
you would have to walk through the other two. It
wasn't really designed for privacy apparently. I'm not sure when
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the events actually started, but some of the neighborhood children
playing alone upstairs would come downstairs confused, wanting to know
who the woman was that was standing at the other
end of the upstairs hall. They were certain that all
the adults were downstairs, and my great aunt would go
upstairs and look around, and of course no one would
be up there. There was only one set of stairs,
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and they were in the kitchen, as I mentioned, and
that's where my grandparents would camp out most of the day.
It was a small town and many parents would just
kind of watch the neighbor's children by unspoken mutual consent.
No one thought of kids wandering in and out or
remaining unattended in the house if their playmates, mostly cousins,
would wander off. But things got stranger from there. One morning,
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every one was ready to leave for a fishing trip,
and only my great aunt and another aunt were going
to stay behind. My aunt went upstairs to be sure
the beds had been made, and in one of the
rooms some one was apparently asleep, huddled under the blankets.
When my aunt went downstairs, she mentioned it to my
other aunt that some one stayed behind, to which great
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aunt replied she had just seen every one off, and
it was every one who was in the house. She
knew every one had left. This alarmed my aunt, who
went upstairs and saw the bed was now empty, but
the sheets were rumpled, as if some one had just
been in it. My great aunt had been downstairs and
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had seen no one come out of the stairway while
my other aunt was up there. The bed thing seemed
to be a recurring issue, and many times after all
the beds had been made, later on in the day,
they were found messed up again with only one other
person in the house. My relatives were sure it wasn't
the kids wandering in and out, because the kids always
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announced their presence and they could be heard wherever they
were playing. This thing with the beds had also happened
while all the kids were in school, too. The sightings
continued one day, one of my cousins wanted to know
who the woman upstairs was who had gone into the attic.
Of course, another search found no one up there. One
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cousin stated that she had been pushed downstairs, but most
of my family said she was kind of clumsy, so
they just wrote that one off too. One of the
cousins staying there had gone downstairs to get a drink
of water, but as he entered the stairwell he saw
a woman standing at the bottom of the stairs. He
didn't recognize her, but when she started to fly load
(29:00):
up the stairs towards him, that's when I put an
end to his desire for a drink, and he fled
back to his room. My great aunt would be woken
up many nights to find a woman rummaging through her
trunk at the end of her bed. This unidentified woman
would finally look up at my aunt and then fade away,
and footsteps could be heard on the stairs at night,
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too many to be discounted as the house settling. On
many nights, my aunt would come down in the middle
of the night and hear the sound of dishes being
washed or the floor being swept. At first, she was
very confused, but didn't question it too much, just went
back upstairs. But the next morning the floor was still
dirty and there were dirty dishes still sitting in the sink.
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Many people had this kind of encounter over the years,
and to my knowledge, no one actually investigated while the
noises had been heard. I finally heard years later from
different family members that while they were having these experiences,
they rarely spoke about them for fear of being ridiculed,
and some just flat out refused to believe it was
happening at all. Finally, one day, my dad, when he
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was a teenager, was upstairs getting something from under his bed.
His bed was in the big open area upstairs. When
he turned around, she was right there. It was the
closest of the encounters that had occurred to my knowledge
my great aunt and grandparents. His parents had been sitting
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at the kitchen table when he came downstairs, apparently white
as a sheet. He talked about it then, but was
clammed up about it over the years. He described a
woman as wearing a purple dress, old fashioned, maybe like
something from the twenties or thirties. He said that she
also wore a cameo pen, but what scared him so
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bad was that she had no face, just a dark
spot where her face should have been. Prior to that,
most people had only seen her in the dark, but
my dad saw this in broad daylight. I had heard
the story from my grandmother and was fascinated, and I
asked my dad about it, but he got kind of
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short with me and said it was so long ago
he couldn't really remember. My uncle Pete, who was dating
my youngest aunt, had some interesting encounters as well. One night,
while he and my aunt were snoozing on the couch downstairs,
he felt someone tap him on the shoulder and trying
to wake him up, whispering his name. He came to
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and saw only my aunt near him, sleeping soundly, But
he caught the movement of someone moving up the stairs,
and he knew full well that they were alone, and
so leaving my aunt, he pursued this intruder upstairs. He
saw someone at the end of the hall go into
one of the bedrooms, but when he went into it
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turned the lights on, no one was there. As he
turned around, he saw this person go into another room
further down the hall, and when he got to that room,
no one was there. Either. This game went on for
some time before he finally gave up, and another night
he came to the house drunk, and though his memory
isn't the best, he thought my aunt, his future wife,
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had thrown him out in the snow. In the morning,
my aunt told him that she had stayed in her
room the whole night and no one else had been
at home at the time. My uncle swears there was
a stern, angry sounding woman who tossed him out in
a snow bank. I mean, no one admitted to doing
this incident, and my aunt says she didn't really know
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what happened at all. In the eighties, my great aunt
leased the house to my aunt, my dad's sister, to
have for her growing family while she moved into an apartment.
One night, my aunt woke up to see someone standing
over her, and she screamed and turned the light on,
but as usual, no one was there. My cousin claimed
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someone grabbed him one night while he was upstairs in
the dark, and both of my cousins stated that on
more than one occasion they had seen a man lying
on the floor upstairs, and when they attempted to approach him,
he just got up and went into another room and
then lay back down. My aunt and uncle began to
remodel the place and knocked out the walls to the
(33:24):
downstairs rooms, including the kitchen, as well as moving the
stairs from the back of the house in the kitchen
to the front in the living room. They were making
the hole downstairs one huge open area, and in doing
so they found what appeared to be the bones of
a hand, which they assumed to be a monkey's paw.
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They threw whatever it was out and didn't have them
analyzed or notified any one of what they had found.
My other uncle had told me that he had knocked
a hole in the wall in the bedroom upstairs without electricity,
and had also found a mummified hand there. He too,
tossed it without telling anyone. I mean, God knows why
they did that. I mean, this same uncle once entered
(34:08):
my great aunt's bedroom while she was still staying there
and saw a woman standing near the trunk, and she
appeared to be looking for something inside it, but then
promptly disappeared upon being discovered. The footsteps on the stairs
stopped and eventually resumed. I guess moving the stairs must
have confused the ghost for a little while. At least
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most of this time, I remained unaware of what had
happened at the house. My parents would take us over
a lot when we were younger to play, as it
seemed to be a popular family hangout, so many people
were always staying there, and this was in the early
to mid eighties. I did spend the night more than once,
and I know my brother and cousin and I slept
on the fold out couch in the big living room
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the night before we went to Arizona for her vacation.
I didn't even start hearing the stories about the place
until my aunt uncle got ready to move and we
were going to rent the place out. I do remember
the bathroom gave me the creeps, as when I was
at the toilet, I always fell watched from the area
of the bathtub, but there was never anyone there. One time,
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my brother and I had been asked by my aunt
and uncle to watch their dogs while they went away
on vacation, and as we approached the house, I felt
like we were being watched from the window of the
upstairs bedroom, the one without electricity. We only found the
dog up there, lying on the bed in that room. Again,
this was before I knew it was haunted. We found
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one of the dogs had gotten off his chain, so
while my brother was out looking for him, I remained
behind in the living room. I had that feeling of
being watched again from the area of the kitchen this time,
and I kept turning around to see who was there. Then,
as I went back to watching TV, I felt a
brush of air behind me, like someone walking right behind me,
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going all the way towards the stairs. I shrugged it
off as my imagination. I found out later this was
a common experience for a lot of other people. My
brother told me years later that the night we camped
out in the living room and he was walking to
the feeling of someone shaking the bed. He opened his
eyes to a rather stern looking man standing at the
(36:22):
end of his bed, and he was wearing a white
shirt and brown slacks, and he straightened up when my
brother saw him and turned around and walked into the kitchen.
There was some light from the light over the kitchen sink,
and he whispered to my cousin, asking him if he
was seeing this. My cousin calmly replied, anah, that happens
all the time, like it was a common occurrence. I
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was there but a sleep sandwich between the two of them.
My brother watched this man start to walk straight up
into the open air right where the stairs used to be.
My brother told me that later that night I got
up to go to the bathroom and that I ran
into the infamous lady in the purple dress. Apparently it
(37:07):
scared me. But I don't remember a thing. I mean,
I do remember that night, but not meeting anyone in
the hallway. My aunt and uncle moved out around nineteen ninety,
and they rented the place out and then they sold it.
I heard that the new owners had admitted to some
strange goings on, but never elaborated. But I've been fascinated
(37:29):
with the place ever since. I know almost every family reunion,
someone inevitably comes forward with another story about the place.
It seemed many of them had kept it under wraps
until others came forward, and then the floodgates opened up,
so to speak. On the various experiences, as far as
my own experiences, they were mild, at least the ones
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I remember. I can't say whether what my brother said
happened with me seeing a ghost or not really happened
as I don't remember it, but I do know some
of my memories of my time there seemed to be missing.
And there are other issues in my childhood dealing with
anxiety starting at that time with no real determinable cause.
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I can say for sure that for years my dreams
were haunted about that house. I'd be alone there, and
I knew that she was there waiting for me. The
upstairs was her domain. I knew that when something traumatic
happened to any of us, if it was bad enough,
our minds can block it out. And again this is conjecture.
I have no real proof, but I do think there
(38:33):
is something to that. But I did try to search
for answers. The library records held no help, and even
my cousin, who became one of the regular contributors to
the historical Society of that town, couldn't find anything. I
know it was built in eighteen ninety five. A contacted
the county historian, who at the time was writing a
book about unsolved murders in the area I grew up in.
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I figured she'd be interested, and she researched what she
con could and informed me that the house had been
owned in the early nineteen hundreds by a wealthier individual
who had rented it out. She came up with a
list of names of women whom she could trace to
living there in an attempt to find out who this
mysterious purple woman was. She found out, though, that they
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had all moved out and died in other places, and
she couldn't come up with anything ever happening in that house.
She surmised that in those early days, if a murderer
anything like that had taken place, it might have been
covered up, as the wealthier owner certainly wouldn't want his
name associated with such a scandal. The look of the
woman's dress had been of the nineteen twenties or thirties,
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and it was harder to trace the identity of the
various renters in those early years. I even consulted a
psychic who told me that a woman had drowned her
children in a bathtub, and if someone dug under the
house they would find something. If that is in any
way true, no wonder. I got such creepy feelings from
the bathroom through and there is a crawl space at
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the front of the house that is accessible from there.
As kids, we played right near there, and it had
kind of a weird feeling to it. In fact, we
played a game called which in the cellar. Ironically enough,
at that spot the neighbors claimed their house was haunted too,
and the kid who lived there and someone I went
to school with claimed to see a fishing pole levitate
(40:24):
on its own in his own home more than once.
The house changed hands once or twice since then, and
had actually fallen into disrepair and been reclaimed by the bank.
It's privately owned now, and even though I still visit
the area and drive by once in a while, I
haven't actually tried to speak with anyone living there to
see if they've never noticed anything. As I mentioned, I
(40:48):
stayed there a lot as a kid, but never found
out about the hauntings until I was a teen. While
staying with my grandparents, I was privileged to listen in
as they retold these old stories and her own experiences.
My grandmother and great aunt would talk about it openly,
though they never did admit whether they believed it or not.
(41:08):
My grandpa would listen but would dismiss the stories as nonsense. Afterwards,
I became fascinated and visited the actual house again once
or twice, just prior to my aunt and her family
moving out and renting the place. It's been a long
time since I've been back there, that that house will
always fascinate me. Heart shaped balloon submitted by Molly s
(41:42):
hey Gang. Before I read this one, I know that
this is not following the theme of true scary haunted
house stories, but Molly just sent this in and I thought, Hey,
I'm going to add it to this one no matter what,
because it is a pretty cool story a little bit creepy.
It was Super Bowl Sunday, twenty eive. I remember not
(42:02):
because I watched the game, but rather because I didn't.
My son was a newborn, just over a month old.
My husband was over at his buddy's house for the
day enjoying the game, so it was just me and
my little man. I decided we'd have a movie night,
so we went up to Family Video and rented some
movies and I brought myself some dots. Remember it was
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twenty eleven and we lived in a very rural area.
On the way home, my son fell asleep in his
car seat, so I managed to sneak us back into
our little home and set him by the couch next
to me. I set the DVDs down and just put
some TV show on for now, hoping I would get
a little nap in while he was snoozing. However, some
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ghost Hunters show was on and I was immediately sucked in. Now,
for some context, our home that we lived in at
the time was a relocated train depot well over one
hundred years old. It was small but still had plenty
of dark corners. The darkest room was probably the one
next to the bathroom, which was a storage room more
(43:05):
or less, and at that moment in time, that room
was still holding things from our baby shower clothes our
son would grow into toys, diapers, and some cute helium
balloons that were holding strong. But anyhow, on this particular
February day, it was overcast and even a bit spooky.
Late afternoon shadows prowled about as I hadn't turned on
(43:26):
any lights yet, and I began to question my choice
of shows and wondered why on earth I was watching
that while home with just my sleeping newborn. As a
woman of faith, I wasn't one to allow myself to
get too creeped out, but for some reason the show
was getting to me that day. I raised the remote
ready to change the channel, and at the same time
(43:47):
the ghost hunter said, can you give us a sign
you're here? The hair on my arms raised, and right
on cue, out of my peripheral vision I saw movement,
heart pounding. I braced myself and looked over. Floating from
the storage room was the heart shaped helium balloon I
(44:10):
liked so much from the baby shower. Now there was
one room between the balloon and me. It bounced gently
into the dining room, then continued on its way. It
took its time coming over, but as this ghost hunter spoke,
that balloon slowly made its way, not malevolently, almost happily
(44:32):
towards us. And that's not the most bizarre part, though,
not even close the heart balloon that never once moved
since we had placed it in that room in November.
It danced slowly but merrily through our dining room, coming
closer and closer until it finally stopped right above my
sleeping son's head. Well, at this point you're probably thinking,
(44:56):
big deal. The heat kicked on, so the balloon moved.
That's all good and all, But that balloon had been
in the exact same spot since the end of November.
There were no events by it to this day. I'm
not sure who was saying hi, but I believe someone
either in our family or the house found the balloon
(45:17):
to send their love to our son. The unnerving part
is not knowing who, and it was definitely scary at
the time, but I got the feeling no harm was
meant and nothing like that ever happened again. We live
in a different house now, just up the road. I
can't explain what happened with that balloon, and I try
(45:38):
not to think about it too much. Hey, Gang, thanks
for listening to this episode. If you have a true
(45:58):
scary story of any you'd like me to narrate, send
it to Uncle Josh True Scary Stories at gmail dot com.
I read them all. If you'd like to take your
support of this channel, step further, find the link to
my Patreon page and the description and pick up some
Uncle Josh and Campfire Crew merchandise. A link to my
(46:19):
tea public storefront is down there as well. And without
further ado, while we're listening to the music of my
buddy Ryan Wilson here, I'm ready to play a track
by Flat Top Riot and my buddy Gus Walters, and
it's a tune called put You in the Stars. Hope
you guys dig it. I like it. It's got a
really cool rockabilly feel to it. And yeah, hope you
(46:40):
guys dig it. Everyone be excellent to each other and
until next time, be wary of things that go bump
in the night. It could be anything a ghost, a monster,
or the guy next door.
Speaker 2 (47:18):
Costume' here he starts on the bedroom fret the way
you last.
Speaker 3 (47:22):
Cruising the air. I'll reach out to you when I
dressed off Dislie.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
You know him, you'll never be.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
I want to put you in the stars. I can
know right where you are. I'll tell everyone you're coming
back to see so please don't go too far from me.
Speaker 3 (47:47):
I'll put you in the stars. I feel your show
on the window. Things I speak to you, lock your bed.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
You'll not through rhythm of the stepstet I teach you
like that goes lost in me. Agg I wanna put
you in the stars.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
I gonna know like where you are. I'll tell everyone.
Speaker 2 (48:17):
You're coming back to see you, so please don't go
too far from me.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
I'll put you in the stars.
Speaker 2 (48:54):
I wannad you.
Speaker 3 (48:55):
With the Doctor's carriage.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
The win distance went a little wind and Okay, when
I'm feeling lost, I.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
Look me up.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
Do you know when you're staring down, I'll put you
in the stars. I don't know right where you are.
I'll tell everyone you're coming back.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
They'll see so please don't go to the fall from me.
I'll put you in the stars.
Speaker 2 (49:26):
In the stars, I don't know where you are. I'll
tell everyone you're coming back. They'll see you, so please
don't go too far from me.
Speaker 3 (49:40):
I'll put you in the stars.
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