Real life ghost stories...

[Betrisher]

re: REAL LIFE GHOST STORIES...

It is All Hallows' Eve: a night on which the dark spirits walk freely among men and wreak havoc in the quiet, peaceful places. Such a spirit walked in my home this night and rendered it no longer quiet, peaceful, safe...

To begin with, everyone was absorbed in the usual evening pursuits of The Brownhouse. Kim was watching a B-grade movie with not the slightest indication that his brain was indeed registering what he saw. Matt was playing computer games in the silence of his room. Ellie was doing something arcane in that cesspit she calls a bedroom and I was simply readjusting the burgeoning peasant populations in my many online game's villages. All of us were busy; all were lost in what we were doing.

Abruptly, I realised the sun was going down. Checking my system clock, I saw it was nearly seven thirty and the animals had yet to be fed by the spellbindingly busy Eleanor. I bellowed in a sotto voce sort of a soft voice, 'Ellie! The animals are starving! Come and feed them please!' and I continued deleting peasants from my overcrowded villages.

Accordingly, Eleanor came a-flollopping out of her room and gaily began to feed Roxanne. Next, she went to open a can of cat-food, but Matt forestalled her, saying 'I've already fed everyone, Ell. Put that in the fridge till tomorrow, eh?' and Ellie did. She's a good girl, really.

Are you clever enough to have realised the seemingly insignificant factoid upon which this tale depends? We'll see...

Time passed. Peasants passed away. Time passed. It became midnight and I felt I could do with some beauty sleep. Just as I was about to arise from my chair and retire, a howl went up and it seems that Roxanne had had an accident in my sewing room! Right in the middle of the carpet! Owing to the air-con being on, some naughty sprite had shut the back door and poor Rox had had to relieve herself.

Was it a poltergeist? A boggart? A pixie? Who can say? Poor Matthew, in his capacity as Chief Sanitary Engineer, got to remove the evidence and render the room habitable again. Bless his lovely soul!

We all sat down and resumed activities after the excitement. No one realised, of course, that poor little Rox had retreated to my bedroom in the height of her embarrassment. No one realised the door had spontaneously shut on her as she went in. She had lain down in her rightful spot upon my bed and brought up approximately 850 grams of the excellent quality dog-food she had been fed. In my bed.

I, of course, had no way of knowing this. All I knew was that when I finally did retire to my room, Roxie met me at the doorway, looking entirely sheepish and shot out oddly speedily to speak to the rest of the family.

'Now that's unusual', I thought, 'Rox usually hops in bed when I do...'

Oh well. I had my turn on Bookworm (waves at friend, Margaret) and kicked my feet up on the bed preparatory to listening to an audiobook before sleep. That's when I put my foot in the dog-vomit: 850 grams thereof, situated amidships and with the vomit-juice quickly filtering through to my darling, darling mattress who loves me (and I love her)!

This is how it came to pass that I was roaming about in the backyard at one o'clock in the morning, hosing 850 grams of dog-vomit off of my doona and sheets. My dear Hunn is, I hope, dealing with my darling, darling mattress, whom I love (and she loves me).

A dark spirit has indeed visited itself upon me and mine this night. Beware! Heed my warning! Closing the doors will not keep them out: look what happened to me!

PS. The seemingly insignificant factoid is that poor little Rox got fed twice and her poor little tummy revolted. I think she feels better now. I hope so!

 

[RavensGryf]

re: REAL LIFE GHOST STORIES...

Trish thank you for the lovely Halloween story !

I sure hope poor Roxanne feels better now, and your bed is clean once again!

 

[Allee]

re: REAL LIFE GHOST STORIES...

Ah no! Poor Roxy and poor mattress, not to mention, poor you and your human family, Trish. Thanks for the Halloween treat, love your stories.

 

[Agapornis]

re: REAL LIFE GHOST STORIES...

OK this is probably the scariest thing that ever happened to me, and I swear is totally true. Over 20 years ago, when I first got married, I was sleeping alone. Hubby is a firefighter and frequently gone. So i'm lying in bed sleeping, and i suddenly hear the floor creak outside my bedroom door. I instantly wake up, in total fear, not being able to move or speak! it felt like i was paralyzed. So I'm REALLY scared, and hear slow, tentative footsteps at the foot of the bed, yet I can't move or anything! I can open my eyes just a little, and i see a dark form, stepping slowly, floor creaking...now here is where is REALLY gets freaky: suddenly I feel the form kneel on the bed, I hear the mattress make a sound, and feel someone kneeling behind me (i was on my side, huddled under the blankets) THEN...just when I am about to have a heart attack from fear, the "person" or whatever the hell it was PUNCHES ME ON THE BACK! like one quick "BAM!" Somehow that was enough to shock me out of my frozen paralysis, and i scream and jump up, turn on the light, and there's nothing there. I run to the bathroom to look at my back in the mirror, and there is a light red mark. I turned on all the lights and ran back to bed, hiding under the covers. To this day, I can still feel that fist hitting my back...I have no idea what it was, but the sense I got from it was something dark and evil. Whew, I have never written that out, i'm exhausted!

 

[andrea.b]

re: REAL LIFE GHOST STORIES...

Hi Guys! Personally, I didn't really believe in ghosts however after reading these stories my certainty is definitely wavering! My story really isn't very scary but its one of the only times I felt like I had experience something "paranormal."

It happened when I was about five. I know one could argue that it was just my imagination, but to this day nearly 15 years later I still can see the vivid image of what I saw and occasionally on similar nights I feel the same feeling I felt that night.
lol.. that's a lot of build up for a pretty lame story but here goes!

When I was around 5 years old we had some family friends from South Africa who often came to visit us. They consisted of two parents and two boys who happened to be just a little bit older than my sister who is four years older than me. So I was always the baby of the group, and often the one who got left behind.

One year, they came in the winter and we decided to have them up to our cottage so they could experience the real Canadian winter (not the brown snow Toronto winter)! My cottage is located on an isolated lake surrounded by forest. In the winter I think we get around 2 or 3 feet of snow.

One night around 10pm the boys wanted to go out for a "midnight toboggan" so we all went out. By that time it was quite dark outside, there's very few lights at the cottage, besides the stars and the distant light from my cottage. The drive way at my cottage is a long, curved, steep hill perfect for tobogganing but a pain in the butt to walk up, literally.

We all trudged up the hill, sleds in toe and me quickly falling behind the older kids. Finally I got to the top and was greeted by all three kids standing silently at the top of the drive way. They were still except for their heavy breathing from the climb. The top of the hill was very dark, you could barely see the trees across the road. Once they caught their breath, the silence began to close in on my ears. The snow has this effect of absorbing all the sounds in the forest, leaving an empty, eerie feeling. The only sounds I could hear were the creaking of frozen branches and the occasional deep "blub" from the ice on the lake (I don't know if you guys know what I mean by that sound..).

I got the weirdest feeling standing there silently, I was overwhelmed with the dark, crisp, lonely night. I was chilled all the way to my heart. Just then the older boy started laughing and said "lets go back" and turned to run down the drive way. Everyone else followed, pushing and shoving to not be left behind.

It took me a little longer to get going because I was still catching my breath from the walk up. As I turned to run away, something caught my eye. The black silhouette of a very tall, thin person in the darkness stepped out from behind one of the parked cars. Its limbs were slender and smooth though, as if it wasn't wearing cloths (I know that's super weird.. lol sorry).

At that point I booked it down the drive way, stumbling because I kept sinking thigh-deep snow. When I reached the other kids who were on their way into the cottage they were terrified but no one mentioned seeing anything. We all pushed our way into the cottage, lungs burning.

I can't remember if I told anyone what I saw. If I did, I'm sure they didn't take it seriously because I was a very imaginative kid. But I saw what I saw, and it remains the strangest thing I've ever seen. Hahah a naked guy wandering around on a very cold winter night!

Sorry, this is a really long story and I know it isn't that scary.. but in the moment, running for my life down that hill was the most scared I've ever felt in my life. To this day I cannot come up with an explanation for what I saw.

 

[RavensGryf]

re: REAL LIFE GHOST STORIES...

Thanks for your story. It DOES sound scary! I'm sure you know what you saw, regardless of age.

 

[Agapornis]

Wow, Andrea, that IS a scary story, not lame at all! It sounds like you saw some kind of E.T. I wish I had seen that, but maybe not at 5 years old. That could be traumatizing! It's a strange world, lots of mysteries!

 

[RavensGryf]

Agapornis, OMG!!! that's AWFUL!! So it never happened again? I'd be afraid to go to sleep in the house ever again!

 

[kq_fan]

Oh, I remember a story I was told over the summer! So I'm apart of a costal tribe in Oregon and our chief passed away this last spring. His name was chief tanner. Anyways at the house where they had his body so people could come and pay their respects, the nurses were cleaning up and the heard voices. They said tanner come here, tanner.... I don't believe in ghosts but that was no lie! They looked scared when they told that story, legitimately scared! I don't know what to think now! O.O

 

[Agapornis]

Ravynsgryf, I KNOW, right???? Even though we havent lived in that house for over 20 years, I still lock my bedroom door every night. Not that that would keep a spirit out, lol. I don't think I ever prayed so hard in my life as I did while laying there, lol.

 

[Spellbound]

Hope you don't mind a newbie jumping into the mix...

These are some of my experiences.

Where I used to live, there was a small, blonde boy who I first 'saw' out of the corner of my eye. Where I sat in the lounge, to my right, was the kitchen and, while you couldn't see the whole room, you could see enough to know if someone was out there. I was watching tv - nothing paranormal or scary and in my peripheral vision, something streaked past the door. I got up to check because I thought maybe a bird had gotten in and was having trouble getting out but there was nothing out there. This happened a few times before I looked out to the kitchen to see if the noise at the cat dish was in fact one of my cats and saw a small boy, no more than 5, run past the door. He was so real I got up to find out who he was and why he was in my house. There was no one there. As soon as you stood up, you could see out the kitchen window and to the end of the garden so there's no way he could have left the property without being seen.
After that, he used to peek around the corner of the tv but you only ever saw his head. The tv stand was glass and there were no backs on the shelves so you could see the wall behind it and there was never a body, just a little face peering around the side of the tv.


The scary thing was in that same house. I'd lived there for almost 30 years with no spooky encounters other than the boy. I had the middle bedroom since we moved into the house when I was a child. Maybe 10 years ago, I was laying in bed with my back to the door when I felt this overwhelming terror. Every inch of me wanted to run out of the room so I rolled over and standing in the small space between my bed and the door and also the only light switch was a huge figure, even in the dark room, you could tell it was massive and it was darker than the rest of the room, no moonlight in that space or anything. It genuinely terrified me and looking at it was scaring me more so I turned back away from it and hoped that it was my imagination or something... after a full 5 minutes, I turned back and it was still there. I wanted to turn the light on but not enough to have to walk through this thing. I just laid there terrified until it eventually went away on its own. I slept with the light on for a few days after that and then, eventually, moved to the front bedroom. That was the most genuinely terrifying encounter I've ever had.

Oh, other than the monk.

I'll try and be fast with this one.
My first job was at a garden centre on a site dating back to Henry 8th, the buildings are all listed buildings so you can't really do anything to them and they haven't changed much since they were built. Anyway, the staff area was upstairs in the admin area. There was a flight of stairs in 2 parts, a small corridor and a couple more steps and then the kitchen was in front of you, the main staff room was to your right and there was a loooooong corridor with unused offices that were used sometimes for storage, and the clock tower to your left. As long as the fire door to the corridor was closed, everything was ok but if the fire door was open for some reason, the sense of foreboding seemed to ooze from the corridor and it was always freezing, even in the summer.
I'd not long started there full time when I 'met' the monk. I was working later on our christmas displays with 3 other members of staff who were good friends by this point when I went upstairs to make tea and coffee for everyone. Now at this point, no one had ever told me any stories about the monk or ghosts there at all. I was about to step into the kitchen when I saw someone walk out of the offices and go into the clock tower, approx 6 or 7 feet between doors. The corridor was approx 200 feet long and in order to get upstairs, you needed the code to one of the 2 security doors so you couldn't just get up there unless you were staff. I opened the fire door and called out, thinking it was a member of staff or someone from the estate come to maintain the clock. When no one answered, I went down there but it was not comfortable. All the way down the corridor, my heart was thundering and I felt genuinely scared even though I had no need to. When I got to the end of the corridor, it was absolutely freezing, my colder than outside and I tentatively put my head around the door. It was a tiny room with another door. I called out again but no answer so, despite my better judgement, I tried to second door and it was locked. The windows were all stuck shut and there was nowhere for a person to go. So, like a sensible person, i fled. When I got back to the fire door, I turned back and a monk like man was standing in the end doorway.

I made terrible tea and hurried back to my friends/colleagues, who, after hearing my story said; 'oh yeah, that's the monk, you shouldn't go into the clock tower room, he doesn't like that.' Needless to say, I never went past the 2nd office of that corridor again. Occasionally, if you looked up at the clock tower from outside, you could see him moving around up there. Even customers saw him and asked what that man was doing up there.

 

[Agapornis]

Wow, Spellbound, very scary! I don't know how you stayed in bed that whole time that dark presence was hovering right next to you! Did your family ever research who the little boy might be?

 

[Spellbound]

Well I either had to stay in bed, jump out the window or run through the shape to get out the room and I really didn't want to do that.

We never researched who the boy was, he must have been a reasonably new boy as he had a stripy t shirt on rather than old fashioned dress so I'm guessing maybe 60s or 70s. Given that that area used to be all heathland with highwaymen on, I'm surprised he's not older in time than that.

 

[Agapornis]

Fascinating! I would love to know the story of that little boy. Maybe he was playing in the fields and died in an accident.

Sometimes Fiji acts like she is seeing something and even lifts her foot to step up for whatever might be there. I wish I knew what...or WHO, it was!

 

[Spellbound]

He was a sweet boy, I don't live there now but am going to miss him. I think the house was built in the 1920s or 30s. I will look and see if I can find anything... not so good with that sort of thing but will try.

 

[RavensGryf]

It's that time of year again! :43: Anyone have any new stories to add?

 

[dhraiden]

I've got a tale a share.

When I was little the east side of the neighborhood I grew up in Brooklyn (Williamsburg) was much different than it is now - many more factories and warehouses, it was a large, bustling industrial center. The buildings are still there, mostly, but have largely been gut-renovated, sub-divided and turned into smart little 'boutique' versions of their former selves, the kind that house sound studios, instrument stores, coffee houses, and the like.

Anyway, my mother's boss was a rich, greedy, grumpy (exceedingly and sequentially superior-ly so, in that order) old Dutch giant of a man whose family had owned property all over for generations, making their fortune off of grass seed, fertilizer, and horse feed going back almost 200 years. One of the buildings he'd owned was a giant brewery we all called, aptly, The Brewery. If you're ever in North Brooklyn, look it up on Meserole street- for now, there's a white chimney on top that still bears his family initials (VD, or Von Damn) with the date 1858. In fact, here's a street-view of the building for the curious.

When they first came to this country my folks ended up renting from him, and since we were just down the road, ended up acting as somewhat-superintendents for old VD's nearby properties- sweeping the walks, checking up on things, minor maintenance and the like. They did much the same for the Brewery, it being the largest and closest building Von Dam owned nearest us, so when they had to go do that, they'd take me along with.

The interior of the Brewery was vast - it took up the entire block, after all. It smelled of old, wet bricks and damp dust, and was largely dark. The lights had been cut ages ago, and only the very first few rooms still had electricity hooked up. There were big old freight elevators that have those vertically-closing shutter-doors, and the wrecks of ancient cars and machinery everywhere. The boss man must've used it to store all his old junk, and I found it all wonderfully fascinating to poke and prod at. The rooms were huge, and went forever, just big, bare, brick rooms with the occasional mysterious piece of old, rusted machinery. Nothing ever looked disturbed - I could always tell where we'd been the previous week because our footprints were still there.

My parents would admonish me never to get too far from them, because the rooms were dark, and it was easy for me to get lost. Once you were more than a few rooms away, any sound from near the huge, iron sliding-door entrance was completely muffled. You could shout and the sound would just be completely absorbed by the dank and dark.

Now my Dad had taken to giving me marbles he'd find here and there when it was just him going, and Mom stayed home with a very young me. Now that I could come along, I made a game of finding more marbles to add to my collection. And the thing was, there were always more marbles to find. Just laying on the ground. Not dusty, or even particularly old, they looked kind of like these. I'm pretty sure Brewery wasn't in the business of making marbles, so I had no idea how'd they got there, but it was a great way to while away the time while waiting for the folks to be done.

As they set about puttering about and cleaning up (which never achieved much), I went off to one of the side rooms I'd already mapped in my mental cartography, determined to press on a bit further that I had last before inevitably I'd hear my Mom's voice- the one thing that carried irrepressibly through the cavernous place- calling me back, and which I could reliably follow to the entrance.

The first few rooms had been thoroughly explored, and lit up and bare they didn't hold much mystery anymore. I'd long since rummaged about and turned up nothing further to add to my collection, so I went through quickly and made a right, then went a further few rooms down, and up a short sub-landing that opened out in another interminable hallway of barefaced brick walls and old pillars, with big, big rooms on either side. There wasn't much on the way to note - very large old cast-iron tubs and basins, bolted to the walls or floor, and waist-high work-benches with nothing on them anymore but bits of scrap and fallen ceiling-debris.

It was still daylight outside, although the wane sun of a late-afternoon in the Fall couldn't really get much past the grimy, dust-caked windows (except where glass was lacking). Still, it was enough to see, and clean by; Von Dam kept Mom at the office late even when business was slow and they should've closed up early, yet insisted she clean (for free, this was their way of keeping in his good graces) about the Brewery with whatever daylight remained. He'd throw a fit if they ran the meter even a little bit, so they just tried to get there as early as possible and then leave right after dusk. Point being, I had some light and time to find what marbles I could, so I set about doing just that.

Well, about an hour went by, during which I'd popped back downstairs to let my parents know I hadn't fallen down an elevator shaft or something, then rushed back to my hunt. But I had nothing to show for my search - not even an old coin, which I'd occasionally found previously. I was getting pretty disappointed, and the whole level I was on was dim to the point of making any further effort largely futile. I trudged back to the first branch-off, when something out of the corner of my eye made me stop.

It was a light. Down a ways off another branch-off running in the other direction, almost as if someone had left an old incandescent bulb on, with that distinct warm'ish yellow'y glow. I remember at the time thinking, it was probably a light my parents might've accidentally left on, so I ran up to room to turn it off, mindful to avoid my Mom getting another scolding from old VD (he was the kind to dock your pay for any little mishap, but at the time, there wasn't much to be done. It was that new immigrant in a foreign country sort of thing, but fortunately that exploitative working relationship eventually turned into a more genuine friendship as time went on).

When I got to the room, it looked much like any of the others I'd passed through, maybe slightly smaller. There were tables with built-in benches here, so I figured maybe it had an employee cafeteria or something. Like everywhere else, it was largely bare save for what furnishings had been bolted or otherwise fixed in place. I didn't actually see the source of light, nor a nearby switch, but the area was lit, so I scrummaged about abit, hoping for one last find.

As before, I turned up nothing, and turned to leave (I figured I could just tell Dad, and he'd come up and find the light to turn off later), when I heard the oddest sound. It sounded exactly like a marble rolling across a floor. When I tried to dig up a similar-sounding effect online to share, this was the sound that I recalled it being most alike to.

soundfile link

And it was quite distinct. I would not have mistaken it for a running tap, or dripping water, or perhaps even somehow water clanging within an old but still active radiator. That was the sound of a marble, rolling around on a maybe metal surface, somewhere nearby!

Well I redoubled my efforts and cast about, and blast it if I still didn't find anything. I turned again to leave, feeling a little annoyed and wanting to be home with the marbles I did have. Right as I was about to pass the threshold, I heard it again. Only now it sounded like two marbles. I wasn't scared at this point, just frustrated, and noticed that there was an egress on the far end of the room, through which I could see what I can imagine now must've been either a storeroom or small kitchen. I crossed over to and into this space, and now found yet another hallway running away to parts unknown from here. See, the way the Brewery was laid out, it was entirely possible to come at the same room from two different ways, and as the metal doors had long ago been salvaged, there was nothing stopping a body from theoretically circumventing an entire floor in this fashion. The strange kitchen-cafeteria remained lit, but this hallway, it was dark. It ran against an outside wall of the building, and so up high there were windows facing the street, and parallel to them a few more rooms whose windows turned to face an interior open space. There was still just barely enough light to glint off a nice, round, shiny marble, I thought, just waiting in some sad pile of dust to be discovered, polished, and brought home.

I started down the hallway, and this time, I heard the sound of multiple (more than two, anyway, I'd dropped mine over and over on the kitchen floor - to Mom's ire - to know what marbles rolling about and clacking into each other sounded like) marbles rolling about. Maddeningly, I couldn't tell from where, and clearly there was nothing on the floor around me except plaster chips and crumbled brick.

 

[dhraiden]

Before I could head much further down that hallway, I heard, impossibly, but also familiar and comforting, my Mom's voice, calling from over the hills, across the mountains, and continents away, 'boycomedownstairsyourFather'sreadyandwe'rewaitingwhereareyouoffto' and, notable for its rareness, my Dads' gruff enjoining, 'wellifhewantstogambleoffwellleavehimhere'.


At one point I'd've loved the prospect of getting an uninterrupted night to scope the whole place and haul away a veritable treasure trove of marbles, but now the the thought of being stuck here unattended to for any length of time made me very uncomfortable. So I dashed back down the darkened corridor, through the storeroom and the cafeteria which both still yet remained mysteriously and improbably lit, and retraced my earlier path, down, around, and back down and over to the big sliding iron-door entrances. Where my parents waited with stern impatience. I got a good ear-chewing for having wandered off so far and so long, but when I explained what I'd seen and had been looking for, both my folks got quiet. They come from a tropical country where people don't dismiss these things out right, but they were also educated professionals who'd made their way in the world for no lack of wits and wisdom. As they stood there, I asked Dad to come back upstairs with me and turn off the light I'd seen. He'd explained that he'd gone up after me twenty minutes prior, seen no light, nor sign of me. And that was all, Mom didn't talk about it, and we were down the street back home and having dinner in minutes. I groused occasionally after my decided lack of marbles, and my parents obligingly bought a whole big bag of them, but it wasn't really the same. I longed to get back to that warehouse and explore.

As it turned out, it would be a while before I returned. When I did, it was with slightly older (and weaker- I'd taken to needing spectacles in a bad way) eyes, and only briefly, and at the time I was probably more engrossed in a book than my surroundings as Von Dam nattered on with some suits with Mom and me in the background. There was talk of the Brewery being sub-divided into loft spaces for artists. But the area was still rough, with the projects and crime nearby, and wouldn't 'turn the corner' for a while. I remember being vaguely put off by all this talk of 'discovering' the hood I'd called home for years, and who were all these people who spoke so shrilly, laughed constantly, and called everyone and everything "that's so great, isn't it really great"? They didn't seem enamored of the neighborhood I inhabited - looking into their faces, you saw that what they saw was sort of irresistible transformative potential in everything they laid eyes on, regardless of whether what they were looking at really needed to be transformed into anything else than what it was.

Anyhow...a few more years passed, and one of those artists had with much effort fixed up an upper section of the Brewery building into a fine living space, with a nice view up-top of the City. We went up there for a 4th of July sometime before the turn of the century, and it actually was a pretty nice gathering of decent folks who seemed genuine and earnest.

More years passed, and throughout my HS and college years, I hardly thought about the Brewery at all, except as a relic of another time whose time would surely come, to go the way of everything else in the hood - superficially, remaining largely unchanged outside, but on the inside looking alien, and full of alien-looking people.

To be fair, it was a while before the viral gentrification came down from the riverfront to our rustbelt pocket of the urban jungle, and some change was good. That brewery had sat, abandoned and abjectly unused for so long, and then one day, there was a large-scale commercial laundry in one wing, run by a friendly Hispanic crowd, processing clothing donations from all over the City. An adjacent true-blue old-school concrete manufacturer had industriously managed to remain open, operating along one side of the great building, and it's still there today. TMI Dumplings came in a while after that, and as far as I know those guys make half the frozen ones I probably eat. These establishments had taken all the outer-areas of the Brewery, though. The main, central building, with the rooms I'd traipsed about in as a kid, that I still thought of singularly and exclusively as The Brewery, and there it always would be, like a giant mountain fortress: ancient, unassailable, impregnable, immutable.

Yet change it did, inevitably and eventually.

Years later still, I caught occasional glimpses as I drove by through the retro-fitted regular doors that now sat where the gated shutters once stood, and saw decidedly unbeguiling white walls lit by mundane fluorescent lighting, with lots of gangly, mostly pasty types scurrying about with kegs, carrying cases, or putting up wheat posters with solemn diligence, which bore ironic witticisms beneath inscrutable symbolisms, both of which ignored my poorly plain pedestrian perceptions, and so whose significance was largely lost and underappreciated. It was a change I always found vaguely discomfiting, but otherwise had no words for. Still, I did welcome the murals I began to see everywhere I looked - bright, colorful, full of fantastic and sometimes absurd imagery.

If you're wondering how this tale ends, it doesn't. There are no more eerie sounds or phantasms, flickering lights, or other sets of footprints mysteriously-appearing in the dust. There's just no more room for ghosts in Williamsburg, mostly since ghosts are notoriously bad about paying rent. While you might find a few haunting the hood's remaining empty lots or railway tracks, moaning about how much the neighborhood's changed and how the newest arrivals don't, like, appreciate it, y'kno?, you're more as likely to find one floating in the digital-ether of a random-forum post than anywhere, lingering on in the words that remember it. But if specters hang on near where they feel a sense of longing, and unfulfillment, I know there are no longer any here. You can't haunt a place if it doesn't exist anymore.

 

[gracebowen]

My mom told me this. She used to live in a house where a house fire killed a couple sleeping in the back bedroom.

It was down a hall. Once she got to a certain point in the hallway she could go no further. There was like a force she knew not to pass. A few times she tried and she was pushed back and knocked down.

Other than that no issues.

 

[RavensGryf]

Thank you dhraiden! Unexpected story line.. I enjoyed reading about your adventures and the eerie happenings in "The Brewery" you experienced as a boy, vs the changes that you see today. I too had those glass marbles as a kid, but mine were store bought...

Grace, I bet your mom was glad to leave that house! Thanks for sharing.