Your haunted houses

[Eireann]

Just about everyone has one. That spooky old house somewhere in town, the one everyone talks about, with all kinds of wild rumors flying. Someone died in the house; someone committed suicide in the house; a murder was committed there. Kids and teenagers trespass there whenever they can.

I know it's nowhere near Halloween, but I'm interested to hear people's haunted-house stories. Give it to me, baby!

[protege]

Let's see...rural PA has the Yablonski house. Supposedly, the house *is* haunted--Jock Yablonski's family was murdered there in 1969..after Yablonski had said that the miner's union election results from earlier that year had been corrupted. All of that is true. What isn't true, are most of the stories about the house. Supposedly, nobody could live in it very long--there were stories about strange noises at night (screams, gunshots, etc.), blood running out of the walls, to name a few. But, all of that is bullshit--the house had been boarded up after the murders. Nobody had lived in it since the son (who was away at school at the time of the killings) moved out...which was confirmed by a real estate notice when the home was sold. Even though the place had been cleaned up before sale, it was pretty obvious what had happened there--there were blood stains in the bedrooms.

[jedimaster91]

Not a house around here, but a hospital. Waverly Hills Sanitorium was a TB hospital during the epidemic in the 1920's and 1930's. After that, it was a geriatric center. Most of the ghost stories seem to come from its time as a TB hospital. There is a legend of a nurse who hung herself in one of the upper floors and one of the local radio stations hosts a Halloween show there every year; they've gotten thermal video of two kids playing ball in the hallway.

I've been to Waverly and I do have my own little tale of the supernatural. One of the youth leaders at church knew the owner and asked him if we could go. We toured the hospital and saw nothing exciting. The place is sad and creepy, but I didn't really find it that scary. Then as we came back out the owner's wife and daughter came storming up demanding to know who had thrown a small piece of wood off the roof. Now, their little tent was too far from the building for the wood to have been knocked off by a breeze or something. Also, our group was nowhere near that side of the roof. We were all on the opposite side.

What really ticked me off about the whole thing was our youth leader didn't believe none of us had thrown the little wood chunk. I remember him saying that he didn't care who it was, just apologize. Silly spirits getting us in trouble.

[Crossbow]

That would be Franklin Castle for me. I don't know if it truly is haunted or not. I just know it's a beautiful old building that someone tried to burn down. A shame. I drive by it on a regular basis (good friends of mine live a couple of blocks down from it) and it always makes me sad to see it in its current condition.

[protege]

I've also heard of Pennhurst, which was featured on one of the ghost hunting shows. Some of the things done to patients there...were truly terrible. I've heard stories of some patients having their teeth ripped out..because they were biting staff, children tied down, garbage everywhere, etc. No great loss when all of that came out in the open in the 1970s, and the shit-hole (and I'm being nice) was shut down by '86. Still, I'm sure there are some *very* pissed-off spirits there

[draftermatt]

http://hauntsandhistory.blogspot.com...nace-hill.html

He was a rich man who lived in the area in the 1700's. He's claimed to have murdered a slave woman and her husband, burned the husband in his furnace and bricked the wife's body into the basement.

People have claimed over the years to see apparitions of Leigh (or oddly a dog that runs and disappears) around his house for years.

(My father lived next door to the house as a child and never heard the stories or saw anything).

When Leigh died his coffin kept rising to the surface of his grave until they finally put a large tombstone on it. (It's 7'-0" long and about 18" thick) but that cracked shortly after putting it on him.

I went to school with the son of the preacher of the church where Leigh is buried, and he never saw anything other than people hanging around the grave on Halloween night.

[Antisocial_Worker]

You'd have a harder time finding a house that isn't haunted here in Asheville, NC. You can't spit in this town without it passing through someone. There are haunted houses and buildings of every description here, from modest homes to Victorian mansions, to castles, to the biggest palace in the US, to skyscrapers, churches, restaurants, bridges, schools, and the city hall, but to name a few.

[Eireann]

I think I'll just bump this thread up.

[AriGriffin]

I have heard people say that Flora Macdonald Academy, http://www.floramacdonald.org/index.html a former college for women, is haunted. The way I heard it, a girl killed herself after her boyfriend broke up with her after she told him she was carrying his baby. Her spirit haunts the third and fourth floor where the dorm rooms were. I went there for a year and a half during high school and I didn't see or feel anything. More than likely the story was created to keep the kids out of the 3rd floor storage area and the 4th floor that was unsafe due to not being repaired correctly after the tornado in the 80s.

[Caffienated_Caramel]

The only haunted place that I'm aware of that has a link is The Bird Cage Theatre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_Cage_Theatre. There have been reports of music,

I know there is another, in one of our small towns. An old hotel, the owners kept everything as is. There have been reports of the founders wife's ghost seen and their daughter around. The girl's dolls moved around and other stuff.

Mom knows of an abandoned house on 40th street and Camelback rd when she was young. She and her friends rode their horses there before. I say its abandoned, she says it was haunted cuz the eerie feeling she felt when she was on the property. She says she saw something running through the house from looking through the windows.

Now she wants to find out if the place is still there or mowed over.

[NateTheChops]

Everyone believes their home is haunted. This is especially funny to me when the place they've lived in is no more than a few years old.

My paranormal team caught some pretty decent evidence of a haunting in Vergennes, Vermont. If I have permission to post a youtube video I can show you one very chilling piece of evidence.

[ThanosIsKing]

I used to be quite into haunted houses. I've visited Bachelor's Grove, Winchester Mystery House, and Resurrection Cemetery. To be honest, I have never found anything, so I stopped investigating and even believing in ghosts. Still cool to hear all the stories, though.


As for locally, we've got Cheeseman Park which used to be a graveyard for indigents before being converted into a city park, and the oldest haunted location on Earth.

[Antisocial_Worker]

Everyone believes their home is haunted. This is especially funny to me when the place they've lived in is no more than a few years old.

Why is it funny? Sometimes the haunting doesn't come from the house, but rather from the land the house it was built on.

Picture if you will, for example, an unremarkable 1960's ranch-style house. It's puke green. It was built by my mother and her first husband in the late 1960's on what had been up to that point a horse pasture.

It didn't take long for the weird shit to hit the fan. There were two phases to the activity -- what happened before I was born in 1980 and what began to happen after that.

Before, the activity included a statuette of a cherub pulling a chariot launching itself from a shelf and traveling halfway across the living room to shatter on the carpet. It happened so many times that eventually it couldn't be glued back together again because it was too damaged. In addition, if my mother and brother ever went anywhere at night, it wasn't at all unusual to come home to find every light in the house burning and every door, including closet doors, standing wide open. After my mother and her first husband broke up, and she began dating again, pictures began launching themselves off the walls.

It was during that period too that my brother once came down with a very bad fever. After the worst of it, he was feeling better the next morning and told my mother that grandma had come to see him during the night. My brother was born in 1970 and my mother's mother had died in 1969, mind you. Chalk it up to a fever dream if you like, but what really startled my mother was that my brother was able to describe perfectly the dress that grandma was buried in.

In 1977, my mother married the man who became my dad. The usual activity kept up, but sometime before I was born, my dad was sick with the flu and woke up one afternoon when a large and invisible something sat down on the bed. Dad said he could see the mattress sink down, stay down for a while, and then lift up again when whatever it was apparently got up and left.

Now, after I was born in 1980, the activity ramped up a bit. Droplets of water began to fall in the house, but only around me. Or, just to mix it up a bit, now and then the water droplets would travel horizontally across the room or the hallway. And finally, and again only when I was around, from time to time my mother would see an old man hunched in a corner looking at her. He would disappear as she looked at him.

What I wonder is, what the hell could have possibly happened in that pasture to let all of that stuff happen in a plain, boring, puke-green 1960's ranch house.

[AccountingDrone]

What I find great is the plethora of ghost hunting shows on now [or paranormal, however you would like to look at it]

I love Ghost Hunters - Jason, Grant and their crew try to debunk in every way before deciding if something is a valid paranormal happening.

I hate Ghost Adventures - they believe every little thing is real, and seem to think almost everything is demonic [I am agnostic, and they seem overly christianized. A paranormal instance does not have to be demonic in origin. And sometimes an orb is a lens anomaly or dust particle]

Amused by - Destination Truth. Honestly, it is a train wreck and I can't stop watching ... is someone going to break an ankle wandering around in the dark? Is that random critter/insect going to bite? And why in the name of god to they have to roll into a site, set up and wander around in the dark? OK, if they are looking for the BatBoy of Borneo, and his reported thing is nocturnal I can see it, but hmmm - Aliens diurnal or nocturnal? Thunderbird - nocturnal or diurnal? Burmuda Triangle is nocturnal

And I lived in a house haunted by my great grandfather. He had the house and 2 others build in 1895 [one for he and my great aunt Bessie, one for my Grandfather and one for my Great Uncle Raymond] Various people have reported hearing him walking around in, and door sounds in the attic where he had his office, bathroom and dressing room. On more than one occasion my mom came home from dinner next door with my grandparents to find every single light in the house on [in the 50s when my dad was deployed in various areas outside the country she lived there, and she moved around with him when he was in country - and she had always had day maids instead of live in before us kids came along] and my imaginary playmate was my great grandfather.

[protege]

What I wonder is, what the hell could have possibly happened in that pasture to let all of that stuff happen in a plain, boring, puke-green 1960's ranch house.

Well, that's what happens when you paint things that color

I've posted before about my grandmother's old house, which has since been sold Anyway, it was built towards the end of the Civil War. It's a solidly-built brick two-story home out in the country. Keep in mind that the area was once Indian territory--several settlements and burial grounds have been found nearby. Also close by, are two old cemeteries up on the hills. Adding to the "spooky" stuff, is the fact that when it gets dark, it's nearly pitch-black, except for the streetlight on the corner. Usually, it's dead quiet too.

Not long after my grandfather (who apparently passed along the smartass genes of the family ) died, some strange things started... One night, I heard a noise on the kitchen porch, looked out, and saw some sort of bluish mist vaguely resembling a person Whatever it was, took off and drifted out into the yard before disappearing.

Ever since then, right up until the night the house was sold, I'd always get the feeling like I was being watched. Always at night, and usually after my grandmother had gone to bed. Most of the time, that feeling was directed towards the room that had once been my grandfather's office. He spent a lot of his time in that office--paying bills, working on things for the Lion's Club, etc. and would occasionally watch TV through the window...which looked into the family room. Maybe Grandpa wanted to watch the late show with me? Wouldn't have surprised me, since I was the oldest grandchild, and was always at their house.

Stranger still, was the occasional hand on my shoulder. Again, always at night and after Grandma was asleep. But, this had a twist--it always happened if I was sitting in his old recliner. Maybe it was telling me to get the hell out of his chair But, I'd like to think that he was trying to remind me that he was still looking out for his family.

After the house was sold, I'd brought home most of what was there--the recliner, TV, and anything else not nailed down or given to other relatives. Sadly, I don't think my grandfather came home with me, as I hoped he would

Closer to home, I think there's a kitty ghost in my house. Some of you might remember that Snow died in the kitchen. For awhile, I heard some scratching noises in 'her' corner of my home office. She would always curl up next to the computer and take a nap. I'm sure the current kitties can somehow 'sense' her, and probably chase her around constantly