Ghosts

[Norman Potting]

No i don't believe in ghosts, but as true as the sea is blue i had one living in, and haunting unforgivingly, the shed that sat at the foot of the garden of my last abode. I sleep now steadily at night knowing that the sharpening of tools or turning on of reasonably miniature motors nearby will be purely the noise of a mass-murder entering my home with his little, draggable sack of hatchets, icepicks and chainsaws and making plans to bury the pieces of my body. The ghost and i only met truly once. It was a typical Tuesday night, which i now believe, if i believed in ghosts, is the night of all things unholy. Previously, i thought that to be a Wednesday, when if there isn't any football on, is thoroughly boring. He, for the gruffness at the base of his whispery vocals said once of man, said his name was Chester. I tried to silence my guffaw ineffectively and the face i imagined of him bent itself with an uncertain rage. For me, Chester is the name i'd give to a dwarf in a story or a galloping horse with a splintersome fence to high for it to leap. Anyway, Chester told me of his plight. More than anything he spoke of the blandness of the afterlife, that his plans to set up a ghostly union where everyone knew their place and had a patch they could haunt and call their own were rebuffed by Him upstairs. He also missed the retention of a pet he'd chosen to die with. Apparently animals head off to another dimension as they perish, and if any filter through the system by mistake they are actually more powerful than any regular-thinking and slightly mournful human. He said it was very difficult to make friends. Everyone just sought in the first moment of death to relive their favourite moment and when such a wish was impossible to achieve they fed off of the anger the disappointment formed. Chester had gone through that. He'd headed back to his favourite pub, The Whistler, but the darts there that he once drunkenly held and flicked toward the perfect score were unliftable. He quickly worked out that this was God's punishment for a life without note and that only the few, often celebrities and scientists and unsolicitous priests, made it through to that Heavenly land some spoke and wrote of. I doubt it was actually like that, said Chester, with the sirens and the horned equines and fountains full of bitches, but even though dead i still dream. He spent a few months trying his hardest to just get a feel of the feathers, to fling them one last time. He'd even watched Ghost and believed in that bald, but hairy guy on the underground who has the power to toss Patrick Swayze venomously across the train floor, his hair remaining in an unhealthy perfection despite it. Alas, the darts were never his to hold again.
On realisation of this, Chester decided it was best to go to a place he knew to be safe: my shed. He'd seen and heard me chortle as i approached there once, as he floated over head still in his invisible state, spectral only to the most believing eye. He followed me in and watched what i got up to. He thought one day we should meet and become friends and that he could be one of the players in the dramas i coyly and silently wrote of in the shed and tried my best to mouth the words of knowing that no audience viewed. I asked whether he was able to bend and reformat the sight of him i had in order to more successfully become the characters i'd created; the nasty headmaster with the monocle and unrueful grin, the "girl" who'd been held back 6 years already and was looking to finish her GCSEs finally at the age of 22 and had finally allowed to take her daytime breaks in the teacher office to drink coffee and sip gin, 15-year old father of four who'd impregnate with little more than a wink, the terrier that talked, etc. He said no. Not yet at least. It had taken him a decade to be any more than an unsmellable gas wisping undramatically through a society unseen, and only in the last 6 months to have any effect on physical matter now able to rattle chains and shake nearby cutlery and scare cats, who are wrongly thought to be aware of nearing danger. I thought to myself that it must have been Chester who had meddled with the stash of magazines i'd secretly in the shed beneath the unshiftable packets of compost i'd piled high, but it was unmentioned.
We talked into the night, but the more i knew of him the less interested i actually was. And that lack of eyeopeningness seemed to be shared. The jokes i'd made up that i thought i pretty much dined off unearthed not one cackle in him. He nodded and grinned and a silence set over us. Perhaps it says more about me and how i seek approval than it does about what sort of a person Chester once was. Maybe after a while he'd become too real to wield the mysticality that first shook me and held me in. And my reality was simply too drab for him to want to keep the dream of vicariously living through. I said i'd best be off, and plodded silently back to my bedroom. The sun had already dawned and i was meant to be headed for work. I slept for an hour knowing i just wouldn't go back to the shed and better find a new place to live in. I mean, when a place and it's happenings are a secret only you keep and you find out someone else has known of the ins and outs of it all along, then it's not somewhere to return to. I worried that Chester might it waiting for me, but i doubt it. He might have moved on too. Found someone more interesting to have time with or someone more screamy to haunt if he feels he should. Good luck to him, but i hope our paths fail to cross.
Where i live now i haven't a shed, and carry out all of my eerie habits and personal pleasures in the bathroom, the taps on full to hide news or longing from any visitor's ears.

Is that a yes or a no then?

 

[Meade's Ball]

Is that a yes or a no then?

*regains breath* it's a firm no. I thought i'd made that clear in chapter 4.

 

[Twinkle Toes]

I think the building has something to do with ghosts, when we've had a party in one of the rooms in our pub (the room is stone with a stone floor, and used to be a blacksmiths shop) you can go into that room after everyone has left and the room sort of buzzes. I think some rooms seem to hold vibrations of the past


I sound like a nutter don't I

I'm with you on the 'vibrations of the past' thing Mr M - & pubs are notorious for it in my experience.

My parents went into the pub game when I was about 13. They took over this 16th century place in Hertfordshire that was in the middle of nowhere, & it had a very strange & claustrophobic atmosphere to it (particularly at night). On many of occasions I saw shadowy shapes moving through various parts of the building; & it often felt like you were being watched by invisible eyes. My bedroom was away from the other rooms & I couldn't bear to go to sleep without a light being permanently being on. It was bloody horrible in there & our dog would refuse to go in, regardless of the time of day.

Down in the bar - a while after the last drinker had staggered off home - the place would have this intense buzzing energy that was quite overpowering. It would be like that until daylight, & often we'd come down in the morning & two candle sticks that were above the inglenook fireplace had been pushed together into the centre of the shelf. Things would also suddenly go missing - only to turn up at a later date at some totally random place.

I'd heard a number of locals talk about the pub being haunted & having a number of tragedies associated with the place, but they were never specific. I knew the former Landlord had died suddenly, but it took me most of the time I lived there to find out he'd put his mouth round both barrels of a shotgun in my parents' bedroom (after his wife had left him). It's little wonder that my mum became a full-blown alcoholic shortly after moving there.

And then there's the wierd experiences I had at the next place they took over in Facking Essex...

 

[Marc]

never seen a ghost so not 100% convinced, however I do believe that my mums Boyfriend and my Grandfather have both visited me in my sleep.....yes after they died!

 

[chops]

my uni house was haunted by a lovely chap who we presumed was a bloke called hobbsy who died in the first world war. he would often turn the electric off for no reason, bang up and down the stairs, knock things off shelves and generally make his presence known, particularly in the bathroom

You drank a lot at uni though.

 

[Muzzman]

No.

I also refuse to believe others have seen them too, soppy twats.

When ever something 'mysterious' has happened in my vicinity, I go out of my way to find out what's caused the strange occurrence... and I have ALWAYS found the reason behind it. Whether it be dodgy plumbing, a draughty crack around a window, a trick of light on a mirror, a shadow. There is always a reason for these things, those who believe in ghosts just need to look a little harder.

They annoy me.

 

[Albalbion]

When i was dating my ex-wife, we were having a kiss and a cuddle after work, she said "i love you", the words came out of her mouth sort of in stereo, like if two people say the same thing at the same time, anyway we both crapped it and i took her home. I parked the car at the end of her drive and we heard her mum calling her name "asking is that you?", my ex even replied yeah "i'll be in in a minute" and headed in.
The following day she asked if i had heard her mum calling last night?, i had. She then told me that her mum was in bed asleep when she got in but in the morning her mum told her that before she went to sleep, she had been sat on the end of her bed talking to her mum (my ex's Nan), who had died about 5 years previous.

not to mention the ornaments on our shelves turning themselves round, tha 'man in may' staring at the window the woman walking through the kitchen every now and then or the ashtray that magically jumped over a ledge of its own accord. EEEEEEEEERY.

 

[magoo]

No.

I do believe in the power of the mind to fool us.

 

[Tyrone Biggums]

My Great Gandmother and Great Uncle experienced the "three knocks at the door" phenomenon one evening.

I found it most interesting because my Great Grandmother especially was a stern no nonsense woman who wasn't prone to making up stories, quite the serious person she was.

So one night just before they were going to retire to bed three very loud and clear knocks on the front door were heard.

My Great Uncle got up to answer the door and there was nobody there. He searched around the house for what he thought would be kids but found not a sign of anyone.

So they went to bed thinking it very weird.

A few hours later one of my uncles arrived with my other uncle in the back of his ute.

He'd gone to pull out a shotgun by the barrel and it had discharged. Blew his guts out.

Great Grandmother tried to sew him up but he died.

Needless to say the family is very much all believers of something out there of the paranormal nature.

 

[Tom Hark Preston Park]

No i don't believe in ghosts, but as true as the sea is blue i had one living in, and haunting unforgivingly, the shed that sat at the foot of the garden of my last abode. I sleep now steadily at night knowing that the sharpening of tools or turning on of reasonably miniature motors nearby will be purely the noise of a mass-murder entering my home with his little, draggable sack of hatchets, icepicks and chainsaws and making plans to bury the pieces of my body. The ghost and i only met truly once. It was a typical Tuesday night, which i now believe, if i believed in ghosts, is the night of all things unholy. Previously, i thought that to be a Wednesday, when if there isn't any football on, is thoroughly boring. He, for the gruffness at the base of his whispery vocals said once of man, said his name was Chester. I tried to silence my guffaw ineffectively and the face i imagined of him bent itself with an uncertain rage. For me, Chester is the name i'd give to a dwarf in a story or a galloping horse with a splintersome fence to high for it to leap. Anyway, Chester told me of his plight. More than anything he spoke of the blandness of the afterlife, that his plans to set up a ghostly union where everyone knew their place and had a patch they could haunt and call their own were rebuffed by Him upstairs. He also missed the retention of a pet he'd chosen to die with. Apparently animals head off to another dimension as they perish, and if any filter through the system by mistake they are actually more powerful than any regular-thinking and slightly mournful human. He said it was very difficult to make friends. Everyone just sought in the first moment of death to relive their favourite moment and when such a wish was impossible to achieve they fed off of the anger the disappointment formed. Chester had gone through that. He'd headed back to his favourite pub, The Whistler, but the darts there that he once drunkenly held and flicked toward the perfect score were unliftable. He quickly worked out that this was God's punishment for a life without note and that only the few, often celebrities and scientists and unsolicitous priests, made it through to that Heavenly land some spoke and wrote of. I doubt it was actually like that, said Chester, with the sirens and the horned equines and fountains full of bitches, but even though dead i still dream. He spent a few months trying his hardest to just get a feel of the feathers, to fling them one last time. He'd even watched Ghost and believed in that bald, but hairy guy on the underground who has the power to toss Patrick Swayze venomously across the train floor, his hair remaining in an unhealthy perfection despite it. Alas, the darts were never his to hold again.
On realisation of this, Chester decided it was best to go to a place he knew to be safe: my shed. He'd seen and heard me chortle as i approached there once, as he floated over head still in his invisible state, spectral only to the most believing eye. He followed me in and watched what i got up to. He thought one day we should meet and become friends and that he could be one of the players in the dramas i coyly and silently wrote of in the shed and tried my best to mouth the words of knowing that no audience viewed. I asked whether he was able to bend and reformat the sight of him i had in order to more successfully become the characters i'd created; the nasty headmaster with the monocle and unrueful grin, the "girl" who'd been held back 6 years already and was looking to finish her GCSEs finally at the age of 22 and had finally allowed to take her daytime breaks in the teacher office to drink coffee and sip gin, 15-year old father of four who'd impregnate with little more than a wink, the terrier that talked, etc. He said no. Not yet at least. It had taken him a decade to be any more than an unsmellable gas wisping undramatically through a society unseen, and only in the last 6 months to have any effect on physical matter now able to rattle chains and shake nearby cutlery and scare cats, who are wrongly thought to be aware of nearing danger. I thought to myself that it must have been Chester who had meddled with the stash of magazines i'd secretly in the shed beneath the unshiftable packets of compost i'd piled high, but it was unmentioned.
We talked into the night, but the more i knew of him the less interested i actually was. And that lack of eyeopeningness seemed to be shared. The jokes i'd made up that i thought i pretty much dined off unearthed not one cackle in him. He nodded and grinned and a silence set over us. Perhaps it says more about me and how i seek approval than it does about what sort of a person Chester once was. Maybe after a while he'd become too real to wield the mysticality that first shook me and held me in. And my reality was simply too drab for him to want to keep the dream of vicariously living through. I said i'd best be off, and plodded silently back to my bedroom. The sun had already dawned and i was meant to be headed for work. I slept for an hour knowing i just wouldn't go back to the shed and better find a new place to live in. I mean, when a place and it's happenings are a secret only you keep and you find out someone else has known of the ins and outs of it all along, then it's not somewhere to return to. I worried that Chester might it waiting for me, but i doubt it. He might have moved on too. Found someone more interesting to have time with or someone more screamy to haunt if he feels he should. Good luck to him, but i hope our paths fail to cross.
Where i live now i haven't a shed, and carry out all of my eerie habits and personal pleasures in the bathroom, the taps on full to hide news or longing from any visitor's ears.

This.

 

[SULLY COULDNT SHOOT]

Yes and told the story before... cant be bothered to do so again... this is about the third time weve had this thread.

 

[Gully]

My parents went into the pub game when I was about 13. They took over this 16th century place in Hertfordshire that was in the middle of nowhere, & it had a very strange & claustrophobic atmosphere to it (particularly at night). On many of occasions I saw shadowy shapes moving through various parts of the building; & it often felt like you were being watched by invisible eyes.

Are you sure that wasn't just the locals?

 

[Seagulls over Essex]

Does anybody remember "The Cloak" that used to post on the Seagulls.co.uk message board a couple of years ago before they ruined it? Scary he was, used to give me nightmares.

 

[Spicy]

After a family bereavement, I was downstairs one night because I couldn't sleep, and was sitting on the sofa. I must have fallen asleep because at some point I woke up feeling freezing cold, and something was holding me as if a person was standing above me and was cuddling me. It frightened me so much that I tried to call out and couldn't and as I was being "held" tightly I felt I couldn't breathe. I am still unsure whether it was my relative trying to comfort me or my imagination. Logic told me that if it was my relative comforting me then they would wish me no harm but it really scared me at the time.

 

[seagully]

After a family bereavement, I was downstairs one night because I couldn't sleep, and was sitting on the sofa. I must have fallen asleep because at some point I woke up feeling freezing cold, and something was holding me as if a person was standing above me and was cuddling me. It frightened me so much that I tried to call out and couldn't and as I was being "held" tightly I felt I couldn't breathe. I am still unsure whether it was my relative trying to comfort me or my imagination. Logic told me that if it was my relative comforting me then they would wish me no harm but it really scared me at the time.

I'm sure I've read somewhere that this is a known phenomenon with a natural cause. Can't for the life of me remember where though.

 

[Fred Oliver - Legend]

Do gay ghosts put the willies up each other??

 

[Spicy]

I'm sure I've read somewhere that this is a known phenomenon with a natural cause. Can't for the life of me remember where though.

Thanks and I may have to google it! Sure as hell frightened me though.

 

[seagully]

Thanks and I may have to google it! Sure as hell frightened me though.

Found it!

Sleep paralysis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[dannyboy]

I'm sure I've read somewhere that this is a known phenomenon with a natural cause. Can't for the life of me remember where though.

sleep paralysis?

Sleep paralysis
During REM sleep, dream activity ramps up and the voluntary muscles of the body become immobile. This temporary paralysis keeps us from acting out our dreams and hurting ourselves. Sometimes, though, the paralysis persists even after the person wakes up. "You know you're awake and you want to move," Kline said. "But you just can't."

Even worse, sleep paralysis often coincides with number 7 on our list: hallucinations. In one 1999 study published in the Journal of Sleep Research, 75 percent of college students who'd experienced sleep paralysis reported simultaneous hallucinations. And these hallucinations, when they occur with sleep paralysis, are no picnic; people commonly report sensing an evil presence, along with a feeling of being crushed or choked. That sensation has given sleep paralysis a place in folklore worldwide. Newfoundlanders know it as the "Old Hag." In China, it's the "ghost pressing down on you." And in Mexico, it's known by the idiom "subirse el muerto," or "the dead climb on top of you."

Even today, some researchers suspect that tales of alien abduction may be explained by episodes of sleep paralysis.

 

[beorhthelm]

the whole notion is utterly ridiculous. what are they supposed to be and why? they require a whole baggage of beliefs to make any sence, and there's never any actual proper proof.

except... a friend of mine not remotely into religion, superstition or such, one day says in conversation "oh yeah, we've got a ghost". like you would mention that the tree in the garden is gone rotten, or the car needs new brakes. apparently happened all of a sudden around the time of his first child, the dog would refuse to stay in the dinning room ever and would on occasion go to the dinning room door and bark at nothing. small items like pictures, hairbrush (in particular moved alot), toys, books, would be moved, never witnessed but apparently tested by leaving things in one place and coming back into the room to find it moved. this would be across the room, off shelfs onto table, across a window sill or onto the floor. wierdest bit was the baby would start to cry and then stop, which would set the dog off somthing loopy. then it all stopped, as abruptly as it had started about year later.

absolutly no rational explaination to any of it.