10 spooky stories told through actual experience personal accounts
#1: The Brown Lady
Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England, is home to the subject of one of the most famous ghost photos ever captured, the Brown Lady is named so because she appears in a rich brocade brown dress. She is widely believed to be Lady Dorothy Walpole, sister of Sir Robert Walpole, who married Charles, 2nd Viscount Townshend in 1713. She died under mysterious circumstances in 1726, and sightings of her began shortly after. Though reports of sightings have waned dramatically since the photo was taken in 1936, sightings before then had been reported by some fairly reputable sources. My favorite account is from a Major Loftus, who was staying at Raynham Hall in 1849. Retiring to bed one night, he and a friend named Hawkins observed a woman in brown brocade who vanished as Major Loftus approached her. Determined to confront the apparition, the next night he returned to she same spot and saw her again. He was horrified to see however, that when he looked into her face he saw only two black sockets where her eyes should have been. Unsettling to say the least!
#2: The little girl, who wasn't a little girl..
I lived in a house from hell for four years, from age eleven to almost sixteen. There was constantly something happening. Doors flying open and shut, voices, footsteps. Nothing ever stayed where you put it. I was alone there a lot because both my parents worked and I was constantly terrified.One of the most gut-level disturbing things though was the little girl in my bathroom. Every time I walked past my bathroom door (which was constantly since it was right outside my bedroom) I saw a little girl with blond curled hair and a rose-coloured dress. She just stood there, staring, looking like a photograph from 1905. I started keeping the door closed so I could walk by without seeing her, but she was always there when I opened it. Once I stepped in past her, I couldn't see her anymore but I could feel her there. She scared me, but I felt really sorry for her because she was trapped there, just like me, but probably forever.As the years went by and things in the house continued to get worse, she started seeming... darker. I started feeling like she wasn't really a little girl. I knew there was something ugly in the house and I felt like it was presenting this sympathetic image to me. Then I started thinking I was completely losing my mind.One day, when I was 14, I had a friend from out of town come stay with me for a week. I hadn't told her anything whatsoever about the house because I didn't think she would come if I did. Right after she got there we were sitting in my room and she left to go to the bathroom. About a minute later she walked back in with a puzzled look on her face and said "So, there's a little girl in your bathroom". "Um, I, yeah she hangs out in there. Blond hair?" "Curls? Pink dress? Yeah. You know that's not really a little girl, don't you?" I almost threw up. I was so relieved and terrified and excited and ready to run out of the house screaming. She wouldn't use my bathroom the rest of the week and I started using it as little as possible without pissing off my parents (who did not want to believe).Eventually we moved out and I could not have been happier. I distanced myself from it mentally as much as I could. Then, when I was 18, I took another friend on a road trip to pack up a few things I'd left in the house (my parents hadn't managed to sell it, and wouldn't for 5 more years). The minute we got on the property, my friend seemed uncomfortable. When we came around the bend in the long, steep driveway, he went completely white. I could tell something was wrong, but he insisted he was OK, so we got to work. After a while he asked to use the bathroom and I directed him to mine. Not 20 seconds after he left, he came running back in, gasping for breath, and slammed the bedroom door behind him. He started babbling about a little blond girl who isn't really a little girl. All of a sudden he went dead still, looked me in the eye, and very solemnly said "She's not happy. With you. You left, and you weren't supposed to". We threw whatever we could grab in two trips in my car (after I walked him to another bathroom and waited outside the door) and got the fuck out at top speed.
#3: Photographic memories...
I grew up in New Mexico and was always very into the outdoors, hiking, camping, rock climbing, etc. One summer when I was 19 I went on a 4 day/3 night camping trip near my parents' house on my own. Might sound weird but I had been to this area many times and it was quite safe. Anyway I brought my camera and took lots of pictures. When I came back and developed my film, there were 3 extra pictures that I didn't take... of me... sleeping. One each night.
None of my stuff was missing or stolen and nothing happened, but it freaked the hell out of me.
#4: Feeling empty in China..
So when I was barely twenty years old I was travelling with a small group of people through China, and we were spending about two months in Qinghai province, which used to be part of Tibet. Our destinations was a specific town to teach English, but we'd been stopping often in towns and small cities along the way. One day we arrived in a rural town, very small, nothing unusual. We spent only a couple of days there, shopping for food at the markets and walking around to see the sights, although there weren't many. This was in the dead of winter, in February, and all the grass on the hills and plains around the town was dead and brown. The overall feeling was that of the normal kind of bleakness that any rural place has in the winter.At this time in my life things were going amazingly, extraordinarily well for me, and I say that because my teenagehood had been rather darkly overcast. But the overwhelming good luck of being able to travel and these close friends I'd made in the last year had more than changed my feelings and attitude towards life it was like I was a whole new person. I was ecstatic to be in Tibet, went to sleep with a smile on my face every night.
On our second day staying in this small town I woke up feeling a little odd. Not bad, just odd, like my normal thoughts and feelings had been turned down low, like on a dial. We all decided to go for a walk on the hills right behind the town, where there was a small summit with a pile of rocks and some prayer flags (to be honest there were little "altars" like these on every other hill, but it gave us something to do).
As we hiked up the hills behind the town I started feeling stranger and stranger. I wasn't scared, and I didn't feel angry or any strong emotion. In fact, it was like emotion was trickling out of me somehow, and I was getting blanker and blanker, emptier and emptier. My mind started feeling a little hazy and more and more I felt like I simply didn't care about anything. A small and rapidly dwindling part of myself started to panic, knew that something bad was happening, but it was like my own inner voice was slowly getting quieter and quieter.
I remember we reached the little summit and I simply sank to the ground next to the pile of rocks. Without meaning to, I started tuning out the voices around me and fixed all my attention on the little pebbles in the dirt. I began tapping one against the other, repeatedly. Do you know the kind of horror that is opposite of feeling scared or feeling anything at all? The kind of vacuous hideousness of a fly buzzing against a closed window for hours on end in an empty room? That's what was filling my mind. It was demonic in its meaninglessness.
I touched my face and felt that I was grinning at nothing. Through all the emptiness a thought floated to the forefront of my mind: You should just die.At first it sounded totally reasonable, but something in me fought it and I was momentarily troubled. Right then, my group started to walk down from the hill, and I followed. The further we walked, the more normal I felt, until we left the town that afternoon and I was totally freaked out. When another girl, Hanna, mentioned in an odd off-hand way that she had felt very strange and depressed while staying there, I told her that I'd felt the same.When the group leader mentioned that a local had told him that the town had been plagued with a rash of young women under 25 committing suicide, Hanna and I went white.
#5: A dog knows the lurking...
In my old apartment, my dog would, on occasion, look down the hallway towards the bedroom, from the living room, and growl, for no apparent reason. Also on occasion, when I was sleeping in the bedroom (she slept at the foot of the bed), I would wake up with her staring intently at the door and growling. She was a big girl - 140 pounds of Great Dane, Catahoula, and slobber.
So I'm there for a couple of years of this, thinking, ok, my dog has a good imagination.
Wrong. One night I woke up due not to my dog growling, but barking for all she was worth. And not at the door... she was barking straight at me. I opened my eyes pretty much immediately, and there was a blur of light, leaning over me, very close - certainly less than six inches from my face. It was not distinguishable as a person - it more resembled a person-sized version of a colourful nebula you might see a picture of in a science magazine. Three dimensional and all. I immediately got the distinct impression that this thing had been watching me sleep. For god knows how long, and how many times before. For all the clarity of that distinct feeling, I had no sense of what it wanted, whether it was malevolent or just curious. I flipped right the fuck out - jumped backwards to the other side of the bed, too terrified to scream, and that blur of light receded and disappeared over the course of about 3 seconds. My dog was going absolutely ape.
So, shortly thereafter, I asked the building manager if anybody had ever died there. She investigated that, and came back to me a couple of weeks later with a yes, a woman had died of a drug overdose in that apartment in 1995 (so 12 years earlier), shortly after having her child removed from her custody because of her addiction problems.My dog did still growl at the hallway from time to time, but I never saw it again. I moved out about a year later.I've had other encounters, but this thing was literally inches from my face, watching me sleep. Getting shivers now just writing about it.
#6: The voice by the stairs..
When I was a kid, I would race up to the top of the stairs as fast as I could, like it was some sort of silly game. Well, I must have been five or six at the time. I'm not sure, but I know I was very little. Somewhere along the way, a voice at the top of the stairs started to whisper to me. It would make bets with me, such as... "I bet you a penny you can't make it to the top of the stairs." I don't really think there was a certain amount of time or anything. As I said, I was very little so I probably didn't have any counting abilities anyway. I recall just sitting at the top of the stairs, having conversations with this voice, about the betting, of course. Eventually the voice (it was like a whisper of a man's voice, not my own voice in my head) started to bet me my life. Instead of pennies, it'd say "I bet you your life you can't make it up the stairs blah blah."As I got older it stopped. I never really thought about it at all. I never mentioned it to anyone... UNTIL one night I was sleeping over at my brother's place (I was about eighteen, he was twenty-two) and we were talking about "spooky" stories. Out of nowhere I brought up the "voice at the top of the stairs" and my brother got all quiet and weird. Before I even mentioned the betting aspect, he said "Did it make bets with you?"We both looked at each other, horrified. It certainly was freaky after the fact. *shudder*A lot of bad shit went down in my family at that period of time in my life, and my mother, a heavily religious lady, said there was a lot of "evil" in our lives at that time. I don't at all think our place was haunted,but it was built in the late 70's .As I got older, I never experienced anything like that again.
#7: The drive-by...
We were camping once, driving through some city, my dad was driving, my mom on the passenger seat, and I was kneeling behind them leaning on the boot that separated the truck from the camper. It was evening, not full dark. We weren't really talking and my mom was looking out her window when she screams, "Oh, God. Oh, my God. Gene? Do you see it?"
My dad says, 'Yeah. I do. I'm going to slow down and let them by." He slowed and the car on the right passed us. I couldn't see inside, but their window was down and the arm hanging out the window looked to be that of someone impossibly thin. I asked my mom what she saw, and she said it was nothing. My dad backed her up. Years later, I asked them about it again. My mom said, "It was a skeleton. It was no mask, because you could see through the jaws. It had a tongue and eyes. It was Death."My dad backed her up but years later (after my Mom was dead) recanted, saying it was a mask because nothing could survive like that.
#8: The haunted strip club...
Okay, so this was when I used to live in in a different state. I got a job working as a cocktail server at a strip club, which was a good choice for me at the time as the club was very fun, kind of metal punk vibe, and also very popular with lesbians, and since I was going through the process of coming out as bisexual, and was in a very radical, "fuck corporate society fuck men lets take their money" phase. I'm not one of those people who thinks stripping is super empowering but it was a good fit at the time. Also while I was there after about 6 weeks I would often have terrible, suffocating feelings, almost about to have panic attacks, and terrible migraines while working in the club. I would often feel panicked and scarred but I chalked it up to a stressful job in a strange environment. I never had these feelings anywhere else around this time.
So the club was really kind of messy, not dirty but just filled with THINGS, lots of tables in the bar, lots of speakers and extra crap in the back storage room behind the stage, and a tiny crowded dressing room for the dancers. Behind the stage there was kind of a storage room area that had several dressers and mirrors put in, as well as an old comfy couch in case the dancers wanted to use it as an extra dressing room, or a place to nap, but no one ever actually used it. This room gave me the worst, suffocating, panic inducing vibes of all, and I had no explanation for it.
So I would often be at work until 4 am or later, since I didn't have a car, public transportation wasn't running, and it was in kind of a sketchy neighbourhood I would wait until one of the dancers was done for the night and she would drop me off at home, this was often after my own shift ended. When I first started working I would spend that extra time trying to do side work, clean and straighten up like a good employee, but after awhile I would often just hang out in the back room studying, since I was also in grad school at the time. Until when I started completely freaking out in the back room, and when I would leave to go sit up at the bar or in the dancer's dressing room, the feeling would mostly go away. So also when this stuff started to get worse, I have to add that some of it was around Halloween so I was watching a lot of scary movies, and I was also smoking a ton of weed so both of these things might have had some affect on my psyche, but also these feelings NEVER happened anywhere else around this time. I started to kind of bring it up to the dancer that drove me home, she said the back room also "creeped her out" but didn't go into any detail.
So one night after closing I was carrying a box of extra glasses into the back room, and I heard the most terrifying sound of my life. It was like from a horror film, like a long screech almost like electronic music but just one tone, almost like a chain saw that reverberated around the entire floor and walls. I dropped the box, screamed and ran out to the floor. The bartender said he had heard a noise as well, but not as loud as me and without the vibrating floor walls, and started checking the sound system telling me some of the music equipment had probably just started fucking up. This happened at least 5 more times while I worked there, sometimes other people heard it, sometimes just me, always when I was walking into the back room.
Twice when I walked into the back room the light would flicker off, and would be replaced with a red glow, like someone had put in a red light bulb. Both times that happened I ran out, got the bartender, they would check and the light would be totally dead, not working. After awhile I was constantly shaken, and didn't want to tell him every time something happened since I was afraid they would think I was crazy.
After the noise and red light, I would never go to the back room, even when I should have been cleaning it. One time I was standing in the hall between the dancers room and the back room, half half heartedly sweeping the floor and staring into the back room. I was starting to feel the panic in my chest, and I kept telling myself to look away and look into the dressing room, but I couldn't stop staring, like I was transfixed...and in the corner of my eye I saw a reflection in the mirror set up leaning against a dresser in the back room, I forced my head to look and I saw, in the mirror, two legs in black ripped tights, floating about a foot from the floor swaying back and forth. I threw the broom, screamed as loud as I could, and ran to the bar. I was convinced one of the dancers had hung herself in that room, I could see it so clearly in my mind. Of course when we went back nothing was there. One of the dancers was convinced that the room was haunted and I was seeing a ghost, she thought maybe someone had killed herself back there. She wanted to get me and some of her friends to do a Ouija board about the bar and the ghost but I was too terrified.
Around all this happening I felt I was losing my mind. I was having panic attacks, migraines, sleeping with my lights on, was terrified of my shadow and carried pepper spray everywhere I went. It may have just been a combination of everything in my life, sleeping weird hours, grad school, dealing with my own personal shit, but I've always been a high stress person who's worked a lot more stressful jobs since then and I have NEVER experienced anything like that ever in my life.
About a week after I saw the legs in the mirror, I was working one more shift before taking a week off to do some research for a grad class and go on a long weekend trip with my girlfriend. This was near Halloween so the club had kind of gone all out and had goofy decorations and costumes. I usually dressed in all black anyway, and I tried not to wear anything too "sexy" or "distracting" so costumers would mostly leave me alone and concentrate on the dancers, so this day I just wore a black skirt and tee shirt but had my face painted like a Dia de los Muertes sugar skull. It was mostly white, with jewels, and it was fucking rad. Since I was so freaked out all the time at the club I started asking if I could leave around midnight, and would catch the last bus, but this night my friends were meeting me to drink at the club after my shift. I was near the end of my shift, and was taking off my apron in the dressing room and leaned over the dancer's mirror to check my makeup, and that is the last thing I remember. Until I was being shaken awake by one of the bouncers with a friend and my girlfriend by my side, I was in the haunted back room laying on the couch, and my face paint was completely smeared all over my face, they said I had disappeared for about 45 minutes until they went looking for me, and found me asleep, and had been trying to shake me awake for almost 2 minutes. I was completely hysterical, had no idea what had happened. My clothes weren't disturbed, my tip money was still in my apron, and there's almost no way anyone had been back there all night. I was almost afraid I had been drugged, but right after this event I went to the doctor, (no health insurance so this was a BIG deal to me), and got checked out and had them give me an MRI since I was afraid I was had a brain tumor or something that made me lose my mind. They suggested I speak to a psychologist. After that night I had to quit the job and never went back. Besides those horrible events I loved working there and made a lot of friends, but I absolutely lost my mind. And once I left I never felt any of those feelings or saw anything like that ever again.
#9: Resurrection Mary...
Travelling North East on Archer Lane between the Willowbrook Ballroom and Resurrection Cemetery in Justice, Illinois, young men might find themselves tempted to pick up a young woman hitch hiking on the side of the road. She has light blond hair and blue eyes, is wearing a white party dress, and has been dead since the 1930's. If you pick her up, she will stop you in front of Resurrection cemetery and vanish from the car. She is a classic example of the vanishing hitchhiker legend, a type of ghost story that has been around for at least a few hundred years. What makes this one so distinctive is the consistency of the story- the girl looks the same, wears the same dress, disappears in the same spot. Also worth noting stories of this particular hitch hiker popped up suddenly in the mid thirties and have been going strong ever since, and not just for those in the know. An account from 1973 sees a cab driver inquiring at Chet's Melody Lounge across the street from the cemetery about a girl who fled his cab without paying her fare. Only his description of her sounded mighty familiar to the customers: Resurrection Mary had struck again!
#10: Anne Boleyn...
The second Wife of Henry VIII and mother of a future Queen Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn had three years as queen consort before Henry tired of her. Accused (most historians agree falsely) of adultery, incest and witchcraft, she faced an executioner's sword with her head held high on May 19th, 1536. The executioner was reported to have said "Where is my sword?" before striking the single blow necessary, apparently in an effort to ease Anne's anticipation by making her think she had a few moments more.Her ghost has been spotted by several different people in several different locations: Hever Castle, Blickling Hall, Salle Church, Marwell Hall, and perhaps most famously the Tower of London. Though she is most often seen just as she was alive- a beautiful woman in a beautiful gown- some sightings are a bit more upsetting. More unlucky individuals will see her as she was just after death- headless, often with the head tucked under one arm. It has become such an iconic image it is often parodied in movies and television, and more elaborate Halloween costumes. One must not forget, however, what you would think if such a vision approached you in some dark corridor one night.
