15 Haunted Objects That Will Give You Chills

From dolls to jewelry to furniture, it seems like anything can be haunted. And people will go to great lengths to get rid of these objects, sometimes even going as far as to bury them. If you’re feeling brave, keep reading to learn about 15 haunted objects that terrified their owners. But beware, some of these stories are truly chilling.

1) Thrice

Not too long ago, I began to experience things I could not explain in my house. It all began after a neighborhood tragedy that seemed like something out of a suspense novel. A few houses down one night, I awoke to the sound of gunshots. Shortly after, it was followed by the screams of sirens and neighbors flooding out of their homes to spectate. I was one of them.

The multi-colored lights bounced eerily over the yard while emergency crews shuffled inside and out and tended to someone on the front lawn. I put a hand up to my mouth to stifle a scream as I ventured closer and spied the body in the front yard. It was the kid who lived across the street from me. He had been shot in the forehead.

I coughed for a moment forcing the wave of vomit back down into my stomach and turned away. After gulping some air and gaining my composure, I turned back to the scene in time to see them lift the lifeless body into a coroner's van.

From the front door came two more gurneys. Both were sheeted and obviously deceased. I peered around me at the familiar faces I’d come to know in my ten years on this street. Some were crying, some had horrified looks on their faces, and others were walking away, refusing to watch on any longer. I was nearing joining the last group. I didn’t want to see this any longer.

Before I go further into the story, I want to tell you what I found out had happened in that house and how an innocent boy got mixed up in it.

Parker was the husband. He was a traveling sales kind of guy. On the road more often than not, and while he was away from us, neighbors had begun to notice the strange car parked at his house more and more often. Needless to say, Anne was seeing someone else while he was away.

This night, in particular, it is speculated that either Parker confronted Anne or caught her doing something and found out about the other guy. He shot Anne, and then before shooting himself, the neighbor boy had come and rang the doorbell. No one knows exactly why he did that. But he did. Parker shot the boy. All the assumptions I’ve heard lead to he must have seen or heard what Parker had just done, and he was rid of a witness for the time being.

Parker then went back inside, poured himself a shot of whiskey, drank it, then turned the shotgun on himself.

So, as I was saying in the beginning. This was when odd things began to happen at my home. The ten years I’d lived there until now were haunted by fewer years. Serene years. So at first, I had no idea why this had begun to happen until I remembered the tragedy, and it was like a bulb went off.

Nearly every night at first around 1:00 am, my doorbell would ring. It would ring three exact times. I’d sit up in bed and strain my ears and listen for it to repeat, which it never did. It was just those three haunting bells echoing throughout the silent house… then nothing.

In the beginning, I’d thought I’d awoken from a dream that just felt real. But then it happened again. And again, and again. After a while, I dreaded going to bed before 1:00 am. I’d fear it.

A few months passed by, and the phantom rings happened less often to where now I couldn’t guess when they’d happen. It could be a week apart or a day. You never knew. I’d started dating a woman who wanted to come over and watch scary movies. Not wanting to say no, and not quite knowing how to explain the phantom rings, I just agreed. In my heart, I begged the blasted thing not to happen tonight. Any night but tonight. But I’m sure you can guess what happened. And although you think you know how this is going to play out, I’m going to tell you that you don’t. Not exactly.

So, we watched three movies back to back, ordered pizza and made popcorn, and snuggled on the couch. Until midnight rolled around, and we were exhausted. I’d offered her to spend the night, so she did not have to drive home so late, and she’d accepted.

We didn’t go to sleep right away. Mostly because I was terrified that the noise would happen and wake her and scare her off. So, I put the television in my room on, and we were groggily watching it.

Then as if on the dot, the three rings happened at 1:00 am. I sat upright, alert, whereas she was still lying down on the bed, trying not to doze off.

I was confused, “Did you hear that?” I asked her.

She sat upright, and her eyes gained some life darting around the room, expectantly, “Hear what?”

I furrowed my brow, “The doorbell ringing?”

She chuckled softly and patted my shoulder, “I think you were dreaming. There was no doorbell.”

I eagerly searched her face for some sign of a prank, but she was calmly laying back watching the television again.

I slowly slide back into place beside her, pull the covers up, and try to busy my mind with the show on the television. However, I couldn’t stop wondering why I was the only one who had heard it. Was I going crazy? Was whatever this was all in my head?

After six months of dating, we moved in together, which, as you can imagine, I insisted it is at her place because I wanted away from that house. Ten years of memories foiled by some weird ringing transpiring.

I still don’t fully have answers for what happened to me. But I’m pretty positive it was the little boy who died that night reliving his last moments at my door instead of the neighbor's. When I let my mind wander to the opinion that is, in fact, what it was, I wonder if he will ever find peace. Or will he continue reliving the last moments he had on earth until the end of time? I’m not sure how all that works, which none of us will fully know until we are dead too, but if that is the case, then I’m not so much frightened of my experiences anymore, but sorrowful.

2) Misty Waters

So when I was growing up, we used to bounce from place to place a lot. My dad constantly had to move for business, so we were always on the move. When we moved to Arizona, I was so excited when I found out that the house we were renting had a pool in the backyard. On a hot day, nothing was better than jumping in the cold water to cool off.

One weekend I was up late with a couple of my friends swimming, and we had just gotten out and were just kicking back in the lounge chairs that were around the pool. I noticed a strange fog that seemed to float over the top of the surface of the pool. I had seen this happen over the top of hot tubs in the winter, but it was the middle of the summer, and it was still almost 90° Fahrenheit outside, so there wasn't any reason for the fog or steam to be there.

My friend Nick thought it was pretty cool and decided he would jump in for what he called "fog swimming". As soon as he hit the water, he cried out, and I knew something was wrong. He quickly swam over to the side and pulled himself out. When I went over to check on him, I just touched his shoulder and couldn't miss how cold he felt. He began to shiver violently, trying to warm up. I went over to the side of the pool and dipped my hand into the water to test the temperature. I had to pull it out almost immediately. It was like dipping your hand in ice water. I told my friend Tony to come over and feel it, but he wasn't interested in getting anywhere near the pool.

Just as quickly as the mist had come, it seemed to dissipate. The surface cleared, and the pool seemed to return to normal. I ran into the house to get my dad so he could feel the water. At first, he didn't believe me, but when he saw Nick, he walked out with the three of us. He dipped his hand in the water and swirled it around a bit.

"Seems normal to me," he told us.

I walked over to the edge and dipped a toe in the water, not believing what my dad was saying. It had only been a few minutes; there was no way that the water could have warmed up that quickly. I prepared to pull my foot out, ready for the cold, but I felt only the normal water temperature. I pushed it in deeper, but there was nothing different there either. Somehow the pool had warmed what I would guess was 40° Fahrenheit in three minutes. It just didn't seem possible, no it wasn't possible.

I went back into the house, frustrated and confused. I know what I had felt, I mean, Nick was shivering still, but my dad looked at me like I made the entire thing up. It also put a bad taste in my mouth about going in the pool. I didn't trust that somehow it wouldn't happen again. I didn't want to be caught in there if it did.

My room was on the second floor of the house and overlooked the backyard, so I had a good view of the pool outside my window. I spent a week watching from my window at night, waiting for the mist. I wasn't disappointed for it came back three out of the seven nights I watched. I would run down to the pool to try and test the water temperature, but by the time I got there, the mist was gone, and the water temperature was back to normal.

This went on for a couple of weeks when I would watch, but I stopped trying to go down to the water's edge. I would just stare out my window and watch the mist come and go. Then one night, when I was watching the mist, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. There on the diving board was a black figure. Their back was to me, and the light wasn't good, so I couldn't see them very well, but I got the impression it was a man. I watched as he dived into the mist-covered pool and started to swim back and forth.

Who was this person, and how could they stand the cold temperatures? I ran down the stairs and burst through the back door as fast as I could. I ran to the edge and looked down, but no one was there. I walked an entire circuit around the pool, but I couldn't find footprints walking away from the water. The mist still hovered above the surface, so for the first time in weeks, I dipped my hand in and felt the freezing water envelop me. I was so engrossed in what I was doing I nearly missed the sloshing sound at the other end. It was like someone had boosted themself out. I heard the wet slapping of bare feet moving away then nothing. I ran over to where I had heard the noise, there was an obvious wet spot near the edge, but no footprints were anywhere to be found.

A cold chill shot up and down my spine, and goosebumps rose on both my arms. I ran back into the house as quickly as I could. I slammed the door on the way in, which brought my dad out of his room. He asked me why I was making so much noise that late. I told him what I had witnessed, but he was skeptical to put it lightly. He doesn't believe in ghosts, so my story seemed nothing more than a figment of an overactive and probably over-caffeinated imagination. I insisted it was true, but he refused to budge.

The next day I convinced my mom to check with the landlord about anything weird that happened regarding the pool. She was reluctant at first, but she knew I would continue to ask until she did it. When she called, she was told that there had been a man drowned in the pool while intoxicated a number of years ago at the house, but there hadn't been any reports of strange activity at the pool. Well, I can tell you from experience, there is now.

3) Footfalls

As long as I can remember, I loved the Japanese culture, particularly that of the ancient samurai. So it was no surprise to anyone who knew me that as I got older, I began collecting swords and armor from that period. I never really thought about a spirit being attached to one of the prized pieces that I have displayed all around my home. It wasn't until I purchased a battle-used sword that things began to happen nearly every night. This sword had been used by a warrior who had been killed in combat according to what I was told by its previous owner.

One thing you have to understand about these weapons is they, at times, were passed down from father to son for generations. This could have been the reason for the attachment because of a strong connection to the family's past. Although I didn't own the sword very long due to the occurrences that were happening in my home, this is the story of the most active night while it was in my possession.

For a little background on what happened before this night occurred, you will need some perspective on what I had been dealing with. It was about a week after I bought it that things started happening about once every couple of weeks. I had placed it on a stand in my living room. One night while I was watching a movie in my room, I heard something fall somewhere in the house. I was alone that night; so an unusual noise in my home immediately put me on alert. I sneaked out of my room as quietly as I could, trying to find who was in my home, but all I could find was that one end of the new sword had fallen out of the stand.

This didn't seem possible since there was at least a foot of the sword that hung over the edge, so it just sliding off wasn't really likely, especially when the stand was still upright in its normal position and only half the sword was out of place. I chalked it up to a freak accident but wasn't really satisfied with my conclusion.

After the sword-falling incident, it was about two days later that I woke up to the sound of heavy footsteps in my home. At first, I thought it was just the sound of the house settling. I do live in an older home, so this type of noise happens fairly regularly, but when I listened closer, the noise was continuous and at too regular of an interval for it to be anything but footsteps.

I have a baseball bat by my bed in case someone decides to enter my home, so I grabbed it and readied myself for a confrontation. I thought that I had heard them coming from the living room, so I snuck out of my door. Slowly putting one foot in front of the other, I prayed that the floorboards wouldn't squeak, announcing my movement to the intruder. It took me a few minutes of slow movements to reach the living room, but I thought I had been quiet enough to get the drop on whoever was there. The footsteps continued until I was almost in the room, so I knew someone was there with me.

I rushed the last few steps into the living room, the bat held above my head, ready to club the prowler. My eyes had had time to adjust to the dim light so I could see pretty well in the darkness. I swung my head back and forth, trying to locate the threat but didn't see anyone. A cold chill ran up my spine, thinking that they were somewhere else in my home or had somehow gotten behind me. I swung around, checking where I had come from, but the hall was empty. It took me nearly an hour to search every part of the house before I was satisfied that I was alone.

When I got back to my room, I had to sit down on my bed and wonder if I had imagined the noises. The footsteps had sounded so real that I had been sure someone was in my home. The thought that I had missed someone didn't seem likely, but the idea of someone sneaking up on me while I slept made for a long restless night.

This went on for almost a month, where once or twice a week, I would wake up thinking that I heard footsteps in my living room, but every night I found nobody in the house. I eventually decided to ignore it and turn back over and go to sleep, seeing as I knew no one was there. I wasn't going to waste an hour trying to find something that wasn't there.

I had heard of objects being haunted before. I didn't put much stock into them, considering I'd seen Hollywood portray too many movies about some evil spirit being connected to a seemingly harmless object. I figured the stories that these shows were based on were just elaborate fantasies created by some twisted writer somewhere. Then came the night when I came to understand there are things beyond this world that I wasn't interested in tangling with.

The night started out like most evenings. I turned in at about 10:45 pm after watching a bit of the news and checking the scores that interested me. Around 1:45 am, I awoke to the sound of the footsteps that had become a regular and, at times, annoying event in my life. Something about them seemed different, but I couldn't place what at first. I listened closer, and then it hit me, they had always been contained to the living room, but this time the steps seemed to be coming right outside my door as if someone was pacing the hallway.

I squinted, trying to get my eyes to peer through the darkness in the hall. My door was slightly ajar, so I had about a foot of space to look through. I waited for them to pass in front of my door to see if I could finally catch what was doing this. It was nearly there, heading back down towards the living room, then for a brief instant, I saw something dark move passed the cracked door.

I sat there for a moment, trying to decide what I should do. I know I had seen something out there moving, of that I was sure. What I wasn't sure of, though, is whether or not I wanted to know what it was. I was scared of what I would find out there. At this point, I had accepted that I could either face what was out there or simply let it continue to do as it pleased. As much as leaving it alone sounded like the best option, I was sick of the footsteps waking me up and decided to investigate.

At this point, I figured that it didn't matter if I was quiet, so I grabbed my bat and walked out to the living room. I expected to have the same thing happen like every other time where I would get myself all worked up but, in the end, find nothing out of the ordinary. I walked into the middle of the room and spun in a slow circle taking in everything I could. There was nothing, absolutely nothing there. Exasperated, I decided to try and talk to the empty room, hell, I'd tried everything else.

"Is anyone there? Who are you? What do you want?" I paused between each question waiting for a response, even a noise, but all I got in return was silence. I felt stupid; here I was in the middle of the night talking to an empty room.

I sighed and turned around, ready to go back to sleep. I had already wasted more time than I wanted on this pointless endeavor. As soon as I looked up and down the hall, my eyes fell upon a shape that shouldn't have been there. It looked like a man was standing in front of me, blocking the entrance to the hall. At least I thought it was a man. He wore traditional samurai armor, including a helmet that covered his face, but everything was black as if it was made out of the shadows. He stood in front of the stand where my new sword sat, and he reached down to grab the hilt. As soon as the hand attempted to grab hold and lift it up, the shadow disappeared and seemed to be pulled into the sword itself.

I was frozen in place, not sure what I had just witnessed right in front of me. I wasn't one to believe just anything, but I had seen it with my own eyes. I tried to formulate a rational explanation for what I had just seen, but nothing I could think of made sense. After a minute of just standing there, I seemed to snap out of it and walked back to my room and sat down on my bed, trying to figure out what to do next.

I went back through what I could remember about the timeline for the strange happenings in my home. As I put the pieces together, I realized a lot of this started after I had purchased the sword and brought it home. Combining that with my seeing the shadow go into the sword itself seemed to point to only one conclusion, some spirit had to be attached to the sword, or I was going crazy.

The next day I did some research on what can cause an object to have a spirit attached to it. It seemed the most common reason was if it was associated with violent deaths. I figured a sword that had been used to kill people more than fit the bill when it came to that. I assumed that the shadow I had seen was either a previous owner of the sword or maybe one of the people that had died by its blade. Either way, I was not interested in dealing with the spirit of a samurai warrior in my house.

I sold it the next day at a major loss compared to what I paid for it. Frankly, I didn't care about the money, just getting it away from me. I probably could have had the sword cleansed, but I didn't want to take the chance. I'd seen and heard enough. I still collect swords and other items from history, but I am much more careful with what I bring into my home.

4) Keke

Dolls used to fascinate me, as I’m sure they did most little girls my age. Every time I saw one, I just had to have it. It could look brand new or even tattered, and I’d pull at my mom’s skirt and beg her to buy it for me.

When I look back on past memories, most are not as crisp and clear anymore. However, this memory is as clear as the year in which it happened.

A nearby church was having a rummage sale, and I was about six. My mom took me with her so she could look through some of the items and socialize with her church friends at the same time. When we arrived, my mom immediately saw some friends and ushered me over to a large box while she chatted with them.

Curious, I began digging into the box to see if anything was of interest. After moving many toys aside that were rubbish, I saw her. On the very bottom of the box was a beautiful doll. At least, at one time in her life, she had been. She was now scuffed and slightly torn, in quite a sad shape indeed.

I hurried over to my mom and tugged at her skirt. “Can I have her, Mommy?”

She cocked her head to the side and raised a brow, “Are you sure? She’s a little worse for the wear, Honey.”

I nodded, “I know. But I’ll make her look pretty again.”

A smile curled up on my mom’s lips, and she patted my back, “I know, sweetie. You always make sure the dolls are well taken care of. It’s one thing I love about you.” She handed me a wrinkled dollar, which I snatched instantly and ran to pay for the doll while my mom finished gabbing with her friends.

When we arrived home that afternoon, the first thing I did was place the doll “Keke” on my bed for the first few weeks. She was like this new treasure to me. Something I had to show off to anyone that came in my room.

During the first few weeks, nothing unusual happened. It was once I began to tire of the new doll that something stirred. I’d been to a few more rummage sales and had too many toys to place them all on my bed. So eventually, Keke was discarded in my toybox with the rest of my less played with toys.

I’d been watching a cartoon video, and as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard a sound on the hardwood floor of my room. It sounded like wood scooting against the wood. My eyes popped open, and I lay there for a bit, just listening to the noise and trying to place it. There it was again. Something was scooting along the floor.

My heart began to race, and I was frozen in place. Should I sit up? Do I turn on the light? Would I dare look over the side of the bed to the floor? Finally, I sat upright in bed, and mid-scoot, the noise ceased. This terrified me even more. It was as if it knew I sat up. It knew I was watching.

After a while, I laid back down and tried to convince myself it was all in my mind. I was tired. Toy boxes don’t move themselves. I was just being silly.

Another week or so went by, and I started to notice the shadow that the toy box would cast on my window. It was harmless, really, at first. When you are a child, it's common to inspect your room at night and watch the shadows for any ill will. But this night, the shadow of the toy box moved. It opened.

So I’m lying in bed playing on my Gameboy with the lights off, and out of the corner of my eye, the shadow caught my attention. At first, it was subtle, just to be noticed. Then again, I glanced over to see the shadow growing larger against my window as if the lid from the toy box was opening.

I dropped my Gameboy quietly on my bed and began to tremble, eyes unwilling to waver from the shadow and its unworldly transformation. For minutes I sat there in silence watching, gaining my courage. Finally, I lunged at the edge of my bed and peered down at the toybox. The lid was shut. I recoiled in terror. Was I imagining all of this?

Again, it took a while for me to nod off. Eventually, I did, and things appeared normal once again for a week or two.

I should mention at this point that I never got a sinister vibe from the doll. I didn’t get the feeling I was in any danger, but I definitely did not like that abnormal things were occurring.

One day on a weekend, I was doing some homework on my bed with my bedroom door wide open. The faint smell of my mother cooking her broccoli cheese soup wafted through the house, and it always smelled like heaven.

I was nearly finished, and the sound of my door slamming caused me to jump about a mile high in the air. I slowly turned towards the door to find it still wide open. I arched an eyebrow in disbelief. Was I going crazy? My door just slammed. I could swear to it.

Because I was a little creeped out by the phantom door slam, I walked over to my toy box and shut the lid, climbed back on my bed, and went back to finishing the last of my homework. A minute or so later, my lights began to flicker. Not like a poltergeist, mind you. It was one or two flickers every couple of minutes. I guess now, as an adult, I look back on it and tell myself it could have been a bulb or two going out. The odd thing about that explanation is as soon as I would open the lid, the lights wouldn’t flicker at all. But when I’d shut it again, they’d flicker.

That was the extent of the activity that happened to me. A month or two into summer, I cleaned my toys out and re-donated the doll I’d picked out. Once Keke was donated, everything stopped. Do I believe an object can be haunted? Yes. I believe there was something about Keke that made things happen. Not so much sinister things, but something was definitely attached to that doll.

5) In Loving Memory

When I was a lot younger, my mom’s sister and her family died in a fire. It started in the lower level, and they could not get out of the house in time. After the fire, my mom and her brother had gone over to the house to see if anything was salvageable to keep as keepsakes. In the basement, my mom found Ginger’s dollhouse. Ginger had been my cousin. When she passed, she was only a year younger than me.

At the time, I was not big into dolls anymore or dollhouses. But my mom insisted I keep it in my room because she wanted me to have something of theirs too. I could tell by looking into her teared-up eyes how much it meant to her to keep something of theirs in our home, so I’d agreed.

Mostly the dollhouse just became a place for me to throw a sweater on until I was ready to wear it again. Then eventually, I moved it into the far corner and out of the way so I could do other things on the floor in the middle of my room.

One night I was asleep, and I woke up to the sound of whispering. The only way I can think to describe it was that the voices seemed to linger in the air all around me. It was hard to pinpoint exactly where they could be coming from. I hopped off my bed and began to tiptoe around my room in hopes I could hear them louder… somewhere.

I had ventured over near my bedroom door when I heard faint footsteps. I approached my door and put my ear to it and listened. They definitely were not coming from the hallway. I backed away from the door and stood still for a moment, just listening. My eyes searched the darkness for answers and settled on the dollhouse tucked in the far corner of my room.

I again investigated with the lightest of footfalls towards the dollhouse, and the whispers seemed to grow, as did the footsteps. My eyes grew huge, and a lump gathered in my throat. Once I was only about a foot away from the dollhouse, the whispering and footsteps stopped. My room was completely silent, except for the sound of blood rapidly pumping through my ears.

I reached out to the dollhouse and opened its sides. Nothing was amiss. Because I didn’t play with the house, I couldn’t tell if anything was moved. A chill ran down my spine, and I shivered. I closed the dollhouse and went back to bed. Unable to dismiss the rather odd occurrence so easily, I grabbed up my book and read for a while before my eyes were heavy, and I went to sleep.

After that night, I heard many things over the years. Noises from the kitchen downstairs when everyone else was asleep. Footsteps in my room in the middle of the night and sometimes the sound of whispering. I tried hard over the years to get my mom to rid of it, but she wouldn’t do it. It was one of the very few things left of her sister’s, and she wasn’t ready to let it go yet.

When I had my tenth birthday, my mom finally agreed to put it out in a yard sale. I sat outside with her while we watched families and children browse around our old treasures. Finally, a short blonde-haired woman approached us with her look-a-like daughter in toe.

“How much are you asking for the dollhouse?” The lady asked.

Her daughter was all excited. You could see her bouncing on the tiptoes of her shoes in delight, her fists eagerly bouncing by her sides.

“How much are you willing to pay?” my mom responded.

The lady glanced over her shoulder back at the dollhouse, then back at my mother, “I can do fifty?”

My mom stood and extended her hand to the lady, “You have a deal.” She then turned her gaze to the daughter, “Take really good care of it. It’s one of a kind,” and winked.

The lady handed over a few bills to my mom, and the little girl ran off to retrieve her new treasure. All the while, I’m sitting in my chair with the heaviest feeling in my stomach that they were buying something evil, and I should warn them. But a glance up at my mother as she watched them load the dollhouse in their car had me think twice. You could just tell she had just sold a sliver of her heart off, and if I made a scene, she would lose it. So instead, I sat quietly and just prayed that the dollhouse would not cause as many problems for them as it had for me.

6) Merging Traffic

People like to collect all kinds of things, dolls, stamps, and even cars. Me, I collected street signs. I didn't have two that were alike and was always looking to add something new to my collection. Some of them were pretty old and hard to come by. The ones that seemed to be the most sought-after were the ones that had been involved in some kind of traffic accident. The worse the accident, the more the sign was sought after and thus was worth it. A lot of times, you have to be really lucky to find them on the side of the road or be in the right place at the right time when the pole a sign is on gets taken out by a car.

One of the more modern signs I didn't have was one that had a merging traffic symbol on it. For some reason, this simple sign would illude me time and time again. I started to think that I may never get one, but then tragedy struck one day when I was getting on the freeway. A car crossed in front of a semi, and with the difference in weight, there was only going to be one outcome. The compact car bounced off the front bumper and flipped six or seven times before coming to rest in the ditch. Parts of the car were strewn all over the road from the deadly rollover.

I knew I was going to be late getting to work since I was now stuck where I was at. Traffic had come to a standstill, and we weren't going anywhere anytime soon. A glint of yellow caught my eye in the weeds on the side of the road. I just figured it was a standard speed limit sign or interstate label, but I figured what the heck, I'm stuck anyways.

I was peppered by insults from people upset that I was getting out of my car on the freeway, but when you have a chance to get a sign, you make your move. As I got closer, I realized it wasn't what I had originally thought it was. I looked down, and I had to blink a couple of times to make sure I was seeing things correctly. Here it was, the sign I had been searching for, the Merging Traffic sign.

I picked it up, looking carefully at it. Even though the post had been bent in all different directions, the sign was intact. It was a stroke of good luck. I took my wrench out of my back pocket and unscrewed the sign from the bent pole, and hefted it back into my car.

I sat there for more than an hour before the traffic started to move again, but even that couldn't dampen my good mood.

I spent all day thinking of where the perfect place would be to put the new addition to my collection. When my workday was finally over, and I pulled into my garage, I left the sign in the back seat until I was ready to wash and mount it. I went to my bedroom to change when I heard my car alarm going off. It took me by surprise since I hadn't locked the doors, so the alarm shouldn't have even been activated. My car was pretty new, so I didn't think that it could have a short in the system yet, so I figured I better go take a look.

I went to the door to the garage, and as soon as I twisted the handle, the alarm went silent. I walked out into the garage with my key fob and locked and unlocked the car so the alarm would for sure be off. Since I was out there, I grabbed the new sign out of the back seat and carried it into my bedroom. I have the walls adorned with a number of road signs, and I figured that since I had sought out this one for so long that it would be nice to be able to look at it. The signs require special mountings that I would have to go to the hardware store the next day for before I could do anything with it so it would stay on the floor for the night.

After a quick dinner and a few hours of television, I was ready to go to sleep. I usually get to sleep early, but I couldn't seem to get comfortable. The entire left side of my body ached. Finally, after an hour of tossing and turning, I got up to take a couple of aspirin for the pain. Whether it was from the pills or exhaustion, I finally drifted off about an hour later.

I found myself behind the wheel. I had this overwhelming sense that I had to get to where I was going quickly or something bad would happen. I would need to push it. I sped down the on-ramp, not even bothering to check for oncoming traffic. I only cared about what was in front of me; the people behind wouldn't catch me.

The car quickly gains speed as I near the merge area, and it looks like I have managed to find an empty spot to turn into. I press the gas to get to freeway speed and turn the wheel. Unfortunately, I don't see the shadow blocking the sun until it is too late. The front of my car is clipped by the front of the massive truck, and I lose all control. I see the sky and then the pavement over and over again as the car flips time and time again. I feel terrible pain on my left side but am too disorientated to know why. I hear a crash and crunching noise above me; then, everything goes black.

I shot up in bed and winced. The pain on my left side from earlier was far worse than it had been, and my head was killing me. The dream had seemed so vivid and real. The terror I felt when the crash was going on was still with me. I hear footsteps next to the bed, but there is no one there. The sign falls over with a loud metallic crash, and the footsteps walk out the door and down the hall.

I sat there, not sure what had just happened. I believed ghosts could exist, especially when people died under tragic circumstances. First, there had been the alarm, then the pain, the car wreck dream, and then the sign falling over after hearing footsteps walk over to it from the bed. I looked over at the back of the sign that now lay flat on my bedroom floor. The only thing that made sense was that the man had died in the car crash I had seen earlier. Had he been drawn to the sign I had brought home?

I now believe that this was the case. I think he was telling me that my precious sign came at a price, and even though I didn't have any part in it, I profited from his death. I thought about getting rid of it, but I just couldn't do it. I like to think of it as a memorial to him. I just hope the man has found peace.

7) Crib of Sorrow

I have a sister that lost her 5-month-old son to SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome). Unfortunately, not a lot is known about the causes of SIDS; for certain, there have been many theories. Our entire family was devastated by Caleb's passing, and I believe that negative energy is what drew a negative spirit to us and nearly caused the death of my sister's then-infant daughter.

Kennedy was a beautiful baby. She relit the hope and love that my sister lost when Caleb was taken at far too early of an age. There was a time when I doubted that I would ever see the woman that my sister used to be again. There was nothing that could have been done to prevent what had happened, but she blamed herself for the death. All that changed when she found out that she was pregnant. It was like the purpose of caring for her unborn child gave her direction and hope that hadn't been there before.

Her thinking was that having the same crib that Caleb did would give Kennedy a connection to her brother. The bed was repainted with a pink color instead of the dark blue that it had been before to go with the remodeled nursery. One week after she was born, Kennedy came home, and after a quiet month, something went horribly wrong.

A normally quiet and happy baby, Kennedy would sleep most of the night without much fussing. She was a baby most parents would dream of. One night though, when my sister put her in her crib, she began shrieking at the top of her lungs. She would shake and turn blue like she couldn't breathe, but as soon as she took her into any other room in the house, she would calm almost immediately and regain her normal coloring.

My sister suspected that something was wrong with the crib. She even spent a night sleeping in it, trying to see if whatever was wrong with it would happen to her but with no success. Despite nothing happening, she became more and more convinced something was wrong with the crib. She was terrified that if she kept it that she would lose Kennedy as she did Caleb.

My sister is a very religious woman, and when she turned to her church for help, she was afraid that it wouldn't stop if she just got rid of the crib, so she wanted to make sure the house was safe for her daughter. Some of the church elders came the next day to see what was happening and if they could help. They tried to get Kennedy to go into the crib peacefully, but even when they placed her inside, she began to shriek and turn the same blue color as always. They prayed around the crib, but her cries seemed to intensify, and she seemed to be going from blue to purple.

The elders had seen enough to believe some sort of evil entity had attached itself to the bed, and in order to purify it, they had to burn it completely. Even though it was early afternoon and a bright sunny day, I don't ever remember being more scared than I was at that time. They brought the crib outside and sprinkled it with oil to bless it, then doused it in another type of oil used to light furnaces. What came next is something that I couldn't have imagined. The crib wouldn't burn; it was on fire, I could see the red and orange flames licking its surface and the intense heat coming off of it, but it refused to be turned to ash.

It took the elders multiple gallons of oil and several hours to completely consume the crib. The priest believed that a demon or evil spirit had attached itself to the item and wanted to torture Kennedy. He believed it was attracted to the terrible events surrounding Caleb's death. It saw the happiness my sister had rediscovered in her daughter and wanted to use that love to inflict pain.

I believed what the elders thought had happened. I had heard stories of spirits coming into people's homes when they bought them at garage sales or secondhand stores, but I didn't know that it could happen to something that was associated with tragedy. It makes me question what is safe to keep and what I should throw away because I don't know what or who I might be inviting in.

8) One Heck of A Ride

If someone had asked me before my experience if I believed in ghosts or spirits of some kind, I probably would have told them, "Yeah, I guess," or "Maybe...". I wasn't a skeptic but never having come into contact with anything of the sort forced it into the realm of the hypothetical. But sometimes, hypothetical can come up and smack you right upside the head when you least expect it. That is what happened to me on three successive nights riding home on a bike I just purchased from a secondhand store.

I was coming home late from work one evening. I was a person who liked to get exercise any way that I could, so given that it wasn't very far, I rode my bike to and from work each day. That night it seemed particularly dark out, so much so that I was having trouble seeing the road even with the assistance of the light strapped to the handlebars. A new moon did nothing to help the situation, leaving me with only a small glow on the road ahead.

I tend to ride pretty quickly, pushing myself to reach fairly high speeds on my bike, so I was a little surprised when I felt a tug on the back of my shirt. I looked over my shoulder and didn't see anyone there. Not only that but there also wasn't a light or anything to indicate that another rider was near me. At the speed I was going, it was also unlikely that someone would be able to grab me either, and most concerning was that if I couldn't see anyone, how could they see me?

The start gave me the motivation to push a little harder to get home as quickly as I could. I pushed hard down on the pedals to accelerate when the front wheel on my bike suddenly stopped, not like breaking stopped, but no motion at all. I felt myself pitch forward and a sudden feeling of weightlessness then over the handlebars I went, followed by a brief slide across the ground. I looked up, and I saw a car coming in my direction, and although close to me, I had time to move out of the way despite the aching cuts and bruises that I was sure were forming.

Leaning next to my bike, I looked it over, trying to figure out what had caused the wheel to suddenly stop. The bike still looked like it was okay. I seemed to take the worst of the impact, and other than a few scrapes, I felt fine. Grabbing hold of the wheel, I assumed that it would be stuck fast, but it spun freely as if nothing had happened just a minute before. I meticulously maintain my bike, seeing how it is my transportation to and from work. Even though I had just bought this bike used recently, I knew every moving part on it, so I wasn't sure what had happened. I gave everything a once over and decided nothing was out of place, so I rode the rest of the way home, although in a slight bit of discomfort.

The next day I felt the wreck more than I had when it had happened. My elbow was sore where I had hit it, and the scabs where the road had cut me pulled against the skin with every pedal. As was my usual routine, I was coming home late down the same road that I had taken my spill the night before. Thinking that if someone was messing with me the night before, they would do it again near the same place. Fortunately, nothing happened, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I turned onto the road leading to my house.

I thought that I was going to make it home without incident when the front tire on my bike halted again. I must have felt something going wrong, or it could have just been dumb luck because I didn't get flipped off my bike this time. I looked around the street trying to find my assailant, but the street was empty. I didn't even hear the sound of someone running away into the darkness.

I was angry at what were a number of options. First, if someone was doing this to me, I could have been seriously hurt twice now. Secondly, at myself, if I had missed something on the bike that was causing some sort of malfunction, then I was to blame. I committed myself to pour over every inch of the bicycle when I got home. I remounted the bike and began peddling toward my house.

I pulled into my driveway and walked up to the keypad next to the garage door and punched in the combination to open the door. I pull my bike into the garage and put it up on the stand, where I do all of my maintenance and repairs. I spend the next three hours taking apart everything on the bike, applying grease and lubricant, and adjusting every cable and lever on it. Nothing stands out with the wheels or the gears that would cause the failure on the road. I hadn't seen anyone there, though, and I didn't find anything wrong with the bike, so I didn't understand what was going on. But a thought in the back of my mind was starting to take shape. Something that I didn't want to accept, let alone consider.

Riding home the next night, I am extra cautious. I don't ride nearly as fast, so I don't wreck no matter what happens. My head is on a swivel looking for anyone or anything in the road that would cause my wheel to stop. Things go pretty normally until I get about halfway home. I have to ride down a pretty steep hill and stand up on the pedals to give myself a little natural shock absorption. As soon as my weight was on it, the pedals gave out. My feet drop to the ground, and the bike is sent off-balance, flipping over a curb.

My chest impacts first, and it knocked the wind from my lungs. My head bounced off the ground, and the world went black. I come to pretty quickly, but I am in an immense amount of pain. I just sit there for probably 15 minutes, just trying to get the road to stop spinning. I knew I have a concussion and was hoping that the throbbing in my wrist was just a sprain and not a broken bone.

The pain is almost unbearable, just dragging myself and what remains of my bike to the side of the road. I am still trying to shake off my head impacting the pavement, as I try to assess what had just happened. The pedal arm had completely come off, and the sprocket had rotated opposite the normal direction it turned with the axle, which for those of you who don't know bikes, is almost impossible without a tool to do so. I grabbed hold of it and tried to rotate it back, but it wouldn't move. I looked down to where my pedals used to be, and it looked as if something had melted right through the arm.

I looked around, trying to find anything in the road that could have caused the wreck, but all I could find were tiny pieces of broken reflectors and the two pieces of what used to be the pedals. No one was around, no cars, no people. It just didn't seem possible. Three days in a row, all by myself with nothing mechanically wrong with the bike and all three days the bike malfunctioned, and now here it sits with the sprocket rotated the wrong way and the pedals severed.

The thought that had started to take hold the night before came front and center in my mind. I had heard of entities attaching themselves to objects before. Was it possible that this was the cause of the problems that I was having? I didn't know for sure, and frankly, I wasn't willing to test the theory. I was done with this bike. Whether it was haunted or just some kind of jinx, I wouldn't ride it again.

To this day, I'm unsure of the cause of the three accidents on the route back home from my work. I threw the bike out, not really caring if it was a waste of money or not. Better out a few bucks than dead, I figured. I went out and bought my next bike new. I figured I would be safe; that way, if some sort of entity was attached to a used bike, this was the safest bet. So far, everything is going well. I hope it stays that way.

9) Lights Out

One of the worst parts of working in a hospital is when a person dies. Especially when it is one of the patients that you have gotten close to. This is especially the case for me, who works in the cancer wing. You see all kinds of people of all ages dealing with this horrible disease, and you spend months watching them go through the worst pain of their lives trying to fight back. Unfortunately, not all of them win. When this happens, one of the worst parts of my job is to take the person's body down to the morgue. After what happened to me one night, the lines I thought existed between the living and the dead changed forever.

I looked down at the face that just a few hours ago was contorted in such pain as her body shut down. I know she was scared to die, but she accepted it and had a chance to say goodbye to the ones that were most important to her. It still is amazing to me how many people that are about to cross over are the ones who are comforting those that they will leave behind. But now her fight is done, and the pain she had experienced is in the past.

I lifted the white sheet over her and maneuvered around to the end of the gurney. As I pushed the cart down the hall, I see people looking at me out of the corner of their eyes. It isn't just the patients or their families but other staff too. Susan had been here for three weeks as her body failed her. But she had been here multiple times, going through chemo and any other therapy in a desperate attempt to save her life. None had worked, though, and the people in the wing would miss her. She was one that people would say, "Susan is gonna beat this, look how hard she is fighting." But in the end, that wasn't the case.

I reached the elevator, and Tish, who was going down with me to the morgue, hit the button to call for the elevator. It took only a few seconds, and the chime announced the car's arrival. The doors opened, and I saw a few people filing out onto the floor. All of them gave the bed a wide berth as if the woman on the bed carried some sort of deadly virus. Hospitals are dedicated to treating the sick and wounded, and when that doesn't happen, the ones who have dedicated their lives to saving them take it the hardest. Some doctors don't even want to be around a dead person, thinking that somehow their streak of saving people will be jinxed. I pushed Susan into the elevator, and behind me, Tish hit the button for the basement.

The elevator jumped to life and began its descent into the bowels of the building. The bed rattled from the jostling of the sudden movement of the elevator, and I gripped the handles a little tighter to make sure it didn't roll around. I watched the numbers on the red LED panel reduce until the letter B was displayed. I heard the chime once again, and the doors slid open to a long white hallway.

Tish walked out first, so it would be easier for me to get the bed out of the elevator. She turned around to make sure I didn't need any help as I began to push. Suddenly the lights in the elevator flickered slightly, and when I only had the bed halfway out, the door began to close. Unable to do anything about it, I just let go of the bed, and the doors hit both sides at the same time. Fortunately, the emergency lever popped the doors open again without damaging the elevator or the bed itself.

"That was weird," I told Tish.

"Yeah, this place down here gives me the creeps," she said back to me.

I grabbed back onto the handles and pushed the bed through the opening without any further problems. Our footsteps echoed down the empty hall as I continued with the grizzly journey. Tish reminded me that she had put the body into the morgue the last time, so it was my turn to do it.

"Great, I get to push the bed and put her away. It must be my lucky day," I replied with an obviously fake smile.

To get to the morgue, you have to push the body up a ramp before you get to the large swinging metal door. I lean into the bed and push a little harder to get up the incline. Tish and I set the brakes on the wheels, and I grab the handle and pull. The door makes a popping noise as the seal is broken into the room. The room itself is fairly small, and the first thing you notice is the smell. It is terrible, formaldehyde, and slow decay. It was a good thing I hadn't eaten anything recently because the stench was especially vile that day.

I pushed the bed containing Susan's body all the way to the back of the freezer. A loud thunk announced that I had gotten it all the way in. The cold inside the room sent goosebumps up and down my arms as I turned around to leave, wanting to get out of there. As I went to leave, the door to the room swung shut, encasing me in the freezing cold.

"Tish! This isn't funny! Let me out!" I yelled through the door.

The lights flickered, and then half of them went out. I reached over to flick the switch off and on, but the other half of the lights refused to come back on. I banged on the door with my fist, letting Tish know that I didn't think this was funny and to let me out. I heard a muffled noise on the other side of the door but couldn't make out what it was that she was saying. I heard a ticking noise coming from behind me. I looked up to the fan in the vent, thinking that it is the source of the noise, but the fan blade wasn't moving.

"Huh? That's weird..." I said to the empty room.

Suddenly it feels like the room drops at least 10 degrees. The tapping noise began to get louder and more insistent. I looked around, trying to find out where the noise was coming from. It sounded like something striking metal, but the only thing metal in the room was the drawers holding the bodies. The ticking noise starts again. It was coming from the drawers, but I didn't know how that could be. The only thing in there would have been another body.

I walked over to the drawer and put my ear right next to it, trying to see if, in fact, that was where it was coming from, but the noise refused to cooperate. I walked back to the door, ready to start my protests to Tish all over again. As soon as my open palm hit the door once, the entire room went black. Without light, you couldn't see six inches in front of your face, so I put my back to the door as that way, I at least knew where I was. I began slapping the door over and over again as the darkness squeezed in around me.

"Help me, please help me," a female voice in front of me whispered.

"Tish! Tish, get me out of here!" I yelled. Tears of fear and panic stung my eyes and face as they trickled down my face in the cold. Someone or something was in there with me, and I was almost thankful I couldn't see what was speaking to me. I heard a dragging noise coming toward me on the floor, and I felt something touch my foot. I recoiled onto one leg, trying to get away from what was right beneath me.

"Tish! Please!" I sobbed. The unseen thing below me grabbed hold of my leg and felt like it was pulling itself up my body. I slapped my hand again and again on the door, trying to get her to open the door. Its hand was near my stomach, and I clenched my eyes tightly shut, hoping not to see the phantom. The next thing I know, I am falling backward, with a brief moment of weightlessness, and then pain as my head hits the floor. At first, I think that whatever had been on me had pulled me to the ground, but I hear Tish's voice above me.

"Hey, are you okay? The door wouldn't open, it got stuck," she said.

I reached up to touch the back of my head, and I felt the beginnings of a nasty bump where my head had hit the ramp. My eyes dart to the freezer, looking for whatever had been in there, but the room was empty, and all the lights were on. There was no way I had hallucinated the entire thing, at least I didn't think so, but all that was in the room was the bed that I had just pushed in.

"I need to get out of here now," I told her.

"What are you talking about?" she looked at me.

"I need to get out of here right now," I said with a little more force.

She cocked an eyebrow up at me, then turned and shut the door. "You're acting weird," she said back, "Let me look at that bump on your head."

"I'm fine, let's just go, please," I shooed her off with a hand.

It took everything I had not to run straight to the elevator that night. But I can tell you the sense of relief I felt when I got back to our floor was like a huge weight had been lifted off my chest. I will not go down there alone to this day. I found out later that I'm not the only person who has had experiences down there, but until that night, I wouldn't have believed them if they had told me. I try to pass off the duty to take the bodies of our patients down there any time I can, but luckily for me, nothing has happened again. I just hope it stays that way.

10) Stolen Shadows

My friends and I, one night, decided that we wanted to play capture the flag in the woods. We thought that it would be fun and exciting to sneak through the woods and try to scare one another while playing our favorite game. But although our intentions were good, things went horribly wrong.

Given that there were five of us, we decided to split up into two teams. My friend Chris and I were paired up together. We headed out into the woods looking for the perfect place to hide our flag so the other team wouldn't find it. Being how we were outnumbered, we decided that just running for the other team’s flag was the best strategy, but we needed to give ourselves some time to get there. I had grown up in the area, so I knew every square inch of those woods from exploring them while I was a kid.

When we came upon a trail leading up a hill, Chris asked me where it leads. I told him that it led to a cabin owned by a man who had been sent to prison for armed robbery. I told him that it had been abandoned and fallen into disrepair since the owner had been gone for quite a while. He thought that it was the perfect place to hide our flag to keep it safe, but I didn't feel right breaking into the place even if the person who owned it had been gone for years. Plus, the trail was quite long, and it would take us at least 20 minutes to hike it, and there wouldn't be any way for the others to find us.

Chris was pretty competitive and insisted that we go. Unable to come up with a good excuse, I decided to go along with his plan.

After hiking the trail, we came to the cabin. It looked as if nature was starting to reclaim the area as the roof was caving in, and I could see a lot of holes where the water had taken its toll on the wooden siding. I zipped up my sweatshirt from getting a bit of a chill when we arrived in the clearing. Chris walked up to the door like he owned the place and opened it.

"Chris? What are you doing?" I asked him. Coming up here with our flag was one thing but adding breaking and entering was something I wanted no part of. I saw him walk inside, and when I reached the door, the smell of rotting meat and excrement hit me. I followed him around as he looked around the kitchen and the living room as poked around the cabin. He found a beautiful pocket watch sitting on a table next to what I only assumed was a recliner at one point in time. Now we were adding theft to our list of crimes; I was about to protest when Chris and I heard a growling from inside the house. It sounded like a large dog or a wolf, which was not uncommon where we were at. We took off at a full run, trying to put distance on the animal, and it sounded like he was right behind us the entire time. Neither one of us was in good enough shape to run the entire trail we had just climbed, but fear and adrenaline pushed us all the way down.

After we realized the animal had given up, we stopped to catch our breath. I had my hands on my knees while I bent over, trying to get the knives out of my lungs. We decided we had both had enough fun for one night, and once we found our friends went back home. When I got home, I couldn't sleep; I just kept hearing the sound of the footsteps behind us as we ran. I turned on the TV, trying to find anything to distract me from my runaway imagination.

The next day Chris called all of us up to see if we wanted to get together at his house that night. I was torn. After he had stolen the watch, I wasn't sure that I wanted to hang around him anymore, but everyone else was going, so I decided to tag along. As soon as I walked into Chris's house, I noticed the temperature. It wasn't cold; it was freezing. He was waving the watch around, showing it off to all of us, I guess trying to impress us. It had the opposite effect. The more I saw it, the more uncomfortable I felt. Alex had started feeling sick to his stomach almost from the time we walked in and had been hovering over the toilet, throwing up most of the night.

Two of my friends had to get up early the next morning, so they left sometime around 11:00 pm. That left Chris, Jessica, and me still there. Around 1:00 am in the morning, we heard a tapping sound on the window. Chris thought it was his brother stumbling home drunk from another of his late-night binges and went to go check on it. When he came back, though, he told us that nothing was there and couldn't find the source of the noise. Jessica was tired and decided that she was going to drive home and asked me if I wanted a ride. I wanted to leave, but something told me I needed to stay with Chris to make sure he was going to be okay. Jessica didn't like the idea of me staying behind but left.

As it got later, Chris seemed more and more out of it. When I asked him if he was tired and wanted to go to sleep, he met my eyes and told me, "No." The way he said it was unsettling, and I just sat there in silence. Everything I would ask him was only answered by a ‘No’, or ‘Yes’, or he would just stare at me as if he couldn't see me. He finally got up off the couch and walked over to the door to his basement. His dad kept his beer down there, and I asked him why he waited so long to get them after everyone else was gone.

What happened next is something that will stay with me for the rest of my life. He turned around and smiled at me, his pupils had disappeared, and he stuck his tongue out. It was long, and it seemed to be getting even more so. The shadows at the bottom of the stairs whirled almost like they were dancing around him. Somewhere in the house, I heard a scream and doors being opened and slammed shut. I did the only thing I could think of, I ran.

I hit the door at a full sprint. I just wanted to get home and away from Chris. I didn't know what I had just seen, but I knew I had to get away. I ran the entire way home, and even when I felt I couldn't run anymore, I pushed myself further, trying to put as much distance between me and that basement as I could.

I fumbled for my key when I made it to my front door. I figured if I could just get inside, I would be safe. Finally, I got it in the cylinder and unlocked the door. I ran to my dad's room and woke him up. I told him everything, from the cabin all the way to what I had seen in the basement. He looked at me as if trying to judge what he saw there. He must have found something that said I was telling him the truth.

"You need to go back to church. You need to find God again," he said.

After that night, I never missed a Sunday service, and I have found myself praying almost every day. This was a massive shift for me because I claimed before that night to be a devoted non-believer.

A few days after that night, one of my friends went back to Chris's to get the backpack that he had left there that night, but no one was there. I saw Chris a couple of times, but a couple of weeks passed, and I didn't see him anymore; it was like he and his entire family just disappeared. I haven't seen him since then. I wish I knew what happened to him. I wonder if he is still alive.

11) Plagued

When I was 14, one of my school friends asked a few of us to come over to his house so that we could try out an Ouija Board. We all gathered around a chessboard in his garage, where he had arranged scrabble letters in a circle on it. For the "spirit" to communicate with us, we used a whiskey tumbler with a silver dollar on it. The idea of the coin was to keep people honest. We figured if someone was pushing the indicator around themselves, the coin would fall off while the glass would stay in place, so obviously real scientific stuff.

We started with the typical "Is anyone there?" question a few times, but the glass didn't move. He picked up the glass to look at it, and I saw him narrow his eyes a bit.

"Look at this," he told us. When I looked at the glass, I noticed that the glass had acquired a crack in it that hadn't been there when we started. Although the glass hadn't moved, I got a bit of a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. He replaced the glass on the chessboard with the coin on top and asked again if anyone was present. The glass began to move and spelled out the word "yes". We continued to ask questions, and slowly the board began to answer our questions. I remember asking if God was real, and it spelled out "bull". None were especially religious at the table, but there was a definite impact on that statement.

As we continued to ask questions, we were told that it was the uncle of one of the boys in the garage that had died in a car crash a few years ago that was speaking to us. As we continued asking questions, the tumbler started moving quicker around the board, at times knocking the letters to the floor, seemingly gaining energy. We asked him if he was okay, and he told us that he was.

One thing that you need to know about what was going on at this point is at different points of time when we are asking questions, one of us would at times look like they would suddenly close their eyes, almost like they were asleep and then suddenly come to. He also told us he would like us to visit his grave. He said he would like that. We asked him what type of flowers he would like us to bring to him. I suddenly got very sleepy, and my eyes closed. I got a distinct picture of a yellow daffodil in my head. Right after I came to the indicator spelled out just that. This was the point when I began to suspect that the spirit that was speaking to us wasn't actually our friend’s uncle. The image in my head and the message that mirrored it gave me a really bad feeling.

It could have been my rising fear, but this is where I believe that things started getting bad. In the dark, we heard a couple of bangs on the boxes the board was sitting on, then on the side of the garage. The boxes could have been one of us shifting, but the loud noise in the quiet space made all of us jump. We decided that we had seen enough and asked if we could say goodbye to the spirit, but the spirit spelled out "no". That was all it took to convince me I should get out of there. I took my hands off the glass and walked out of the garage. My friend Marshall must have had the same idea because he followed me out.

We were standing out there for a few minutes when another of my friends came out and told us the "uncle" had gotten angry after we had left. He asked us to come back to it. Reluctantly we both agreed but refused to participate any longer. The spirit shortly thereafter agreed to leave with the promise that we would have another session soon.

After we had released the spirit, all of us took the chessboard, the scrabble tiles, the cup, and the coin and threw them into a canal that was behind my friend's house. Then without saying anything, every one of us ran back home; we didn't even take the time to tell one another goodbye.

That night I was plagued by horrible nightmares, I could see a figure in the shadows around me in a dark room, but I couldn't quite make it out. It would circle around me like it was stalking me. I kept waking up in a cold sweat to the feeling that someone was in my room watching me even though I couldn't see anyone there.

A few days later, the same guy asked us to come by his garage to try again with the Ouija board. I said I would come but ended up canceling at the last minute, too afraid of a repeat performance. It also seemed that my friend Marshall had seen enough himself to be wary and decided to cancel as well. Later the next day, he said that the "uncle" was angry with us for not showing up and threatened to hurt our faces and hands. But I figured maybe they were just making this up as a way to scare us, but I wasn't completely sure. I wouldn't have taken this seriously just a few days ago, but now I didn't know what to think. What happened soon after, though, dispelled all doubts about the seriousness of the statement.

I was walking home with a friend of mine from the store eating a bag of chips when I felt what I could only describe as an electric jolt go through my hand and settle into my jaw. My mouth completely dried up, and I nearly choked on the food that was in my mouth. I immediately reacted and started yelling at my friend, thinking he was trying to pull some sort of practical joke. However, he was genuinely surprised and a little afraid of the reaction that I had made. The same thing happened later on in the day when I touched a metal fence.

I know that what we came into contact with that night in the garage wasn't my friend's uncle. I also know that it had the ability to affect me in ways that still give me the chills today when I think about it. One thing I am sure of, though, is I will never use an Ouija Board again.

12) Liar

While growing up, my parents enrolled me in a private Catholic school. I had a very small tight group of friends, and we did everything together. For one of my friend's birthdays, we were going to be having a slumber party at her house. Tonight, we were all very excited because Emily, a new girl who I had never met, was coming with the promise that she was going to bring her grandmother's table with her that would answer questions. I didn't believe this was possible, but it wasn't my birthday, so I just kept my mouth shut.

The birthday party started like almost any other where we watched movies and ate pizza. Then as night started coming on, my friends were anxious to try out the table that Emily had brought. The item itself wasn't very remarkable. It had four short wooden foldout legs, and the top had three different grains of wood that had been set into one another in a diamond pattern. She explained to us that you lightly rested your index and middle finger on top of the table, and with your eyes closed, you had to concentrate and repeat in unison, "rise table, rise table, rise..." over and over again. At this point, I was skeptical that anything was going to happen and laughed a little as she was telling us this. I got more than one withering look from my friends who must have taken this all very seriously.

We all gathered around the table. I closed my eyes and placed my fingers on the table and began speaking the words we were told. At first, nothing happened, but then I felt the side of the table nearest me begin to lift off the ground. My eyes popped open, expecting to see Emily holding the table up, but everyone was still kneeling with their fingers on the table. It rose to a height of about a foot and just seemed to float there. I didn't know how this was possible. Everyone seemed to be in shock except for Emily, who must have seen this before. She explained to us that we could ask the table yes or no questions, and if the answer was yes, we would get a reaction. If not, the table would not move.

We started like most 12-year-old girls would, asking the table about what boys the others liked. If the table was telling us "yes", it would dip down, and one of the legs would nearly touch the ground, then it would float back up. If the table was telling us "no", then it simply would remain where it was. When it came to my turn to have the girls figure out who I liked, I figured there was no way that the table would know. I was fairly new in the school myself and had told no one about my crush.

They began naming everyone they could think of, but the table remained in place. When one of the girls guessed his name, my face turned scarlet as the table dipped to the floor. The table knew, somehow, it knew.

As the night wore on, we continued to ask it questions. We began trying to figure out who this entity was that seemed to know more than it should. It told us that it was a young boy from Russia that had been murdered by his uncle while he slept. He asked us to go there and find where he had been hidden so he could have a proper burial. I started to become concerned that the spirit inside the table wasn't telling the truth because I didn't know how a young boy would be able to understand the questions that we were asking it. One of the girls even asked if it knew who Jesus was, and the table remained ominously still.

After a while, I started to become scared, thinking that this spirit wasn't who it said it was and wanted to stop. I could tell from the faces of my friends I wasn't the only one. Emily told us that we weren't supposed to take our fingers off the table until we had properly told it goodbye and released it, but the table refused to go back down to the floor. It seemed to become angry at us and would violently bob up and down when we would ask it a question. No matter how many times Emily tried, the spirit would not leave. It felt like we were no longer in control.

Willing to try anything, one of the girls had a crucifix around her neck and placed it on the tabletop. The table began to shudder violently until the cross fell to the floor. At that point, I had seen enough. Too terrified to continue, I took my hands off the table. Emily told me I couldn't stop until we got the spirit to leave, but there was no way I was laying a single finger on that table. That night I couldn't sleep from fear of the spirit still being inside the room. Somehow the other girls seemed to sleep soundly. Even when I went home the next day, I still had an uneasy feeling of being watched and followed.

My experiences that night were eye-opening events for me. It took me a long time to get over what I had seen and felt, but it seems that whatever was speaking to us that night was trying to lure us, young girls, into something. I know now that letting in any spirit like that can be dangerous, and you just never know what might show up to say hello.

13) The Moving Doll

Although my sister was younger than me by a few years growing up, we always were best friends. We shared toys, played games with one another, and even shared a bedroom.

When I was eleven and Christi was eight, we were alone in our bedroom playing "I Spy" with one another, as our parents had gone out for the evening, and we had been left with a babysitter for the evening. We had gone back and forth for a little while searching out things in our bedroom, trying to fool one another. We heard our babysitter call out to us from downstairs that it was time for bed. Not wanting to incur the ire of the girl downstairs, we turned out the lights and climbed up into bed.

Christi didn't want to stop playing, so when I closed my eyes trying to go to sleep, she called out, "I spy something with my eye, something that starts with D."

I heard a muffled thud from across the room. One of our rag dolls that were made by our grandmother had fallen onto the floor. I didn't know how the doll could have fallen, there wasn't a fan on in the room, and the window was closed, so it couldn't have been the wind.

"How did the dolly fall?" I asked Christi, "neither one of us was over there."

She gave me a shrug, and I continued to look around the room for what my sister might have chosen. Then I had an idea.

"Dolly, you see a dolly," I told her.

Suddenly she screamed out, kicking the covers off of her. She was scared that much I could tell, but the sudden shift in the mood caught me off balance, and I didn't know what to say or do for a moment.

"Christi, what's the matter?" I asked her, now sitting up in bed.

"Something grabbed me!" She insisted.

"What do you mean something grabbed you? I'm the only one here besides you," I told her. I walked over to her bed to check on her, thinking that it was just her imagination. I picked up the covers and looked around as she huddled against the wall, watching my every move. I even went so far as pulling her blankets off the bed, but that's all I found, blankets.

"You see, there is nothing here," I reassured her, "now go back to bed." She seemed to be calmer now and slowly inched forward, allowing me to cover her back up with her blankets.

"I swear, something grabbed me. I'm not making it up," she said, sounding a little unsure of herself. I tucked her back into bed and handed her back her bear, hoping it would help her not be scared. Her eyes looked big as she stared at me. I'm sure trying to find out if I believed her or not.

I climbed back into my own bed and pulled the covers over myself, ready to go to sleep. A light rustling noise came from the foot of my bed. I tried to ignore it, but it continued on and seemed to become more persistent. I slowly crawled across the top of my bed and looked down onto the ground, but nothing was there, just a bare floor. I figured that Christi thinking something had grabbed her now had me hearing things that weren't there.

I got under my blankets, hoping this would be the last time I had to try and go to sleep that night. I had just laid my head back on the pillow when I heard the rustling noise again, but not only do I hear it, I see a small lump moving under the blankets on my bed. I don't know why, but I sat there transfixed by what I saw as it inched closer and closer to my legs. Then when it was almost next to me, it burst forward, and I felt something latch onto me. Screaming, I was kicked out, but whatever had hold of me wouldn't let go. I managed to push the blankets down far enough that I could see strands of bright red yarn peeking out from the darkness. I pulled my leg out from the blankets, and the ragdoll that had fallen earlier was holding onto my foot.

I screamed again, kicking frantically, trying to get the doll to let go. Its eyes seemed to bore into mine as panic took over. At some point, Christi had gotten out of bed and was next to me and grabbed hold of the doll. As soon as she touched it, the arms went limp, and she threw it down on the floor. We stared at it for a few seconds. I almost expected it to get up and chase after me.

"I told you something grabbed me," Christi said almost as an afterthought.

"Uh, huh," I said, not wanting to take my eyes off the doll. I couldn't believe what had just happened, the doll, it had been, alive.

Our bedroom door opened, and our babysitter sat there looking at the two of us out of bed. "I thought I told you two it was time for bed," she said. "Do you want me to tell your parents you were up late? And what is with all this yelling?"

"No," we both said in unison. I considered telling her about what had happened, but I knew she wouldn't believe me. I shot a look at Christi, and she seemed to have the same idea.

I picked up the doll and put it in one of the drawers in the desk in our room, hoping it would contain it for the night. Not wanting to press my luck with the babysitter further, I got back in bed.

"Now, go to sleep, you two, it's late," she told us and closed the door.

Nothing happened the rest of that night, and eventually, both of us fell asleep. I woke up first the next morning and shook Christi so we could figure out what we would do with the doll. I opened the desk drawer to find the doll, but it was empty. Figuring it had to be somewhere in the room since the door was shut, we tore our room apart trying to find it, but in the end, we couldn't locate the doll anywhere.

Later on in the afternoon, we were outside playing with our friend Amanda who told us that she had found a rag doll in her room that morning that she had never seen before. We asked her to bring it out so we could see it, and I didn't know what to say when I saw that it was our doll!

14) Reflections

Sometimes things don't make sense when you are trying to understand them in rational terms. So, when you exhaust every possible rational solution to a situation that cannot be explained using what seems possible, then you have to inevitably turn to the improbable. That is what happened to me one morning when I had an experience that had me questioning what was possible.

I was getting home late from an evening out with my friends. We were celebrating a birthday and decided that we were all going to ditch our significant others and have a girl's night. It had been a while since we had the opportunity to do this, and we decided to take full advantage. I wasn't someone who liked to drink a lot, but an evening with my friends sounded like a welcome change from my average Saturday night, which usually consisted of takeout and a movie.

I got home right around 2:30 am in the morning after being dropped off by a cab. I walked back to my bedroom so I could get out of my clothes and put on something more comfortable, sweatpants and a t-shirt, then head to bed. I was brushing my teeth and looking at myself in the mirror when I got a bad feeling that I wasn't alone in the room. Something told me that I was being watched. I couldn't see their eyes, but I felt them on me. The hairs on my arms were up, and I had goosebumps running up and down my entire body.

I looked around, trying to see if I could find where the source of dread was coming from. I was alone, so I didn't want to go far, but I knew if I didn't see this through then, I wouldn't be able to get any sleep that night. Walking from room to room, I peeked around corners and shone the light from my phone into the shadows. It took me 20 minutes before I had gotten to searching every room and closet in my apartment. I found no one, but the feeling of eyes wouldn't leave me.

It had been a while since I had been out on the town, and I thought that maybe it was just me coming down from the music-fueled adrenaline that had been coursing through me the entire night, so I figured that I would finish getting ready for bed and then just read a book for a while to let myself calm down.

I finished brushing my teeth and walked over to the bed to lie down. I slid under the covers and reached over for my book. It didn't take long before I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer. I set the book aside and switched off the lamp on the table beside my bed. My eyes drifted closed, and I was asleep within a few minutes.

I awoke with a start as I heard a crash against the floor that came from the bathroom. How had someone been able to hide when I looked around the entire place? I thought to myself... unless they had watched me as I went from room to room and moved when I couldn't see them. A cold shiver ran up and down my spine as I pulled the covers a little off of me at a time. I didn't want to make a sound as I approached, hoping to keep the element of surprise on my side.

I walked into the bathroom; the room was only partially illuminated by the nightlight that was plugged in by the sink. Shadows surrounded me as I tried to find who was in there with me. I stepped slowly into the room, and a sharp pain shot up my foot. I reached down and picked a small sliver of glass out of my foot. The intruder had broken the vanity mirror on the small makeup desk. There was enough light that I could see the top of it and noticed all of the bottles and compacts were still in the places that I leave them. If the mirror would have been bumped by someone, it didn't seem possible that it could have completely missed hitting anything on the desk. It was like someone had picked it up and dropped it on the ground.

I walked around the broken mirror, still trying to find out where the intruder was. I got in front of my sink and turned and saw someone, startled; I yelled out.

"Who are..." I yelled. I had seen myself in the mirror and had mistaken it for someone else. I took a steadying breath and pointed at myself in the mirror, trying to downplay how scared I felt. I see a shift in the shadows in the mirror behind me, and my body goes rigid. Every nerve ending feels like it is firing, and I cannot move. I stare into the mirror, waiting for whoever is hiding to show themselves.

I want to turn and face them, but instead, all I can do is look at the reflection, unable to face the danger. The shadows seem to dance and flow behind me as a figure seems to emerge. It is like staring into the abyss when I look at it. There is no face where the "head" is, just a pool of blackness as it floats toward me. There are no arms or legs that I can make out but just whisps of shadow that seem to form and disappear.

It comes right behind me; I'd be shaking if my body could move from absolute terror. I feel pressure on my shoulders like it had placed its hands there and slowly slid them down my arms in a cold caress. I felt a chill trail down my arm where its touch has been. A gentle breeze passed over my ear, and I knew that its "face" was right next to my ear. It said only one word, and it sent a chill right through to my very soul... my name. It knew who I was, and that scared me more than I thought possible.

The breath seemed to abate, and the sensation of its hands left my arms. Unable to stop it, my legs failed me, and I collapsed to the floor. Fear fueled my next move when I lunged for the light switch on the wall. I missed the first time, but on my second attempt, I managed to turn the lights on. My eyes darted back and forth, trying to find out where it had gone. But the room was empty. I was alone.

I'm still not sure what was in my bathroom that night, but I believe it came from the mirror on my vanity. I never believed in ghosts or demons until that night. I still live in that apartment, but I got rid of the vanity. I just hope that whatever was there that night has moved on.

15) Reflections

I am 16 years old. Recently some things have happened to me that have me questioning the beliefs that I held about what was real and make-believe. These things started to happen after my parents bought me a desk from a secondhand store for me to do my homework at night. I am a person who firmly believes in things that can be seen and explained. Now I'm not sure what to believe...

My dad and I carried the desk down the hall to my room. It wasn't so much that it was heavy but awkward and cumbersome. We did okay keeping from banging into the walls until we got to the door to the room. My dad paused and looked up at me.

"Okay, let's be careful not to bang it into the door and wall," he instructed me.

"Yeah, I know, Dad," I told him. No sooner though that we turned the desk halfway into the room that a loud bang came from the side of the desk where it collided with the frame. Our eyes met, and he cocked his eyebrow up at me in a gesture that said I thought you were going to watch the wall. I sighed, knowing exactly what the look meant and continued back into the room.

We had cleared a space where the desk was going, and we quickly set it down and positioned it flush against the wall. Both of us were satisfied with the location my dad left me to set up my new desk as I wanted. I took out the office supplies that I had gotten at the store and tried to organize the desktop in what I thought would be the most efficient way. Satisfied with how it looked, I walked out of my room to see what was for dinner.

The evening passed, and I went to bed around 10:00 pm. Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up to the sound of a pencil falling off the desk and hitting the floor. The sound startled me awake, thinking that someone was in my room. After the moment of shock cleared, I assumed that our cat had jumped up on the desk and was curious about the new piece of furniture in the room. The problem with that was I couldn't find her anywhere, but the loud noise could have startled her, and she might have just run off. It made sense too, so I turned back over and went back to sleep.

The next day when I came back from school, I walked into my room and dumped my backpack on my bed. I went to take my science book over to my desk to finish the assignment for the next day when I heard a crunch underneath my foot. I looked down and saw one of the pencils I had bought the day before snapped in half under my foot. I looked to the ceiling and muttered, "Great..." Reaching down, I noticed not only had the pencil been knocked off, but everything that had been on the desk, too.

"Damn cat, mess someone else’s things up," I muttered as I picked up the floor. I placed everything on the desktop as I reached farther under my bed, trying to reach the last few pens. I clearly heard a pencil rolling on the desktop, the distinct noise of the flat sides as they rotate seemed to get quicker and then stop.

The pencil smacks against the hardwood floor right next to my head. I finally retrieve the last of my pens and the pencil that had fallen again and stood up to look at the desk. I didn't want a desk with a sloped surface that was going to dump all my stuff onto the ground every few seconds, so I put the pencil back on top and watched. It didn't move at all. I sat there continuing to stare at it, almost willing it to roll off once more.

Shaking my head, I reached out to poke it. It rolled toward the back of the desk and stopped. I rolled it toward the floor next, but it stopped after just a couple of inches. I didn't understand. It was like the pencil had a mind of its own and just didn't want to move. I decided to go get a level to check if maybe the desk may need repair. I turned around and walked a few steps, nearly making it to the door when I hear the pencil begin to move. I turn around just in time to see the piece of wood pick up speed and then fall onto the floor.

"Ah, ha! Gotcha," I said to the desk. I spun around and walked out to the garage to get a level and hammer to fix the problem. I was back within a minute and walked over to the desk and placed the level on it to see how much work this was going to take. I leaned down close to see where the bubble was, dead center... how is that possible? I picked up the level and placed it on the other side, the same thing.

"What in the world?" I said. I didn't understand. How could the pencils be falling off the desk if the surface was flat? I was at a total loss. I tried checking both sides at least two more times, and after getting the same result every time, I threw my hands in the air in defeat. I couldn't figure it out.

I needed to get my homework done before dinner, and I had wasted enough time trying to figure out what was wrong with the desk, so I went to get a glass of water and put the tools away. I came back to the room and pulled up my chair, ready to get to work. I set the glass of water down on the desktop and thought to myself that I would have to get a coaster at some point for drinks.

I had been at it for about half an hour when I heard a small scraping noise. I looked at the desk but couldn't see anything; then I caught the motion. My water glass seemed to be creeping across the desk, not toward me where the pencil had gone but to the side. I froze as I watched it creep slowly toward the edge. It moved about six inches and then stopped right before it fell off.

I shook my head. "Did I just see that? Did that just happen?" I probably would have thought that I was going crazy if I hadn't seen the trail of condensation that the glass had left on the desktop. I stood up quickly, holding my hands up like I had someone pointing a gun at me. What was this? Ghosts don't exist; at least that is what I had always thought. But what else could it be? Something hit the back of my knee, and I fell back into the chair. I had to grab onto the desk to keep from falling onto the ground.

I almost threw the chair out from under me as I ran from the room. I ran straight to my mom and dad. I told them what I had been experiencing in the room. My dad seemed skeptical, which I understood considering I would have been too if I hadn't seen it myself. My mom, on the other hand, seemed to believe me. She told me we would get rid of the desk the next day.

The three of us took the desk back to the thrift shop where we had bought it and just left it in the donation area. None of us wanted to explain why we were returning it. I'm sure they had heard stories like ours before, but I wasn’t interested in answering their questions or their judging looks.

After that experience, my parents agreed that they would buy me a new desk to go in my room. They both knew that I was unlikely to want another one that someone else had owned. So, I guess you can say that I'm no longer a skeptic but a reluctant believer. But if I have my way, I won't be having any other brushes with the paranormal.

Stories included in this article are ©Eve S Evans and may not be used without written consent from the author.