A few years ago, I asked my SO if he had ever seen a ghost. He got really uncomfortable and squirrelly, lots of hemming and hawing. Annoyed, I said "Just say yes or no! I won't judge if you think you have seen a ghost." (I'm a skeptic and figured he didn't want to sound like a rube or something).
Turns out he was hesitant because he believes he saw one but it was while he was deployed on a mission in the Middle East, and he was trying to think of how he could describe it without giving up any classified info. The story is this:
He was in the spooky, vague "Middle East" when there was a commotion from the soldiers watching the perimeter. Apparently, they could see a man about 100 yards away from the camp. He had appeared out of nowhere, no one saw him walking up. The man was just standing there, not doing anything threatening. But since it was a strange man in a war zone, they broke out all the high tech gear to see what was going on. They could see his face, his clothes, his height, but he looked bizarrely distorted and was not giving off a heat signature (they have infrared jimjams and whatnot, it's the freaking military not a piddling ghosthunting troupe here). He was not the temperature of a human being, he was the temperature of the air around him. They had no idea what was going on and people were freaking out.
At this point I said some obvious stuff- "Maybe it was a scarecrow or dummy. Or a shadow. Or the soldiers were really tired and delirious and their eyes were playing tricks on them. Or it was a hologram weapon shaped like a human".
His response: They called different people up to come look at the man, it wasn't just a few soldiers who saw this- dozens of people came to look and everyone confirmed that it was definitely a person. Eventually they decided to send out a team to check this guy out. When they got about 50 yards away, the man started walking- only it didn't look like he was walking toward or away from them, only walking in place. They froze, expecting an attack. But the man never got any closer.
Me- "So he was, uh, moonwalking? OooooOOoohh a terrorist with dance moves, scary!"
His shaky response: It looked like it was trying to walk but instead of moving like a regular person, its bones were breaking and splintering backwards and forwards at the joints. I can't think of a better way to describe it. Its head was jerking around like a puppet. When the convoy got a few yards closer, it disappeared entirely. The team hauled ass back to camp and as soon as they returned, the man-thing reappeared in its spot. Everyone took turns watching it for an hour or so until it disappeared for good. Didn't walk away, didn't fly or melt or explode, just stood there for a looooong time then vanished.
James, from
When I was 17 years old, I was an avid romance reader. I'd sneak all of my mother's Harlequin novels and lock myself in my bedroom and just absorb all of it's cheesy, dramatic, goodness. So when I started dreaming of this dashing, young fellow in a breezy, ruffled, white shirt (think Fabio or whatever any man on a historical romance novel would be wearing) and riding boots, I was ecstatic.
His name was James and he had this old time, English accent that I couldn't quite place. The dreams started out naturally, once a month he'd pop in, sometimes twice. Then it became more frequent, 1-2 times a week. It would always start the same, I'd be dreaming of myself sleeping in my bed and I'd wake up to find him standing in my room. His eyes glowed this vibrant green and he kept pushing his ruffled hair back in this sexy way. The way he looked at me is what I became obsessed with. There was this yearning, this deep devotion to me. I would wake up thinking, "that's what it feels like to be in love".
He would always approach me slowly, hesitant to make sure I wasn't scared. Then he would tell me I was beautiful and ask me to dance. Music would appear out of no where and I would look down and find myself in this beautiful, laced nightgown and flowers in my hair and we would waltz in moonlight (can you see why a 17 year old girl would just become obsessed with this?) I would become so eager to go to bed, sometimes forcing myself to sleep by 7:00pm just so I could see him.
Meanwhile, things in my waking life were becoming strangely dark. My music player would turn on in the middle of the night, full blast, waking the entire house. I'd be doing homework at my desk and would continuously see something from the corner of my eye. One time, with the house to ourselves, my best friends and I were all piled into my bed, eating cookie dough and watching reruns of "Cops" when we heard a male voice talking from the bathroom just down the hall from my bedroom. At first, we didn't think anything of it. Perhaps my Dad came home earlier than expected, or my brother. We were a family of five with an open door policy for friends. It was rare that we were alone.
The voice kept going on and on, until finally, my one best friend asked me who was here? I muted the TV and we listened and then I realized, the voice had an accent. I got this terrible shiver down my back and I yelled out "James?" and suddenly, the voice stopped. I finally told my best friends about my dreams and their faces went white. Two nights later, I dreamt the same dream. I was dancing with James but the energy was different. His grip on me was firmer and as we danced, the whole time he was growling in my ear, "you are mine and no one can have you".
A week later, I begged my mother to let me move out of that bedroom and come upstairs (it was in the basement). My younger sister switched with me and she stayed there for years. My dreams, gone.
A little over a year ago now, my sister and I were helping my mother clean out the room so she could transform it into her own office. My sister and I were going through things and she randomly started laughing and said, "James won't like this".
I have never felt more cold or sick or terrified in my life. "What did you just say?"
She looked embarrassed, and waved her hand to pass it off before carrying back to the boxes.
"James, English man who dances?" I asked.
She nodded. "He's not a very nice man".
Hammer Time, from
My mother's family lived on the second floor of a large duplex on Côte-Sainte-Catherine. The front doors to the second-floor apartments were located on the side of the buildings and faced each other from one duplex to the other. They rarely locked the front door and everyone knew their neighbours quite well. One morning, one of my uncles, who must have been about 13 at the time, says he woke up very early. This was summertime and although it was kind of light out, the sun hadn't risen yet so it was practically in the middle of the night still. He was half awake in his bed, a bit groggy and he realized that what had woken him was the sound of someone creeping along in the corridor. For some reason, it didn't feel right to him, it didn't sound like someone from the family was going to the bathroom during the night. It was slower, much weirder. He called out «Hey, who's there?». He then heard whoever was in the corridor walk back to the top of the stairs, down the stairs, out the front door. Creepy enough imho, but it gets much worse.
Within six months of this happening, a teenage girl was found dead in the duplex next door to my family's home. She had been killed during the night with a hammer by a 15-year-old boy that lived nearby. He was known by all the other kids of the neighbourhood and my mother remembers him as being very quiet and always kind of looking down or away whenever you would look at him. He was kind of an outcast, certainly because of his personality but also a bit perhaps because he went to a posh school thanks to his father being the janitor there and he got a bit snobbed out by the other kids.
In the duplex where my family lived, on the first floor there was a family with three teenage girls, in my family there were two teenage girls. I guess he knew where to look and I guess he must have been lurking around for a good while before deciding that it was time to take the hammer out. He killed himself in hospital or jail while he was still very young.
