• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to secondary sidebar
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • YouTube

David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

  • About
  • DavidMcElroy.TV

Spooky stories: My friends share their real-life weird experiences

By David McElroy · October 31, 2013

Spooky storiesA few days ago, I asked friends on Facebook if they had had anything spooky or unexplained happen to them over the years. Here’s a sampling of the stories I received. Editing has been very, very light, in order to retain the original words and tone.

Let’s start with Kate Duggan, who’s a high school teacher in California. She shares a story from the house where she lives and then some strangeness from the school where she teaches:

I live in a house built in 1914. When we moved in 34 years ago, there was something…something…about the downstairs bedroom (which we made into a TV room).

No one wanted to be there after dark. Weird. Much later, when friends moved in to stay for a few months, strange things began happening. Lights going on an off (completely at random), the room being too hot at one moment, too cold at the next. My friends reported seeing stuff in the middle of the night. And these are friends who don’t believe in crazy stuff. Very, very strange. Another friend told me that it was a ghost. Yeah, right.

I got really sick of it, so I decided to do something. I went in and announced that whoever was there was dead. To go away. I burned salt and rubbing alcohol in a dutch oven and invited the “ghost” to move on.

“You are dead. Go away,” I said.

I swear that the next part actually happened: the lights went off — and it was exactly as if something lifted off the room. A presence or something. The lights went back on. I have never felt it since. My friends were completely shaken up — well, so was I. I have not felt it since.

I have since had a number of encounters with “something strange.” A few friends believe that I am something of a witch. I can get rid of some nasty stuff, or at least so I have been told. Always with light. Always.

In another case, the administration at my school forced me to move my classroom from a room in the new building to a room in an older building. I had to move over the summer. That was the strangest room ever. I could barely stand to be in it for longer than 45 minutes–which was something of a damper on moving in.

My good ftriend Kari was moving from the room next door, and I asked her about my new room (which had no resident teacher in it for any longer than a semester for the previous five years). She told me that there was a ghost in residence in one of the four rooms that shared a common office (my new room was one of them), but to not talk about it, because she didn’t want anyone to think she was nuts.

The ghost was a former student who had committed suicide and stuck around (this is general knowledge at school — yes, the girl had had a class in that room 10 years ago). She talked about encountering the “student” only in the early morning (she got to school early for zero period, usually at 6:30 a.m. every day). When “she” arrived, the temperature in the room would suddenly drop, and there would be a creepy feeling of being watched.

I never experienced this. I simply felt that all the oxygen was being sucked out of the room and had a horrible feeling of oppression. I really wondered how I was going to be able to teach there in September. I did the salt and rubbing alcohol burning thing again — quite a trick with school smoke alarms. And I invited the person to move on.

I have been in the room now for four years, have had no trouble, and kids hang out there a lot. And I spend a lot of time there without feeling like all the oxygen is being removed from the room.

Next comes a story from a woman in the U.S. Northwest who wants to remain anonymous:

When I was 16, I was kind of a troublemaker. I was hanging out with a group of kids that I worked with at a pizza shop.
At this time my dad and I lived way out of town — almost a 45-minute drive down remote country roads.

One night this group of friends had a party at someone’s house, where a Ouija board was brought. I had always been raised to never mess with anything supernatural, so I knew in my gut it was not something I should mess with, but I didn’t want to be a weirdo, so I played along.

The game was mostly uneventful, but it was what happened on the drive home that was terrifying to me.

It was early in the morning, and I had been up most of the night. As I was driving down the country roads I noticed a figure standing on the side of the road near a sharp turn. It was a young man wearing all black from head to toe.

He looked evil, menacing even, and as I drove nearer, I remember feeling absolutely terrified that I had to slow down at the turn to pass him. I could feel his eyes fixed on me. I did not look at him again as I drove past, but was so terrified by the experience I never spent time with those kids again.

And never played with a Ouija board again.

The experience solidified the reality of dark forces in this world, and has kept me away from any possible “gateways” ever since.

Next comes a story from Steve Smith, who’s a writer who lives in North Carolina:

My wife and I, with her siblings, used to rent a beach house for one week every year, both before and after we had my daughter. This particular incident happened well before my daughter was born.

During one such vacation, I took a stroll by myself. As I got closer to one of the other beach houses, I could make out a blonde woman about the same height and build as my wife, standing on a deck. Beside her was a blonde girl of about five. The woman began waving, and as I got nearer, I could hear her say, “Do you see Daddy? Wave to Daddy!” The little girl then started waving, too.

I looked around, but there was no one besides me on the street. I assumed the woman had simply mistaken me for her husband from a distance and would realize it in a moment. But even when I was right in front of their house, they kept waving at me as the woman said things like, “Say ‘hi’ to Daddy.” Unfortunately, I had the sun in my eyes and couldn’t make out their features, beyond the fact that they were both blonde and that the woman could have doubled for my wife in a general way, including the fact that she was wearing the kind of dress my wife favors.

Just when I was sure they must be able to see that I was not who they thought I was, they disappeared. That is, they turned as if to go inside their house, which is what I assume happened — but then, the sun was still in my eyes.

I wondered about the odd incident all that week, and told my wife about it, saying, “Maybe it was a vision from the future of a daughter we’ll have. Because I think that’s what she would look like.” I even went back by that house a few times, but never saw the woman or girl again.

A few years later, of course, we did have a baby girl, who turned out to be a blonde like her mother. Now I wonder if I had I been given a glimpse of her, long before she was even conceived.

Heidi Hurd has a story about the bedroom of her home when she was growing up in the Midwest:

Growing up, I felt like when I went into my own bedroom, that I was interrupting something, that spirits wanted me to leave so they could resume what they were doing without me in the way.

I was young enough that I didn’t think it was spirits, but in my mind it was witches. But now that I’m older I know that I was imagining spirits, without the vocabulary for it.

As I got older, I had a problem with my light bulbs burning out all the time in the room. Sometimes I’d turn on my light and pop, a light would blow. But sometimes the bulb would explode and melt the light fixture.

By the time I was older, I was used to the feeling in my bedroom, but my friends were creeped out by it. I never told them about the feeling I got in the room, because I would have felt too silly as I don’t believe in ghosts. But they were very uneasy in the room.

What’s weird is we built the house. Nobody lived in it before us. My mother sells dogs, and over the years she’s had people come to buy them and tell her that the house is haunted. These are people who claim to be people who can see spirits and the like. None of these people knew the others. It was just random customers who would state it matter of factly. Strange, isn’t it?

Kent McManigal is a blogger who lives in the U.S. Southwest, and he has several short stories that he’s written about previously on his blog:

This first one happened in the mid 1990s.

We were sitting in Sunday School, which was held in the auditorium of our little log cabin church in Gunnison, Colo. The preacher’s wife taught the class, and we all sat in a semi-circle in folding chairs. She had her Bible open on her lap, and her empty styrofoam cup beside her chair on the floor. I was sitting almost directly in front of her.

As she was talking, I saw something suddenly fall from about shoulder-height into her cup. The cup rocked and everyone looked. She picked up the cup, looked in it and there were 2 or 3 coins in it. There was no way they could have fallen out of her Bible, or from her pocket.

There was no balcony or anything, and there wasn’t anyone who could have tossed the money in from somewhere else. She just kinda said, “Huh,” and went back to talking. No one else in the room seemed to think anything too odd had occurred. I couldn’t concentrate anymore, trying to figure out what had just happened. I never did.

Years pass. After my life got turned upside down, my second wife talked me into moving to Pennsylvania (against my better judgement) in the summer of 2000.

The house I moved into was very strange. When I was downstairs in the half-basement, I would clearly hear footsteps on the hardwood floor above me, but when I would go (stealthily) upstairs to look, heavily armed, no one would be there. The cat would also react. I could hear the front door open and close, and someone walking across the floor towards the top of the stairs. I’d would be prepared to shoot the home invader, but none ever appeared.

Once my friend Amy came to the house and opened the door. I was thinking it was just the same old routine that I heard at least once a day, when she called my name. I just about jumped out of my skin.

I would also hear voices that seemed far away. I could not understand what was being said. My then-wife Angel was scared to be there alone. But she was very superstitious anyway and claimed that her childhood home had been haunted by a ghost they called “Stella.”

Finally, I was living in my pet store in Gunnison, Colo., in the spring of 2004 when I experienced this.

One afternoon I was cleaning under the counter and found a knife catalog that was several months old. I looked at it and decided to add the company’s website to my “favorites” on my computer. I am not a good typist, and was even worse back then, so I have to concentrate on anything I type.

After entering the web address, I put the catalog on a small landing halfway up the stairs and started cleaning the shop. About 15 minutes later, I took a break to read the catalog, but the catalog on the landing was different than the one I had left there.

It had changed. It was from a different company. The pictures on the front were similar, but not quite the same as when I placed it there, and it was older than the catalog I had found earlier. No one had been in the store during the elapsed time to switch the catalogs. (It wasn’t a busy day; that’s why I was cleaning under the counter.)

I looked around the store, wondering if I could have been confused. Then I remembered adding the website to my favorites, so I went to the computer. Being from a different company, the web address on the back of the catalog I now held was a different one than the one I had entered earlier.

The website for the original catalog was on my “favorites” list but had not been moved to the proper folder yet, just as would happen to a new addition. This is how I knew it was the one I had just added, and not one I had put there at some earlier time. (The “new” catalog’s website address was also not in my “favorites” yet.)

I was completely bewildered. I decided to try to get my mind off of the bizarre occurrence, so I began surfing the web. I was not searching for anything related to what had just happened, but was just browsing randomly, yet one of the first websites I went to had an account of “reality shifts” where something changes in your reality, as had just happened to me, but no one else seems to notice. Now I was really in shock.

Over the next few days, I looked for the original catalog just in case I had imagined the event, but it didn’t turn up.

I never did see the original catalog again. I had also never seen the replacement before the instant it appeared in place of the other one. I love knife catalogs and look at each one until it is memorized, so I would have remembered it.

Thanks to all who contributed their stories. It seems that everyone has at least something in his life that he can’t explain.

Share on Social Networks

Related Posts

  • Buffet’s hypocrisy: His company owes IRS $1 billion in back taxes
  • Feral cats and hurt people both require trust and patience to healFeral cats and hurt people both require trust and patience to heal
  • Each unexpected death forces me to confront limits of my own life

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Primary Sidebar

My Instagram

I didn’t have time to stop and I didn’t have m I didn’t have time to stop and I didn’t have my “real” camera with me anyway, but this is what my iPhone was able to get just a few minutes before sunset as I drove west on I-20 just east of Birmingham about an hour ago. #nature #naturephotography #sky #colorful #clouds #sunset #birmingham #alabama
This was the Birmingham sunset at about 8 p.m. Fri This was the Birmingham sunset at about 8 p.m. Friday. #nature #naturephotography #sky #colorful #clouds #sunset #birmingham #alabama
I was in the back yard with my dog at 5:30 a.m. an I was in the back yard with my dog at 5:30 a.m. and it suddenly started getting beautifully pink and magenta in the sky beyond the trees. I didn’t have time to go get my “real” camera, but this is what my iPhone caught of the lovely little display around us. #nature #naturephotography #sky #colorful #clouds #sunrise #birmingham #alabama
I tried to get Alex to pose for a portrait in the I tried to get Alex to pose for a portrait in the studio tonight, but I never figured out a way to get him to look at the camera. He was fascinated by the studio, though, and he purred the whole time. This was the place where I took the first photos of him on the night I captured him when he was a feral kitten. #cat #cats #catstagram #catsofinstagram #cute #cutecat #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #tabby #tabbycat #instacat #ilovecats #birmingham #alabama
I apparently have way too much time on my hands. I I apparently have way too much time on my hands. I’ll let you know if any of the toy companies agree to pick this up as a featured toy for the upcoming Christmas season. Thanks, ChatGPT. 😺
Thunderstorms are just starting here, so I stopped Thunderstorms are just starting here, so I stopped on the way home — about a mile from my house — for some dramatic lightning photos. #nature #naturephotography #sky #lightning #night #thunderstorms #birmingham #alabama
This was the Friday evening sunset near my house a This was the Friday evening sunset near my house about half an hour ago. #nature #naturephotography #sky #colorful #clouds #sunset #birmingham #alabama
Lucy and I are taking her last walk of the day and Lucy and I are taking her last walk of the day and it’s just starting to rain lightly. The misting rain and low-lying fog that diffused the light from nearby street lamps give the night a magical feeling.
It seems as though the trees turned bare of their It seems as though the trees turned bare of their leaves almost overnight when I wasn’t paying attention. This is part of the neighborhood route that Lucy and I walk every night. #nature #naturephotography #sky #nightsky #iphone #birmingham #alabama
Follow on Instagram

Critter Instagram

This is the first time in hours that Sam has opene This is the first time in hours that Sam has opened his sleepy eyes Friday afternoon. He was still curled up in his favorite bed when I left the house. #cat #cats #catstagram #catsofinstagram #cute #cutecat #blackcat #blackcats #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #instacat #ilovecats #birmingham #alabama
Oliver is snoozing on the castle earlier than usua Oliver is snoozing on the castle earlier than usual Thursday night. He looks as though he’s already ready for bed. #cat #cats #catstagram #catsofinstagram #cute #cutecat #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #instacat #ilovecats #birmingham #alabama
For “throwback Thursday,” here’s the lovely For “throwback Thursday,” here’s the lovely Charlotte from nine years ago. Charlotte was one of Molly’s kittens and she was one of the most beautiful and unusual cats I’ve ever been around. I lost her only about a month after this photo was taken, even though she was only 7 years old. I’ll never know what was going on the genes of that entire feline family, but none of them lived long lives — and the vet couldn’t pinpoint the cause for any of them. I always loved Charlotte’s beautiful green eyes against that striking dark gold fur. I don’t think I’ve ever seen precisely that color on a cat. #tbt #cat #cats #catstagram #catsofinstagram #cute #cutecat #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #instacat #ilovecats #birmingham #alabama
Oliver and Alex were waiting for me in an office w Oliver and Alex were waiting for me in an office window when I arrived home just now. #cat #cats #catstagram #catsofinstagram #cute #cutecat #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #instacat #ilovecats #birmingham #alabama
Alex is hanging off the side of the castle because Alex is hanging off the side of the castle because he’s been using that long arm to swipe at the toy mouse we’ve been playing with. Alex is the only one of the current three cats who genuinely loves toys — and this particular fabric mouse has been his favorite since he was a kitten. #cat #cats #catstagram #catsofinstagram #cute #cutecat #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #tabby #tabbycat #instacat #ilovecats #birmingham #alabama
Sam hasn’t been with us for quite a year, but I Sam hasn’t been with us for quite a year, but I think he’s made great progress in converting himself into a lazy indoor cat. He’s had a couple of excellent role models in the pursuit of this behavior, of course. #cat #cats #catstagram #catsofinstagram #cute #cutecat #blackcat #blackcats #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #instacat #ilovecats #birmingham #alabama
From the CritterCam: The birds outside this office From the CritterCam: The birds outside this office window are lucky that Alex can’t get to the other side of the glass Tuesday morning or else this would be the last day of their little lives. #cat #cats #catstagram #catsofinstagram #cute #cutecat #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #tabby #tabbycat #instacat #ilovecats #birmingham #alabama
Alex relaxes on the castle just after midnight aft Alex relaxes on the castle just after midnight after a long and busy day. #cat #cats #catstagram #catsofinstagram #cute #cutecat #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #tabby #tabbycat #instacat #ilovecats #birmingham #alabama
From the CritterCam: I’ll bet Sam is having more From the CritterCam: I’ll bet Sam is having more fun watching the neighborhood at home than I’m having showing houses an hour away. #cat #cats #catstagram #catsofinstagram #cute #cutecat #blackcat #blackcats #pets #petstagram #petsofinstagram #instacat #ilovecats #birmingham #alabama
Follow on Instagram

Contact David

David likes email, but can’t reply to every message. I get a surprisingly large number of requests for relationship advice — seriously — but time doesn’t permit a response to all of them. (Sorry.)

Subscribe

Enter your address to receive notifications by email every time new articles are posted. Then click “Subscribe.”

Search

Donations

If you enjoy this site and want to help, click here. All donations are appreciated, no matter how large or small. (PayPal often doesn’t identify donors, so I might not be able to thank you directly.)




Archives

Secondary Sidebar

Briefly

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

Read More

Crass Capitalism

Before you buy anything from Amazon, please click on this link. I’ll get a tiny commission, but it won’t cost you a nickel extra. The cats and Lucy will thank you. And so will I.

© 2011–2025 · All Rights Reserved
Built by: 1955 DESIGN