5 Terrifyingly True Stories From People Who Were In Haunted Houses

Everybody knows that ghosts aren’t real.

1. Animals often seem especially sensitive to hauntings.

Reddit user /u/pooveyfarms shared this disturbing story in one recent thread.

“I lived in a house with 4 girls and 4 animals in college. One night I happened to have the house to myself, which was fabulous because I had a paper to write. So I’m in my bed with my laptop and I hear a scratch at the door. It’s the dog Mikko and he’s shaking and whining. As soon as I open the door, the two cats Ralph and Beaner, streak in behind him and jump on my bed. I squeeze in between all of them and I resume my studying.

“Suddenly, Ralph’s hair stands on end and Mikko starts to whine. Beaner’s claws are digging into my legs as soon as I hear footsteps upstairs in the hallway. It’s a pretty short hallway, probably about 20 feet, but the footsteps keep walking, and walking, and walking past where the outer wall of the house into the next door neighbors house. Mikko starts growling when the footsteps turn around and I hear them SPRINTING back in our direction and then a door SLAMS shut. By this point my heart is racing and Mikko is barking up a storm so I grab a baseball bat and walk upstairs.

“Nobody was home but me and the animals.” [sic]

2. This story seems like something out of “The Exorcist.”

“Ah, I’ve got a story to tell. This isn’t my house but my cousin’s, and I practically lived there anyway.

“I don’t believe in ghosts at all, but my family does, vehemently. Growing up in an Asian country, superstitions were practically fact and it wasn’t easy for a person to dismiss them.

“So when my cousin said he saw a strange man standing outside the gate, muttering odd things and leaving, the family was a little taken back. Who was this guy? Immediately everyone thought that the house had been ‘marked’ or cursed.

“Several strange occurrences were reported. One of the girls said that when she entered her bedroom, she saw a white woman dressed Victorian style sitting on her bed, crying (we were formerly an English colony). Doppelgangers of family members were seen. At night, more than a few people reported seeing a strange furry figure peering furtively into the bedroom.

“It all reached a breaking point when my cousin suddenly broke out into a fit in the middle of the day. He had no history of epilepsy whatsoever. He was writhing on the floor, babbling incoherently about a bearded man standing in the corner of the room, glaring at him. The family then decided they had had enough of this and went to a local priest to cleanse the house.

“Things seemed to settle after. I personally never bought into it but as a child I really couldn’t say much. Who knows what really happened anyway?” [sic]

3. This ghost seemed to really hate vacuum cleaners.

“When I was a teenager, I was running the vacuum cleaner in our dining room, and I kept hearing a man say my name, like he was in another room, calling me. Only my mother and I were at home in our big old Victorian-era house, and she heard it too, and started walking around the house, thinking maybe it was my dad coming home from work early.

“I cut the vacuum off, and heard my name called again, this time from the direction of a window in the corner of the room. I walked over and bent down to look out the window, still looking for whoever was calling my name, when our enormous china cabinet, full of china and glassware, came unbolted from the wall, and crashed down in the exact area I had been vacuuming, breaking all kinds of glass, damaging our wooden dining room table, and smashing the vacuum cleaner.

“We never found out who the “voice” was, but it saved me, maybe even from being killed, by calling my name.” [sic]

4. Jill Uchiyama shared this set of heartwarming ghost stories.

Uchiyama posted these tales in a Quora thread.

“After my father died in 2008, there have been 2 incidents and both occured in my family’s garage- exactly at the spot where he once stood at a table saw, cutting wood for various home projects over the course of many years.

“The first episode happened during a visit I was having with my mother. We weren’t getting along very well during this visit and I remember getting very frustrated with her and out of sorts. During the course of this day, there was a very loud noise that buzzed through the house and all of the electricity went out. My mother and I went down to the fuse box to see if we could bring the electricity back and when we reached for one of the levers, this huge noise, like a loud alarm went off scaring us both out of our wits!

“The day went on and somehow, my mother had this idea that the electrical short might have been caused by something in the garage. I have no idea how she came up with this but we went out to the garage and walked over to where my father’s table saw used to be. There was a strange cord plugged in and at the same time, we both noticed it and I reached over to unplug it. As I did, a long firey spark flew out of the outlet surprising me. The cord was something that my dad had rigged up to “electrocute” the worms in the ground in the back yard. My dad liked to fish and so he had this contraption set up to gather worms.

“After the cord was unplugged, all the electricity came back on and all was normal again. When I told the story to my friend who happens to be a Shaman, he said, ‘the ancestors always communicate through fire.’

“If that story isn’t believable, there was another one. Same place in the garage.

“I was at home for my mother’s 80th birthday party and my mom and I walked into the garage to get to the car. There were papers all over the floor (again right where that table saw was).

“When I saw the papers, I knew exactly what they were. They were appraisals that my father had done years ago. Apparently he had stashed these appraisals in the rafters of the garage and for some reason, they were all tumbling down, flying all over the garage. I looked at my mom and said, “Ma, I had a feeling that dad was going to show up this weekend.” As soon as I said that, the service door blew wide open! My mom looked at me freaked out and said, “ok, let’s get out of here!!!” And we drove away.

5. One handyman fancied himself a ghost buster.

This story comes from /u/Alternativetoss on Reddit.

“I rented a few rooms in what was an old inn, it was supposedly really haunted where people were chased out.