Amanda Sedlak-Hevener

Believing in the paranormal does not necessarily come easily, but just one instance could change any disbeliever’s mind. The universe thrives on chaos, and thus the inexplicable can always be possible. That being said, even with the proof available to us these days, it can be difficult to truly put faith in the unexplainable. But, many-a-believer can tell the exact moment they changed their tune, usually in response to an impossible occurrence that they were lucky, or unlucky, enough to witness firsthand.

These telling tales describe that exact moment, all via the folks at Reddit. Some people heard unusual noises, others witnessed things that weren’t just a coincidence, and one even predicted the future. Either way, the horror stories here illustrate what it takes to go from one extreme to another when it comes to the supernatural.

________________________________________

• The Temperature Dropped In The House

When I was younger we would go ‘ghost hunting.’ We never really expected to see anything, but Ohio is known to have a plethora of supposedly haunted venues.

One night we went out to a dilapidated old house that was allegedly haunted. We poked around a bit, and filmed while we were doing it. Nothing real exciting until we went to check out the locked-up machine building out back. This is where it got freaky.

As we were walking out to it, we noticed at least 10 ‘do not enter’ signs posted, as well as just how well-sealed the shop was. The doors were barred, chained, nailed, and welded shut. Instantly the temperature around us dropped, and we could see our breath. It was a 70 degree night in the height of summer. We all got this strange feeling of something ‘dark’ pushing us away from the shop.

We proceeded to get the hell out of there.

Later, reviewing our footage we confirmed you could see our breath. You could see the instant it happened. All three people and the camera person stopped dead in their tracks at the exact same time.

I’ve been to a lot of ‘haunted’ places, and this is the only thing that’s made me a believer with first-hand experience.

• • A Quickly Moving Light

When one of my friends died suddenly, a bunch of us gathered at his house to mourn him and comfort each other. A few of us were sitting outside on the porch, and probably two-or-three other people and myself looked up at the sky. A rather large, bright light was moving towards us at a very rapid rate. One of them shouted “Look at that light!” and as we kept looking, the light suddenly veered rapidly to the left and, even though it was still as large as when we originally saw it, it disappeared completely.

Super odd, and it could not have been a satellite, plane, or shooting star from what I’ve witnessed in the past.

• • Two Very Weird Experiences

I’ve had two experiences. The first can be corroborated by four other people. The second, well, I could have just been hallucinating.

First story takes place during my freshman year in college. I get in bed when I hear my roommate say “Uhh, look at the ceiling.”

Six green, glowing hand prints are staggered across the ceiling like someone crawled over the ceiling. They were huge hand prints too. We run out of the room and get our neighbors. We tell them we think we’re being haunted, and are immediately called out as trying to trick them. We hit the lights and show them the hand prints. I go to turn the light back on once we’re done observing, and three more hand prints are now on the wall. They’re continuing the “crawl” towards to light switch.

We’re freaked out at this point and grab wet cloths to remove the hand prints. And the washing seems to work. They’re gone once we’re done with wiping down the ceiling and walls. We discuss how weird it was then decide to see if the hand prints are still gone. We hit the lights again, and now all nine hand prints are back, plus six more that now appeared on the ceiling above the bunk bed two of my friends were sitting on. We couldn’t get the hand prints to go away that night. We fell asleep in the room with the hand prints there. I slept soundly though the night, which I also consider pretty odd considering the circumstances.

Second story, I’m 22-years-old and home on winter break from college. I wake up in the middle of the night and see that someone is in my room. My eyes are adjusting to the darkness so I could make out it was a woman. I assume it’s my mom and ask her what she’s doing. I get no response.

Now I start getting very worried. I ask again, no response. My eyes keep adjusting to the darkness. It’s a woman in a white nightgown standing three-to-four feet from my bed. I keep looking at the figure. Now I notice that it’s a girl, maybe 14-years-old, just standing there. I notice her eyes are fixed on me as she’s slowing rotating to her left and her head is cocked on her shoulder. Then I realize it’s as if she’s hanging from the ceiling and staring at me as she’s slowly rotating.

Yes, I know this sounds crazy and I was well aware of it at the time. I told myself this is a waking dream and it’s not happening at all. I made myself stay there and stare back at her knowing it would go away. I could do this for only about five more seconds (probably a lot less in reality, seemed like more), before I busted into my parents room in my boxers at three in the morning screaming about ghosts.

That’s right, a 22-year-old wearing nothing but his boxers screaming to his parents that there are ghosts in his room. Of course, nothing was there once we went back to the room. This was most likely a waking dream. But man, I was staring at the figure for a long time telling myself it was all in my head. That figure still stayed there until I couldn’t take it anymore.

• • A Piano-Playing Ghost

When I was 15-years-old, I lived in Victoria British Colombia. There were some old houses, belonging to someone famous or a famous family, something like that. They lived there in the early 20th century, and there are some ghost stories about the house.

Maybe seven years back they moved the houses to a park next to the museum. There are tours, and you can go through the houses on your own as well. A friend of mine, his family, and I all went through the houses together, and in the basement room of the one house we saw a woman playing piano. She played very well, and we complimented her on her abilities (the employees working as tour guides and such wore period clothes). She smiled, nodded, then kept playing.

We went about our tour, and at the end we said to a man working there that the piano player was very good. He looked confused, and said there was no piano player employed there. All the employees were male. We looked at the photo on the wall behind him, showing the entire family, circa late 1800s early 1900s, and there was the piano player, sitting with the family. We went back to find a thin, untouched layer of dust on the piano, as well as the bench.

Could have just been a creative hoax to draw in tourists, or could be legit. All I know is that her face was exactly the one in the photo.

• • A Cautious Disembodied Voice

I was driving in the mountains in the winter near Kananaskis Alberta, and I was going around a turn at about 100 km/h. I heard a soft voice in the back of my head whisper, “be careful,” and for some reason I slowed down to about 50 km/h. Within about ten seconds, I came around a second corner and saw a couple huge elk on the road, and three-or-four cars that had stopped to take pictures.

I had to navigate slowly around the cars and the elk. Had I been going full speed, I think I would have hit one of those huge elk head on and been messed up a bit.

• • He Watched Them Sleep In The Basement

I grew up in a 125-year-old Victorian house. The stairs to the basement would occasionally make noises as if someone were walking upstairs. Things sometimes randomly fell off counters when no one and nothing were near them. I once saw a figure leaning in the doorway of my room, too.

All that was weird but not creepy enough to make me think, “Oh, ghosts. Of course!” It’s an old house, it makes noise, I was a kid and probably saw my mom checking in on us, etc.

The one thing that did creep me out happened when I was in 8th grade and had a friend over for a sleepover: we were sleeping in cots set up in the basement, about five feet away from each other.

The bedrooms were on the main floor, and my parents and brother were upstairs.

I woke up in the middle of the night to see a man standing over my friend, just looking at her. After about thirty seconds, he turned and, without a glance at me, opened the door to the bathroom (I saw then that the bathroom light was on, and very bright), walked in, then closed the door behind him. Thinking it was my brother, I shrugged it off and went back to sleep.

When I asked him the next day why he had come downstairs when we had a closer bathroom on the main floor, he told me he hadn’t even woken up during the night. Creepy.

• • A Watery Save

When I was a kid I didn’t know how to swim. One day I go with my family to a relatives party who’s home featured a swimming pool. I got bored, went out back alone, and walked around the pool when I noticed a leaf floating near the edge. I knelt down on both knees and tried to go grab it but I lost my balance.

I grabbed the edge of the pool with both hands to try to steady myself but to no avail, I was completely falling forward, and my feet weren’t touching ground anymore either. I remember my face getting mere inches from the water, but suddenly I was somehow forced back up. I decided to go back inside and join the party.

• • Spooky Cloud Outside A Cemetery

This was back in 1992 and I was a senior in high school. A friend of mine lived next to a cemetery with his grandparents and we were going back to his house to hangout for a bit. The road itself is small and there are only three houses on it. There is never any traffic and it is very easy to see any cars on it from a distance. The cemetery is about a foot from the road and has high bushes around it with two fence entrances facing the road.

Well, it was around 8pm and I had my headlights on. As I turned up his street, there was this weird green form, like a cloud or smoke, hovering about a foot off the ground. It was about three feet wide and just hovering in the middle of the road. I was sort of startled and then just drove through it. In my mind I was trying to think if I had seen a car or something pullout from his road, though I knew I hadn’t. To even get on his road you have to go on a side street and there had been no cars there.

We go inside and I am not saying anything and after a minute my friend says to me “You can’t tell me you did not see that thing in the road.” I told him that I did not know what it was. His grandfather was there and told me that he used to be a grounds keeper for the cemetery and that he quit doing it because he saw things like it. To this day we joke about it and I think there has to be a simple explanation for it, but what I don’t know.

• • Waiting For “Froggy”

Before my parents (mom and stepdad) sold my stepdad’s house, they were renovating it. My stepbrother was four at the time and began to refuse to sleep in his room. No one thought anything of it until one night he came into my parents’ bedroom and told them them the man in the ceiling told him to tell “Froggy” he’s waiting for her.

My stepdad’s uncle, who had lived in the house’s apartment until he died 15 year earlier, used to call his wife Froggy. His wife was still alive at the time.

• • Ghostly Feelings In Various Locales

I had an invisible force grab my hair and pull me backwards. I was in New Orleans at a seance, and when it happened I turned around to punch the bastard who did it and there was nobody there.

I also toured a house in Savannah, GA and at the spot where some lady had jumped to her death a good hundred years ago gave off a very strong static electric buzz feeling. Now I don’t know if that was a ghost, an angel, or the remains of electricity from her body that still somehow hung around that spot, but I had others confirm they could also feel it and move their hands in and out of the spot and tell that there was something there. That’s more than enough for me.

• The Spirit Of A Young Female

I grew up in a small town in Texas. My family lives “in town”, but their house sits on a few acres, as do the houses nearest to it.

When I was twelve or thirteen, my mother used to say that she saw a ghost of a young woman in the house and outside. I thought it was ridiculous, even as a kid. Then, unprompted, the woman who lived next door to us came and described seeing the same image young woman in her house and yard.

One day, I was watching TV in a room filled with windows in my parents’ house, and I saw the girl standing next to one of the windows about 12 feet from me. I gasped, and the girl turned suddenly and looked directly at me. I threw the remote control across the room and ran to my bedroom. The next morning, I got in trouble for shattering the remote and leaving so many lights on overnight.

Presumably, it was just the power of suggestion, but that’s the closest I’ve gotten to believing in something like that.

• • Thrown By An Entity

I was at a friend’s house a few years ago. It was pretty late, so we decided to crash.

He laid down in his bed, and I on the floor next to the bed. We were both sitting up talking and looking in the direction of his hallway door when a shoe flew halfway across the room. It looked like it had been gently stooped up and underhanded.

There wasn’t anything on that side of the room that could have done it, so I have no other way to explain it.

• • Followed By A Sparrow

One early afternoon in 2006 a sparrow flew into my parents’ work and landed on the piece of machinery my dad was working on. The sparrow spent half the day with my step-dad before flying into my mother’s office and spending the second half of the day with her. The bird followed my mom into her car and was there when she picked me up from school.

Later that evening after being halfway through my shift at my second job, my parents showed up at my work asking to speak to me, and then proceeded to tell me that my biological father had been in a plan crash and passed away early that afternoon, around the exact time the sparrow showed up. Even better, the sparrow flew away right before my parents got the phone call. I have heard that some cultures believe the sparrow to be messengers of death, which is what makes this situation so eerie. Now I’m not sure if I necessarily believe that the sparrow was my dad’s spirit, but it really does make me wonder sometimes…

• • The Car Broke Down

My dad was a kid in the 70s and one evening before dinner my dad had a feeling that his father would not be home in time for supper. So he went into the kitchen and told my grandmother “Dad won’t be home for dinner, the car broke down.” My grandmother asked how did he know? Did his father call, she didn’t hear the phone from the kitchen. My dad just shrugged and said, “I just have feeling.”

Sure enough, my grandfather called the house soon after and said that he wouldn’t be home for dinner, that the car broke down on the highway and that he was at the repair shop until it could get fixed.

Now my dad is a very rational man and when he told us this he was dead serious, and his brothers and sisters backed him up on the story. It’s weird to think about how one gets like, a gut-feeling and you can’t explain it. You just know.

• • Homemade Ouija Board

Back in college, I met a new friend who claimed she can talk to “spirits.” I asked her to show me, since I’ve been interested in hearing/experiencing supernatural stories for the longest time. She’d show me how to create a ouija-like game. But, instead of using the board that you buy from a Halloween store, she uses a blank sheet of paper and a pen. Homemade-style, I suppose.

With this blank sheet of paper, she had me write “Home” in the center, “Yes” on the top right corner, “No” on the top left corner, and a “Goodbye” at the bottom of the paper. In the center of the paper, which says “Home”, we’d hold a pen with the ballpoint facing down. Carefully and patiently, we’d ask the “spirit” to come through.

I won’t get into all the successful stories, but I have to say it worked. I would ask if “it” knew my social security number, it would answer back in cursive writing (on the paper).

One of the freakiest moment was when my then-boyfriend, our friends, and I were about to leave this house we rented. I convinced one of my girlfriends to play the paper-pens-ouija game with me. Not a surprise; it answered a lot of our questions that we already knew the answers to.

While we were still playing my boyfriend and his friend were looking for Chris’s (his friend) car keys, for about 15 minutes. I thought we could use the spirit’s help and asked it if it knew where the car keys are. Few seconds later, it would write on the paper “Sam. Sam. Sam. Sam….” We were a little confused to that reply, since it had nothing to do with finding the keys. We asked it, “Are you trying to tell us your name is Sam?”

The pen goes to “No”. Then the pen wrote, repeatedly, “11, 11, 11, 11… ” We looked at each other again. “Are you telling us you’re 11-years-old?” Pen goes to “No”. We both got frustrated, trying to decipher what it means.

About 10 minutes had past. My boyfriend and Chris came rushing into our room, asking, “What did that pen just tell you guys? Something about Sam and 11?” We nodded,

They had this huge surprising look on their faces and demanded us to walk with them to the parking lot.

“You guys won’t believe this. I’m a skeptic, but that shit is crazy,” he said. “We found Chris’s car keys. That spirit thing you guys were talking to was right. He left his keys inside his own car. But, check this out…. look at the license plate number of the car behind Chris’s car.”

So, as we slowly approached Chris’s car, we scanned our eyes towards the license plate number of the car behind his. And read “Sam 11.”

I loved the hell out of that. Gave all of us goosebumps. But, I stopped playing that game ever since!

• • The Entity Choked Her Dad

When I was 13 my family and I moved into an old house in the center of the city. Everything was fine until we had lived there for about a month. My sister and I had rooms on the bottom floor with a set of stairs opposite my bedroom door. We started to hear heavy footsteps going up-and-down the stairs and hallway at night. I assumed that it was just my sister walking around (my parents’ bedroom was upstairs) until I talked to her about it and she said she’d heard it too and thought it was me. Since I could see the staircase from my bedroom and I slept with my door open, I started to watch out for the source of the footsteps. I heard the footsteps go past and up the stairs but there was no-one there.

After this things just got more creepy. Every time I’d turn off my bedroom light to go to sleep, I’d hear heavy breathing by my face. The cat who slept on my bed would freak out and run when she heard it so I know I didn’t imagine it. I started to hear scratching sounds, much louder than mice could be, inside my walls. I dreamed of a fire that had been in the house and when we redecorated we found the walls had been charred. My dad painted the spare bedroom and said when he’d started that the walls and floor had started banging. We’d often hear someone behind us when we were cooking in the kitchen and the floors of every room downstairs would bang sporadically.

The final straw was when my dad woke up to someone sitting down on my parents’ bed. He felt hands around his neck and started getting suffocated. He said that the entity suddenly stopped and he could hear it walk away. We stayed in that house three years before giving up and moving.

• • The Same As In The Picture

When I was about 10-years-old I was lucky enough to go on my first vacation ever to Italy to see my father’s family. About midway in our two-week trip, I woke up mid-sleep around 3 am. There were no lights on the streets and a new moon so everything was absolutely pitch-black.

I felt my way around the room eventually grabbing a doorknob to get out and go to the bathroom. I followed the railing leading to the bathroom inching my way there when I caught something strange on my side. I convinced myself after I was hallucinating but I was staring at an elderly couple one that looked like my grandmother in a dress sitting down sipping tea on a circular table with a white table cloth, and the other was a man that looked like my grandfather jogging towards me (although it seemed like his distance from me wasn’t changing) wearing a suit and everything was in gray-scale for some reason.

After about five seconds of staring I just sprinted towards the bathroom jumped in the tub with the light on and sat there for a few minutes. Then got up and went into my parents’ bedroom where I found my mom talking to my dad because my he couldn’t sleep. He kept hearing children and a ball bouncing. He then explained to me (this is the house he grew up in) that the house was always haunted and the ghosts use to be downstairs forcing my aunt and uncle and their two children would sleep upstairs, but a few years ago migrated to the upstairs so everyone moved back downstairs. He shared a few of his experiences with me and I was a generally freaked out lil’ kid. Now the weirdest part of all this was when I got home my dad put a new picture up on the mantle of his grandparents. When I saw it I gasped because they were exactly who I saw in the hallway.

ranker.com