Ever been in a haunted building? (1 Viewer)

Just read that the Waverly Hills Sanitarium in Louisville is to be turned into a luxury hotel.
Waverly Hills was for many years a tuberculosis facility and 63,000 patients died there.
More recently it was a nursing home and was closed by the State of Kentucky due to abuse allegations.

Of course, the new owners will be playing up the buildings reputation for hauntings.

Several years ago I was on a home tour in Austin that included the 1860s era State Asylum, as it was once named.
If any place was going to be filled with bad vibes, I would expect it to be that old structure.
On the contrary, as I walked through the halls with the light switches on the outside of the rooms (think about it) I felt very comfortable and at peace.

That was important to me and it's almost always been that way for me.
I've spent a lifetime exploring old houses and buildings, many simply abandoned. My interest is a love of old architecture but I also like to imagine who might have lived there. Any old place is going to have experienced all the joy and sorrow that life brings, but I think any vibes one gets are probably the creation of the visitor.

Only one time, out of thousands of buildings, did I feel real uncomfortable.
It was somewhere in upstate New York and not even a really old house. On the second floor I just had a strong sense of, "Get OUT!". So I did.
Happily, I've never had it happen again because for me, going through these places, particularly alone, is right up there with se......well I enjoy it a lot.

I've been inside the Winchester Mystery House in S.J. a couple of times. It's open for tours. They restored it a few years ago. It's almost too comercial now. I liked better when it was kind of run down. That lady was nuts!

And then their's Alcatraz. Now that place is spooky. But again, guided tours take some of the fun out of it. Very interesting place, though.

I don't know if it was haunted or not, but I don't know what else to call it. The first house I bought had a "room". The dog would sit outside it and growl. It was the guest room and in the morning I always found the guest sleeping on the living room couch instead of the guest room where I left them. They felt too uncomfortable in there. There are many other things that I don't like talking about or people start questioning my sanity. I don't get offended because I would question it too - if I hadn't lived through it. To make a long story short, you know when you see a movie about a haunted house and in the back of your mind you wonder why the people don't just move out? We sold the house just 3 months after buying it and later found out it had a history of people moving in and out. It was also a major turning point in my life that turned a non-believer into a strong Christian.

I'd be interested to read any experiences you're comfortable sharing. I don't think anyone will make fun of you. There's a lot of literature out there about this kind of thing.

I was in a music video for a band called Rock Kills Kid. We filmed in an old, abandoned hospital in/around downtown los angeles. The areas with people weren't bad, but there was this staircase that I went down ... which led into a basement. All the hair on the back on my neck and arms stood straight up, then I was completely overcome with a feeling of dread ...

I went back up the stairs and was fine after that. But geeze, that place was crazy.

Shot a cheapo movie in the basement of a very old building that was being used for storage. It had a creepy look to it (which was why we were filming there) but I did not feel any dread etc.

However, at one point during a break in filming, I got a feeling in my right forearm like I had been hit by a pebble at very high speed (felt like a bug hitting me while on the highway with my motorcycle). I naturally looked around to see if someone threw something at me, but there was no one around at the time. I sort of shrugged it off, but less than an hour later, another actor had the same thing happen except to the back of his neck. I saw him walk by and the jump and grab his neck. He thought the same thing, that someone threw something at him. I told him what I felt earlier and he said that it was the same feeling. Rather odd.

DRobbins...would love to hear your stories. I have one of my own that I tend to keep to myself.

OK ghost stories or the like....how about this...

A bunch of my friends went out drinking. We then decided to bar hop and set out in 2 cars. We had to pass through a street known for strange occurrences called Balite drive. We always drive through there during daytime but at night, u better be speeding pass thru or u'll pick up an unwanted passenger. So 1st car goes in but our driver happens to have had more alcohol than expected so we switched drivers. We were only supposed to be about 5 minutes behind the first car. When we get to the other end we found the 1st car sitting there with its passengers with strange looks on their faces. They said they waited on the other end for 20 minutes (like we always do...place is quite known), then double backed, didn't see us and then went to the other side again. Take note this is just a 2 lane road, before the time of cellphones.
We just laughed the whole thing off thinking its just the booze taking effect. But then again, ur gonna think, who got "punked", them or us?

This was back around 1983 or so and I had just gotten married (first wife). We bought a first house and it was in a "ok" area of town and needed work. That was part of the plan to get a house and fix it up. Keep in mind that neither of us believed that ghosts, spirits, etc. really existed. It was a 3 bedroom, 1 bath rancher. The 3 bedrooms were in a row with the bath at the end of the hall just outside the living room.

We moved in and set up "house" with me working during the day and her staying home doing the domestic stuff and we got a puppy. I started working on the house so we used the master bedroom, I worked on the third one and the second (middle) one was our guest room with unpacked boxes in it also. It needed the least of the work as far as repairs went. But there was this rectangular patch in the wall that someone did a terrible job fixing.

When I came home from work and talked about things that happened during the day, my wife would tell me that the puppy would sit in the hall and growl at that room. I didn't think much about it. Maybe there was a fly on the wall that she didn't see. Then one Saturday I saw him growling. I went to see what he was up to and I couldn't fine any reason why he was growling, but he was very intense about it.

Being as we were one of the first couples in our friends groups to have our own place, we entertained often. Many times guests would stay over and we would give them the guest room. In the morning we would find them on the couch. When asked why, they all replied that they were uneasy in that room.

Back to that patch on the wall. Looking back in retrospect, every time I was going to work on it, it was a different size than I remembered it. If I had a little time to do something, I would say that's a quick job. But when I went in, what was I thinking? that's a all day project. Then the weekend would be here and I would think I will get started on that big project. Then when I went in, what was I thinking, I can knock that out in an evening.

Now for a few weeks we were almost sure that other people had been in our house while we were out. Being as we just bought the place I thought that extra keys might be about so I changed the locks. We were so paranoid that I would put things on the inside of closed doors so if the door was opened the item would move. We never found any of those items moved, but we were sure that someone was still getting into our house. Things were not where we remembered leaving them.


One day after some crazy events all night that I am still try to figure out and put into words, (I will post later when I get home from work) My wife and I started thinking maybe the place has a ghost. We both nervously looked into the room. Nothing noticeable was different. We went to the kitchen to eat breakfast and we heard a noise coming from that room. She looked at me with the "did you hear that" expression and we both looked under that table at once to see that the dog was by our feet. We went to the room and saw that an item had moved clear across the room from where we both remembered it being a few moments before. We decided at that moment to sell the house at no matter the financial loss.

Even now over 20 years after this happened, while I am typing my heart is racing, my nerves are shaky and I have goosebumps all over.

Great stories, Dave. I'd love to hear more.

I had a girlfriend in high school who lived in an old (100+ year old) farm house. It had been in the family for generations. In the earlier days there had even been funerals/viewings held there for family members.

Anyway, I spent a lot of late evenings there and I experienced my share of unexplained noises and happenings. There was also one room there that you just felt very weird being in. Not an evil feeling, but just one of not being alone, which is creepy.

I remember one evening we were all around the dining room table. We heard what sounded like footsteps upstairs. The only problem was all of us were at the table. We glanced over and their two dogs were sleeping nearby.

Of course the family had plenty of stories from living there over the years. My girlfriend would talk about occasionally seeing a lady in white pass down the upstairs hallway at night. And more than once, when she was younger, asked her mother who the lady in white was who had sat on her bed at night. That story really creeped me out!

I haven't had anything unexplainable happen to me, but the creepiest thing I can think of is when the girl who sat behind me in class, whom I didn't even know, said to me, "You want me to take you to the graveyard where Satanists bury sacrificed babies?" Now, maybe she was nervous and just blurted out the first crazy thought that came to mind--"Flick says he saw some grizzly bears near Polaski's candy store!"--but I was certainly not the person who was going to be responsive to that at all.

A friend of mine claims he had some encounters when he was in his "prayer warriors" phase. He woke up one night and was paralyzed and couldn't breathe because something heavy was sitting on his chest. All he could see was a shadow darker than the rest of the room above him. Kind of sounds like what are known as night terrors. Another night, some weird shit was happening--I don't remember the details--but he said he saw these "things" disappear as shadows. He told me this in about '88 or '89. A year later, he was in the theater watching Ghost, and about freaked out when the scene where the spirits take Willie looked exactly like what he saw. To this day, he'll tell you that "the movie people got it right!"

When we moved into the house our relationship went down hill. Both of us were irritable and short tempered. It got to the point that she left. It was one of those times that you could write a good country song about. Literally - fixing up a house, pick up truck broke down, laid-off from work, wife left, and she took the dog with her and none of our "good time buddies" came by anymore. I was left with nothing to do and nothing to do it with. Now I knew a lot of church going people and also many devil worshipers. I didn't believe in any of it and I thought when you died, that was it. But at this point I was wondering about the whole afterlife thing. Are there ghosts? Is there a spirit in my house?

So I thought I would do some research and started reading the bible. After doing some reading I thought I would give this a try and I started fasting. I did not eat anything except for a vitamin and drink water for a week. In Mt Holly, NJ there is a outside stone church on top of the "mount". I started to walk up there to pray daily. I had no idea of where my wife was (no cell phones yet) so I asked for a sign if she would be coming back. On the way down I found one of our blankets spread out on the grass. I knew it was ours and not a similar one by the corner that the puppy chewed up. So I brought it back home.

The next day the guy who was my best man at the wedding dropped by. He said that he ran into my (ex)wife at the shore and after speaking with her, he came to tell me that she wasn't coming back. I told him that was nonsense because I found the blanket today. So I started eating again.

The next day after that, she called me and asked if I would come and get her. She was down the shore. We had a good chat and it seemed that we could work things out. This is when we really started putting the pieces together about the whole guest room thing and really wondered if there is a spirit in the house. We also noted how we both had done many things "out of character" and wondered if the ghost could have been playing with us. She asked if I was surprised that she came back and i said no because I found the blanket and I showed it to her. Her jaw hit the floor and she got this look of mistrust in her eyes. She thought i had been following her around. She had left the blanket under the boardwalk. She also recognized it by the chew marks.

This is when things got weird. As we were talking things out, it started to seem like I wasn't talking to her anymore. I don't remember at what point I was convinced that I was talking to someone else, but I asked (I'l use wife as her name) "let me talk to wife" to which she replied "wife is not here!" At this time I couldn't believe what was happening. My logical mind was in denial and was trying to convince me that it wasn't happening. But there it was. No spinning heads or pea soup or anything. We stopped communicating verbally and it is hard to describe how we did. It was abstract through feelings and emotions. In a nut shell the spirit didn't want to move on. It was afraid and didn't trust where it was going. After a while of me trying to comfort it and let it know that it was alright to go, (in the back of my mind I was still scared to death also) it left. She turned and lit a cigarette and I said "wife is that you?" To which she replied "who do you think it is?" I was glad it was over and she was back.

We went to make breakfast and looked into the room as I mentioned earlier. In the junk, on the one side of the room by the patch in the wall was a (believe it or not) ventriloquist dummy that she had from when she was younger. On the other side of the room in the pile was a hand "paint by numbers" picture of Jesus on the cross that her grandmother painted. As we cooked breakfast I told her what I went through during the night. She didn't remember any of it and thought she slept the whole time. And she thought I lost it and was crazy. That is when we heard the noise from the other room. As I said the dog was at our feet. When we went in the dummy was across the room thrown up against the picture. That was the noise. At that point she believed what we went through.

We had enough. We put the house for sale and bought bus tickets for Washington DC to get away for a week. It was the 4th weekend and the Beach Boys were doing a free concert there.

Luckily the housing market was good at the time. The house sold quickly and with the repairs I did we walked away with about $300 profit. At least we didn't loose anything. To this day, I still don't fully comprehend what happened. I don't know that I ever will until after I die. I haven't told this story since the days after it happened. Everyone wanted to know what I was on, or thought I was crazy. As I said earlier, I would not believe it either if someone told me the story. I still have a hard time believing it.

Sleep paralysis is a well-researched subject with no basis for thinking it's "paranormal":

Sleep Paralysis Page

Dave's anecdotes sound fun, but nothing like anything that would stand up to skeptical scrutiny.

I know that nothing that I ever say or write will ever convince anyone of what happened. That's why I don't try or talk about it. But just for the sake of discussion, if you were going through life normally day to day and then something like I described happened to you, how would you get it to stand up to skeptical scrutiny?

Dave, any chance your ex was bi-polar? Still, it doesn't explain physical objects moving. I don't think any of us here should question anything you are saying, simply by your history here you don't strike me as a kook. You have had an interesting experience to say the least, good reading.
I have never had anything like that but my wife was a nurse working on an oncology floor,where many of her patients were not to survive anyway, and one night walked into a patients room who had just passed away to retrieve something and turned to leave and felt and heard a puff of air on her neck as if someone was behind her blowing on her neck . She turned and of course no one was there, no AC vent, no prankster, she was alone. She had many other instances of "feelings" but never any more real than this.

Catch 22 of ghost stories right? You can't prove it, skeptics can't either. My only question is, why didn't you knock a hole in that spot on the wall? It causing lazy feelings or whatever, if somethings throwing ventriloquist dummies into Jesus, I'm knocking a whole in that patch and having a look.

The above-mentioned low frequency effects can affect one's mood, even if they are too low to be heard. If what I experienced can be explained by the research, there is no need to assume or reach for a "paranormal" explanation. If what I experienced cannot be explained by such research, then careful observation by trained skeptics would be needed. Note the importance of the two terms. "Believers" wouldn't make good observers for what should be obvious reasons. Knowing how to detect tricks, fraud, conventional explanations, etc. is what I mean by "trained". If the phenomenon never occurs under such controlled conditions, it's safe to say it doesn't pass skeptical muster.

Robert,
I take it you have looked into these type of things before. Believe me I am skeptical about UFOs, Bigfoot, Trolls, etc... Ghosts used to be on that list also until this experience. I have a very inquisitive nature and I always want to know how things work or cause & effect relationships. I never take things at face value and that is one of the reasons why it took a while to even start thinking about a ghost in this instance. During this time, yes I questioned our frame of mind. Also If each of the events listed happened apart of each other, I could probably reason away some of it. Please also keep in mind that I wrote a very shortened version so I could fit into 3 postings the events that happened over 3 months. I believe also that many superstitions have a perfectly good scientific explanation that we just don't know about yet.

I would go down the path of the skeptic and look into the possible explanations if it were not for for that dummy moving across the room. Even as of that morning I was not convinced that ghosts exist until that happened. ( and obviously I could never prove that it did) As I posted when things were not where we left them, it did not even cross my mind that it could be a ghost. I thought someone was getting into my house. And as far a any mental issues, nothing like that happened to us before that house, and nothing has ever happened since, But the 3 months we lived there were full of these events.

I still am not totally convinced of a ghost, but I don't know what else to call it. In my life's experiences since then I have had proven to me that there is a God. If you or anyone else would like me to elaborate I can PM you so we don't tread on forum rules. So if one believes in the afterlife, it isn't far fetched to believe in spirits and ghosts. I am still interested in "logical" explanations though.

Russell,
I was expecting you to visit. To answer your question, I didn't look at it as a ghost thing at the time. It was a remodeling project and I tried to schedule my work by the time I had available. It was never the "right time" for that size project. After the dummy went flying across the room, we moved out, and at that time I was also a little squeamish about finding a black trash bag in there with who knows what in it. Rather than confront the situation, I ignored it until it went away.

thanks.... I think...

thats the yelling at the movie screen part of the story for me. "KNOCK A HOLE IN THE WALL!" You did the right thing though, in getting the f**k out before getting physically hurt... XD

Neat stories though. I wouldn't say they did or didn't happen. the dummy bit is freaky. I would flat out doubt the patch thing changing size though, mainly cause you said "looking back...". but again, creepy stuff regardless.

Anyone listen to "real" EVPs? I have to admit, as much of a skeptic as I am, they're creepy as hell on the radio at 2am on a dark night.

Dave,

I've done a fair amount of reading on the subject, mostly from the pages of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. The thing is, these sorts of occurrences have been debunked so many times that something has to be very well documented to even take a good hard look at it. If I experienced what you did, it would certainly arouse my curiosity, but I wouldn't feel scared unless there was some physical danger involved.