October is here, and with the falling of leaves begins the telling of ghost stories. I always like hearing about local legends and tales of the supernatural and if you have real (unchopped) pictures to back them up thats even better!
It could also be fun to make stuff up and chop the photos to go with. I, myself am a lousy chopper (see the bat that ate Ace’s luggage http://www.woot.com/Forums/ViewPost.aspx?PostID=732095&PageIndex=1&ReplyCount=17)
So if you want to make stuff up go right ahead. I know some of y’all will anyway! It would be fun to see what people with real talent can come up with!
My submission is from a trip to the Prince Solms Inn in New Braunfels, Tx. It is a beautiful bed and breakfast built in 1898 just off the town square. We had come to celebrate our anniversery with two nights away from the kids! My husband has always been interested in ghost stories and had seen the ghost story on the Inn’s website. We were given the Princess Sophia suite and the Innkeeper told us that some of the guests had reported that if you took a picture of the bed with someone on it, there would be some sort of hazy image beside the person on the bed. I had forgotten my digital camera and bought a disposable with flash at the grocery store our first day there. I took lots of pictures of the public areas and our suite. Nothing out of the ordinary happened while we where there, except that the piano bar was in the basement directly below our room and we could hear music until 2am each night! Anyway, I took my pictures and had them developed and burned to a cd. The film was a little grainy but nothing unusual until I saw the picture of my husband reclining on the bed. He was pointing to the empty place on the bed to his right to indicate were the ghost would be, and there are two large, red hazy areas over him and the space next to him. I don’t nessesarily believe in ghosts, but this kind of freaked me out. I’m glad we waited until we were about to check out to take the picture! Here is the bed with and without the “ghost”.
[img=
http://i54.photobucket.com/albums/g83/zeamomma/1333-R1-01-1.jpg
It sort of looks like two men in old fashion suits standing between you and the bed.
You just don’t see their heads.
I’ve got three stories, but no pics to go with them unfortunately … I’ll only tell one at a time.
In 1980, I was working for a couple of guys who were making money by buying city apartment buildings at foreclosure or at estate sales, then putting a little money into them and selling them at a profit or collecting rents as income. (This was before “flipping” became all the rage…) They used to call it ‘being a slumlord’. 
Anyway, one big building I was working on was being gutted to the studs and rafters and completely redone inside – wiring, plumbing, drywall, etc. We were also splitting it into a couple of extra apartments, and finishing the huge attic. This building had been a single family home, mansion actually, at the turn of the century, maybe earlier, and the first floor had been a funeral home. Very ornate – 11 foor ceilings, 2 1/2" thick oak doors, marble fireplaces, grand staircases.
At one point we had the ceilings and floors out of the second floor, and had torn out the staircase to the attic. I was in the attic, alone in the house one day, and was sitting, having a break. I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and thought maybe my boss was coming to check on me. I called out his name before realizing that we didn’t have any stairs in the house! Whoa! I can’t think of anything else that would have made that sound, and there wasn’t anybody else in the house with me.
The basement was spooky as well, having 1/4 of it sectioned off with thick brick walls. This was the iceroom, and had an ice chute leading in from the street.
I ended up living in one of those apartments for a year after we finished the building.
at the emergency clinic where I work all sorts of strange things happen…this building had been three different bars before being converted to the clinic. No real earth-shattering things, but drawers open and close by themselves, doors open and close…we all laugh about the ghosts - can’t decide if they are from vicitms of bar fights or if critters are coming back to ‘help’ us. Not that dogs and cats open many drawers in real life, mind you… We do hear footsteps with some frequency, and we do hear phantom dogs barking.
hmmmm…my name tag and dosimeter badge have been missing for about a week…hmmmmm …I wonder…
I’m working Halloween…if it ain’t back by then I’ll hafta ‘ask’ around that night
I died on the internet and now I haunt Woot.
And you are very scary!
Bo****o.
:scared:
bo****o bed the sea.
(No, it doesn’t make any sense.)
It’s spooky how quickly this thread disappeared . . .
Yeah, and what happened to gwp’s other two stories he was going to tell us?
When the thread slipped beneath the waves, I lost the reminder to add them. Here comes #2.
The first house I owned (after the apartment episode above) was built in 1912 for a woman and her infant son who had just arrived in the US as refugees from Germany. I bought it from the estate of the son, who had lived there all his life. The house was grand, with large rooms, tall ceilings, and all of the original fixtures from when it was built, including the kitchen stove which could burn wood or coal in addition to gas. (A large stovepipe lead from it to a chimney in the kitchen…)
When I moved in, I began to discover many items left behind by the previous occupants. Amongst them a tintype photo of the woman and son in front of the house after planting a pine seedling, probably the spring after they moved in. That tree was over 50 feet tall when I moved in.
I found a 78 RPM record in the attic that had been recorded by a local radio station, and contained an interview the man had done back in the late 50’s as part of a documentary on the network of sponsors and safehouses for Germans who were coming to the US as escapees during WWII. This man, I discovered played a pivotal role in the effort and housed many refugees in this house.
Faced with the potentially interesting history of the house, I began to ask around the neighborhood, still filled with many older German, Polish and Ukrainian familes. They told how as a ‘freedom fighter’, this man would receive many visitors, many of them bringing with them chronic health problems from their poor living conditions in their original country, or brought on by the difficult and perilous journey to the US. Many of them over the years died within the house, as did several who came back in their later years to be put up in a hospice situation when their health became too frail to live alone, or when there were no institutional alternatives available.
The bedrooms upstairs hadn’t been used for 20 or more years when I bought the house, but I remodeled the second floor and we used those rooms for their intended purpose after about a year in the house. The architecture of this house was spectacular as typical of the era, featuring wide gumwood trim and high ceilings. The bedrooms each had tall doors, with large windows in the upper half. Sheer curtains covered the window. I kept these doors as-is because of their importance to the overall look of the house, and because they were in excellent shape.
Quite often while laying in bed at night, I would hear footsteps in the long hallway that was common to all the bedrooms. Most often, I’d expect the footsteps to stop outside our door, to be followed shortly by a small voice asking tentatively “Mom? Dad?”. Both children were small at the time, and bad dreams and requests for a drink of water were common.
Several times however, the footsteps would stop outside our door, and there’d be no wimpering or other childly sounds coming from the other side. Without rolling over, I’d wait a while longer before asking “Yes? Something we can help you with?”. No answer. As I rolled over to look, I would see a silhouette cast on the door curtain from the light left on in the hallway.
None of the kids were tall enough to cast a shadow on that curtain. It would have had to have been an adult. Problem was, the only two adults in the house were both in the bedroom.
Thinking that there might be an intruder in the house (which would have been a miracle considering the large dog resident in the kitchen at the base of the stairs), I arose to carefully investigate.
Cautiously approaching the door, I should have been able to make out the features of whoever was behind the curtain, but could not.
Finally, poised for who/whatever was in store, I flung the door open to discover nobody there. At all. The door at the bottom of the stairs remained closed, as did the extra hook we had installed high along the doorframe to prevent toddlers from escaping the bedroom area and wandering about the ground floor by themselves.
The dog remained asleep on the kitchen floor, oblivious to anything that may have been going on upstairs.
Very spooky, but not a one-time occurrance. This was repeated for many years, on and off, and never was there a physical presence to accompany the shadow. This did not occur with any other bedroom door but mine.
Never any sound except the footsteps. Never any manifestation except the shadowy figure cast on the bedroom curtains. No worldly explanation that I could come up with.
Thanks. Waiting eagerly for the next one. And I liked “childly.”
I don’t always have to make up new words. Sometimes I can use words that are simply underused.
Speaking of making up words … my youngest used to use amn’t. Why shouldn’t that be a real contraction? Am and Not = Amn’t.
Are + Not = Aren’t [OK]
Is + Not = Isn’t [OK]
Am + Not = Amn’t [Not OK]
Why?
Heh. I tried explaining this to her with the word “elsewise,” remember? But “Elsewise” is certainly more vernacular than “childly” though…
Because people who make up grammar rules are evil
For example…why can’t you start a sentence with because?
I do have a ghost photo. I don’t know where it is. It is an actual photo, but I found out if I scan a photo it goes directly into my photo file. If I can find it, I can post it.
It isn’t a ghost, it is a giant hand.
Because.
For the same reason that ending a sentence with a preposition is not where people like that are at.
Excuse me? People like what? And, besides, that not ending a sentence with a preposition started out entirely diferent, and various English teachers twisted it into a rule. But it isn’t a rule.