The murder house

If I were going to believe in anything, it would have to do with some kind of residual energy or something like that.  I've lived in a couple houses that really freaked me out -- including the one I grew up in, but I honestly think it had more to do with the things that happened to me in a real, physical sense while I lived there & how I felt about those things than anything else.

I could not knowingly move in to a house where something like that had happened. I am sure it happens all the time where enough time has passed and people don't know.. but that is just too freaky to me. I think people should have the right to know before buying a home if something as serious as a murder took place there. 

Well, I was a die-hard skeptic.  It really didn't get any more skeptical than I was.  My dad used to laugh and secretly giggle that his mother was a 'witch doctor' - she was a full-blooded Mayan who really knew her herbs and whose sister seemed to have a sort of second sight, if you will.  He'd start singing Kumbaya under his breath when we went to see her and stuff like that.

I was 28 and on a 3-week tour of the UK with my mother.  Now I love her to bits but by the 3rd week we were getting on each other's nerves. 

So when we got to a particular site, a castle in Scotland, we decided to split up and tour separately and then meet at the gates.

I found this one tower that went down instead of up.  I thought that was pretty cool.  It was November and a little after 3PM, so going a bit dark.  I started down this staircase and for some reason, I felt a really strong sense of apprehension.

I shrugged it off and kept going.  And going and going.  Down and down.

I found myself in this large, earth-floored empty chamber.  By now it was going a lot dark, and I couldn't see so well as to get out because this tower had those windows that were more like slots for crossbows to fit in.

I started to get a little nervous about this.  Turned round, and there's a VERY solid looking fella about 20 feet away, wearing a tartan and one of those linen shirts.  All the employees were wearing stuff like that, so I asked him if he knew the way out.  He didn't say anything, he just started walking.

So I followed him.  He was walking really fast, though and I lost sight of him.  But when I reached where I'd last seen him, I saw it was a hallway with a door at the end of it.  I figured he'd gone in there and as I could now see the stairs leading back up and out, I got out of there.

I was smoking a ciggy at the gates with one of the employees, waiting for my mom, when he asked me how I'd enjoyed the castle.  I told him it was great and about the strange man in the tower.  He asked me to describe this man in detail and went pale.  Then told me that is was the ghost of a Jacobite prisoner who'd been dead a couple of centuries.

I thought he was taking the mick and after bumming him a couple of fags and thanking him for the good story, we were off.

My mom and I had a good laugh about it.

A year later, I was watching one of those TLC shows like 'Haunted Places of Scotland' or whatever.  And there was the story of the spirit I'd seen!

Since then, I've seen and heard a lot of strange stuff!

What a cool story Expat!!

Yes very cool story Expat!

I was deffo not cool with it when I saw it on TV.  It was like someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over me on my couch in Denver.  FREAKED ME OUT big time.

This guy looked really solid.  He didn't disappear in front of me or anything you'd think of that a ghost should do.  And of course I didn't think I should hear his footfalls because the floor was all earth and soft.  In fact I just wanted to get out of there because it was getting hard to see.

I had an experience with a 'solid' apparition when I was ten years old. My grandfather was in the hospital dying. He and I were very very close.  A nurse came up to myself and my brothers who were all waiting in the hospital waiting room as at that time they didn't allow children on to the wards. So we were sitting there waiting for our parents and a nurse came up to us and asked if I was Rebecca. I said yes and she ask me to come with her. I went with her into a tiny white office no bigger than a small closet. All she said to me was this.."You know Rebecca, when I was about your age my grandfather died. I was sad at first but then realized when he passed away he wasn't suffering anymore and that made me feel better. And now I know he still watches over me." I remember her face exactly. She was very light skinned with dark eyes like mine. She had Dorothy Hammill haircut which was very popular at the time. She had pale red lipstick on and wore a white nurses uniform with a name tag "O'Connor"
After this very brief meeting she took me back to my brothers who were still waiting in the waiting room. The very next minute my parents and grandmother came down and were all crying. I knew at that moment my grandfather had passed. I decided to run back to the little office and speak to nurse O'Connor but the room wasn't there. My eldest brother (17) asked for nurse O'Connor and we were told there was no nurse by that name on staff at that hospital. I would have written the entire thing off as a dream but my brothers also saw her. I really believe she was an angel. 

pebbles, i can't decide if that's spooky or reassuring!

I don't really know what I believe as far as ghosts go, but I did have an odd sort of thing happen when my grams died. When i was little, she used to pick me up and we'd drive out into the country, just following old farm roads and eventually have a picnic somewhere. We did this almost every weekend over the summers for several years. We always played a game of spotting red-winged blackbirds. You would never see them in town, only out in the fields and woods. I loved them and so did she.  

The day after she died, I was heartbroken, missing her so much. I walked out my front door and there, sitting on the fence in my front yard, was a red-winged blackbird. It just sat there and sang at me for a minute or two and then flew off. I've never seen one in town before or after this. I immediately thought it was her, coming to tell me goodbye.

I was deffo not cool with it when I saw it on TV.  It was like someone had thrown a bucket of ice water over me on my couch in Denver.  FREAKED ME OUT big time.

I bet! Like I said before, I get creeped out just reading this thread. I can't imagine having an encounter like that. 

Pebbles....wow, that was spooky.

I'm glad he didn't speak to me!

Yikes.

Norfolk seems to have more than its fair share of places which are reputed to be haunted. 

Hickling Broad just a couple of miles down the road from here is said to be haunted by the ghost of a soldier.  The story goes that he used to walk across the water when it was frozen over as a short-cut to visit his sweetheart, until one day when he fell through and was drowned.  He can supposedly still be seen walking across the surface of water sometimes.   

Horsey just down the coast is supposed to be the site of a large children's graveyard from Roman times, and it's said that one day each year the children can be heard running around and laughing.

Several of the old bridges which criss-cross the waterways around here are reckoned to have the usual selection of phantom coaches and horses.

While I was reading expat's story, something randomly fell off my desk behind me and scared the crap out of me! 

If you want to see some *really* haunted places, look no farther than your nearest council estate.

Honestly, folks, I have witnessed some activity in several of these flats - you get a lot of people moving in and out, things happening in a short amount of time, and more than a few of them built over old graves, particularly in older, densely populated areas.

The London Underground also has a fair number of places, for example:

Farringdon.  One can supposedly still hear the screams of a 13-year-old girl who was murdered there in the 18th century.

Aldwych. (Closed in 1994.)  Staff claim to have seen a ghostly figure walking the tracks at night, reputedly an actress from the old Royal Strand Theatre which used to stand on the site.

Bank.  Haunted by Sarah, "The Black Nun."  It's said that she still searches for her brother, a cashier at the bank who was executed for forgery in the early 1800s. 

Covent Garden.  A man in evening clothes walks the station, an actor who was stabbed to death outside the Adelphi Theatre in the 1890s.  It's said that he regularly visited a baker shop which once existed where the station now stands.  Apparently some LT staff in the 1950s refused to work at Covent Gdn. at night.

British Museum.  Supposedly haunted by the ghost of an ancient Egyptian.  (You won't find this station on the map, as it's been disused since the 1930s, but you pass through it on the Central Line near Holborn.)

The whole section of the Piccadilly Line around Covent Gdn. to Russell Square is so notorious for ghosts and ghouls that it was chosen for a spooky horror thriller, The Death Line, in 1972.

Edited because I was in too much of a hurry and mixed up the lines!