Random People Describe Ghosts That Haunted Them When They Were Kids (20 items)

• (#13) Haunted by a Monk

  brownelld shares this story:

  So this is more of a collection of stories, and I haven't told them in a while because even thinking about it freaks me out, not to mention makes me question my own sanity. Anyways, here goes...

  To preface, when I was entering 5th grade, my dad's company gave him an opportunity to transfer to an overseas job in Florence, Italy. My parents obviously jumped at the chance, and we lived over there for 3 years, which was an awesome experience for the most part. The first few months we lived in an apartment across from Santo Spirito Cathedral, and then moved out to a small town in Tuscany called Impruneta, where my father's company basically paid for us to live in this awesome Italian villa, I mean 7 bedrooms, 5 baths... it was the biggest  house I'd ever seen. We started speaking to the farmer who works the olive orchards around the house, and who knows the family who has owned it for centuries, and find out that the oldest part of the house was a 500-year-old hunting lodge owned by the Pitti family, and then the rest of the villa was built around it in the late 1700s. Since we were renting it, it came furnished with all sorts of cool old furniture, art, etc. My father, in a conversation with the neighbors, heard from them some anecdotal stories about the "monk ghost" who haunted the house, guarding the Pitti's forgotten treasure, and he told my mom, but they didn't tell me sister and me because they didn't think it was a true story, and they didn't want to freak us out.

  The first thing I remember being weird about the villa, was that I was never comfortable being there alone. I've been a very solitary person my entire life, and I usually enjoy time by myself. However, I can remember right from the start that any time my parents would leave me alone there, I would feel like I was being watched and/or there was another presence in the house. I spent months convincing myself it was just nerves, that I wasn't used to living there, or that the huge size of the house was what was freaking me out. Then I noticed that our cats (we had 1 house cat when we moved in, but we also adopted the 4-5 cats that roamed the property, and some of them moved into the house) would act strange sometimes, staring at empty spaces, running up to a spot like they would a person, when there was nothing there, but it seemed like I only noticed them doing it when I was there alone. By the end of our first year in the house, I was terrified of being left alone (my parents thought I was crazy), and whenever I was there by myself, which was rarely, I would lock myself in my bedroom with one or more cats, who I thought could protect me. (I don't know how, or why, it just seemed like a good idea at the time).

  At the same time, I started noticing noises at night, scrapings, clawings, that sort of stuff, but when I would freak out, my dad would come in and remind me that the house was hundreds of years old, and there were probably mice, bats, and other critters above my room making the noises. It made sense to me, but I can't even begin to recount how many nights I got woken up by these strange noises that seemed too loud or persistent to be a mouse. I started to occasionally hear random doors shutting, those sorts of things, but by this point I just kept it to myself, because my parents were already thinking I was crazy.

  After about a year, our relatives started to fly over from the States to come visit us. They basically got a vacation in Tuscany for the price of a plane ticket, so we had guests at least once a month, if not more. The first major incident I remember was when my aunt and uncle and two cousins came and visited, and stayed in the apartments that were originally the second floor of the hunting lodge. I'll mention briefly that it seemed like a majority of the incidents/noises/etc. seemed to all originate from the oldest part of the house, which was the 3 floors of the original hunting lodge, the root cellar below it. There were two adjoining bedrooms, with a bathroom opening onto the front bedroom. My aunt and uncle slept in this front bedroom; my cousins in the back. To make a long story short, my cousin Casey woke up at like 5 in the morning, walked into the bathroom half-asleep, and saw a man standing in there, so he turned around and sat on the chair outside the bathroom door. He had been sitting there for a couple minutes when my aunt sat up and asked him what he was doing, and he told her "waiting for dad to get out of the bathroom," To which she replied, "Dad is still in bed, right here," and he was. Needless to say, by the time breakfast came around, we had all heard the story, and it was at this point that my father finally made mention of the ghost stories he heard from the neighbor, and that supposedly this was the reason the villa had been empty for a few years until we started renting it. Apparently, the last people to live there had been freaked out. I pretty much flipped out on all of them, because I felt like everything I had experienced finally made sense, and they had been making me feel insane by passing off my experiences as something I made up in my head.

  After it was out in the open in my family, we all started noticing how frequently weird things happened in that house, and I'll just list a few examples:

  My sister had a slumber party for her birthday with 5-6 girls, and my mom sat out in the stairwell around midnight for a bit to make sure they all went to bed. She started hearing furniture being dragged around, and went down to see what the girls were up to, but they were all talking, and no furniture was moved. A week later, my parents had the owners come out and open up the 3rd floor of the hunting lodge, which were 2 rooms they kept locked up as storage, and inside there were several large wardrobes, dressers, and other pieces of furniture that had been dragged around at random (you could see the trails through the dust where they had moved), anywhere from a few inches to several feet. The owners got mad at us, thinking that my sister or I had managed to break in and mess with their stuff, but the door was locked, and my dad pointed out that there were no footprints. The owners freaked out, made a bunch of hurried excuses and dismissive gestures, and left pretty fast.
• (#15) Sleeping Spirit in the Bed

  From Reddit user LittlePrettyThings:

  So, both my parents tend to snore quite heavily when they sleep, and sometimes one will be loud enough to drive the other out of the room to sleep somewhere else for the night. So every now and then, one of my parents would come crash in my room or my sibling's room on the spare bed, or on the other side of the double bed. One night I woke up in the middle of the night, and saw there was someone sleeping in the bed next to me. I assumed it was my dad (it sort of looked like him, and it was dark), and that he had trouble sleeping in his own bed, so I just figured no big deal, its quite comforting to have a parent around anyway, so I turned around and went back to bed. The next day, just randomly in conversation I mentioned something to the effect of "So mom must have been snoring quite heavily last night, ey?" My parents both just kind of looked at me like, "what?"

  Me: "Isn't that why you crashed in my room?"

  Dad: "No, I was asleep in our room all night..."

  I asked siblings, etc. No one had gotten up throughout the night or anything. Who did I see?
• (#19) Floating Figure in the Alley

  From lilylily_4:

  One time when I was about 6 or 7, my brother and I were playing out in our yard. It was pretty late. I told him that I'd be right back because I had to use the bathroom. The yard is weird, since there are 2 houses on the lot. My dad lives in the front house, and the coach house is where my grandma lives. My brother was headed towards the front of my dad's house, and I was headed towards my grandma's. I just stopped dead in my tracks. Along the corridor that runs on the side of both houses was a door the led to the alley. I saw a floating figure there that I can only describe as the grim reaper. It was just floating in front of the door. I know it couldn't have been someone playing a trick on me, because it disappeared while I was looking at it, and we had been playing near that door all day. To this day, I can't go near that door, it creeps me out.
• (#10) Visit from Grandpa and Some Bent Keys

  From samirbrokeit:

  I never met my maternal grandfather, as he died before I was born at a relatively young age, around 50 or so. He had died of a heart attack. He was too drunk to acknowledge he should have gone to the hospital at the time and instead sat in a chair in his living room, with his house keys in his hand - and he squeezed them so hard that they were all bent when they found him the next morning. My mum described that night feeling his "presence" over her with his keys in his hand.

  Many years later, when I was about six, my mother told me about my grandfather for the first time and showed me some photos of him. She told me the next morning that I claimed he'd visited me the previous night, and handed me a set of bent house keys to play with. There's no way I could have known that detail - and I maintained this for many years until I was too old to recall it, and she told me the story.
• (#14) The Ghost Tried to Get in the Door

  From arialist:

  I wasn't allowed to lock my door as a kid. I was about 7 years old, and one Saturday morning, I had woken up at 7 or 8 am (I didn't know the beauty of sleep then), and had found that my mom had locked her bedroom door when I tried to go in and wake her. Childishly I decided to go ahead and lock my door too, and then figured I'd let myself enjoy a computer game until my mom woke up. I was actually in the middle of fighting Captain Hook when I realized that this weird, metallic clicking noise wasn't actually coming from my game.

  With the way my room was laid out, my back was facing the door while sitting at the desk, but I had a clear view behind me if I glanced at the mirror that hung over my dresser to my right. The door knob was turning- slowly, but non-stop, almost as if someone were trying to sneak in as quietly as possible, but was starting to get impatient or agitated. I remember blinking a few times before asking "Mom?" and as soon as I spoke it stopped.

  Now by this time as a kid, I'd heard plenty of scary stories and even stories about supernatural happenings that had occurred around me as a baby, so I was a little concerned, but being a pretty sensible kid, I figured I had to at least double-check and make sure it wasn't my mom pulling a prank.

  I opened the door and the hallway was completely empty. I tried calling for my mom again, trying not to panic and hoping she was just elsewhere in the apartment and - nothing. Just the soft sound of birds and the occasional rumble from a car outside. With a last bit of a hope I went to my mom's door and pressed my ear to the wood, hoping I'd hear her talking at least, or moving around, but instead all I heard were soft snores. It definitely wasn't her.

  I remember then the hallway went frigid, like a 20 drop degree in the space of less than a minute. My brain went into automatic mode and I took off running down the hall, headed straight for my Yorkshire Terrier's crate. I scooped her up and ran back down the hall to my room, where I shut and locked the door immediately. Our dog was still pretty young and so she didn't mind much being carried or how I sat her firmly in my lap, watching the door apprehensively. I kept waiting for something else to happen, but finally after about 5-10 minutes, I turned around and went back to my computer game, trying to forget the whole thing. I'd finally settled back into the game when I heard it again, except this time it wasn't soft or sneaky. As I turned to look at the mirror my Yorkie growled sharply from my lap, and I saw the doorknob twisting violently. The door starting to bang, and my dog snarled and jumped off, running for the door with her hackles fully raised and clawing at the door. I didn't know what to do, so I did all I could think of: I closed my eyes and prayed. It's funny in retrospect, because even back then I wasn't religious at all (despite being raised in a Catholic family and being forced to do a First Communion), but it was the only thing I could think of to do, and so I did, mumbling and stuttering through it until my Yorkie's growls and barks finally stopped and the rattling disappeared completely.

  I think I stood there for a full 10 seconds before I started screaming my head off, waking up my mom and getting in trouble for making a ruckus, but I sure was glad to hear her voice after all of that. I'm still not sure what happened. It wasn't the only weird/scary thing to happen in that apartment to me. But I can remember every detail, even to this day.
• (#20) Objects Moved Around the House on Their Own

  From arvotheaspie:

  Little things would move around my house while I was home alone. I live in a very small town in the south, so during the summer, parents would usually leave kids home alone (kids like 10 and up, at least). Markers would go missing while I was coloring in the living room, only to be found in my parents' bathroom the next day. Action figures would go missing while I was playing with them on my bedroom floor, and when I would look for them I'd find them sitting on my (very tall, I still can't reach the top of it without a stool) TV stand. Books would go missing. CDs, video games, you name it. They were never missing forever, with the exception of a Hillary Duff CD (I was 10, okay,) and I'd usually always find them later in the day or within a couple of days. This only ever happened when I was alone and I still have no idea why.

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