We aren’t going to post anything unless people start posting things of their own.

SO PLEASE SUBMIT! :)

-Kay,.

Sorry we haven’t posted anything the last few days. Been busy! 

We will tomorrow, pinky promise. 

Submit some of your stories to us please!

           -K.

THE SIGNS OF A HAUNTING

The first step is to determine, as best you can, whether or not you truly have a legitimate case of a haunting. Not all hauntings are alike, and they may exhibit a variety of phenomena. Some hauntings feature a single phenomenon - such as a particular door slamming shut that occurs repeatedly - while others consist of many different phenomena, ranging from odd noises to full-blown apparitions.

Here’s a partial list of phenomena that might indicate that your house is haunted:

·   Unexplained noises - footsteps; knocks, banging, rapping; scratching sounds; sounds of something being dropped. Sometimes these noises can be subtle and other times they can be quite loud.

·   Doors, cabinets and cupboards opening and closing - most often, these phenomena are not seen directly. The experiencer either hears the distinct sounds of the doors opening and closing (homeowners get to know quite well the distinctive sounds their houses make) or the experiencer will return to a room to find a door open or closed when they are certain that it was left in the opposite position. Sometimes furniture, like kitchen chairs, are perceived to have been moved. Very rarely will the experiencer actually witness the phenomenon taking place.

·   Lights turning off and on - likewise, these events are seldom seen actually occurring, but the lights are switched on or off when the experiencer knows they were not left that way. This can also happen with TVs, radios and other electrically powered items.

·   Items disappearing and reappearing - this phenomenon, which we have dubbed “the DOPler Effect” (DOP = Disappearing Object Phenomenon), has been examined in the article “The DOPler Effect.” Others have called this “the borrowers” phenomenon, and it’s the familiar experience of not being able to find a regularly used item - say, your set of car keys - which you believe you placed in a spot you routinely place them. But they’re gone and you look high and low for them with no success. Some time later, the keys are found - in exactly the place you normally put them. It’s as if the object was borrowed by someone or something for a short time, then returned. Sometimes they are not returned for days or even weeks, but when they are, it’s in an obvious place that could not have been missed by even a casual search.

·   Unexplained shadows - the sighting of fleeting shapes and shadows, usually seen out of the corner of the eye. This phenomenon has also been discussed in some detail in “Shadow People.” Many times, the shadows have vaguely human forms, while other times they are less distinguishable or smaller.

·   Strange animal behavior - a dog, cat or other pet behaves strangely. Dogs may bark at something unseen, cower without apparent reason or refuse to enter a room they normally do. Cats may seem to be “watching” something cross a room. Animals have sharper senses than humans, and many researchers think their psychic abilities might be more finely tuned also. (See “Animals and Ghosts” )

·   Feelings of being watched - this is not an uncommon feeling and can be attributed to many things, but it could have a paranormal source if the feeling consistently occurs in a particular part of the house at a particular time.

Those are some of the most common experiences of those who think their houses are haunted. Yet even stranger things can happen…

·         STRONGER EVIDENCE

The following phenomena are more rare, but could be stronger evidence of a haunting:

·         Mild psychokinetic phenomena - hearing a door open or close is one thing. Actually seeing it happen is quite another. Similarly, actually seeing a light go on or off by itself is greater proof that something unexplained is happening. Do you see the TV or radio turn on? Or perhaps you’re present when a child’s powered toy begins to operate on its own. Doors and windows are locked or unlocked. Some people report that when they are in bed they can feel and/or hear something sitting on the bed.

·         Feelings of being touched - the feeling of being watched is one thing, and actually feeling like you are being touched is quite another. Some people feel something brush past them, something touching their hair or “a hand” on the shoulder. Some feel a gentle poke, push or nudge.

·         Cries and whispers - on occasion, muffled voices, whispering and crying can be heard. Sometimes it’s music from some unknown source. People hear their names being said. This phenomenon, as is true for the one above, gains more credibility if more than one person hears or sees the same thing at the same time.

·         Cold or hot spots - cold spots are classic haunting symptoms, but any instance of a noticeable variance in temperature without a discernable cause could be evidence.

·         Unexplained smells - the distinct fragrance of a perfume or cologne that you do not have in your house. This phenomenon comes and goes without any apparent cause and may accompany other phenomena, such as shadows, voices or psychokinetic phenomena. Foul odors can happen in the same way.

Rarer still are more extreme phenomena, some of which have been called poltergeist phenomena, and can be quite strong evidence of a true haunting:

·         Moving or levitating objects (severe psychokinetic phenomena) - dinner plates sliding across the table; pictures flying off walls; doors slamming shut with great force; furniture sliding across the floor.

·         Physical assault - scratches, slaps and hard shoves. This kind of personal assault is extremely rare, but obviously highly disturbing.

·         Other physical evidence - unexplained writing on paper or walls; handprints and footprints.

·         Apparitions - physical manifestation of a spirit or entity. These phenomena are also very rare and can take many forms: human-shaped mists or forming mists of some indistinguishable shape; transparent human forms that disappear quickly; and most rarely, human forms that look as real and solid as any living person, but that disappear into a room or even while being viewed

Source:http://paranormal.about.com/od/ghosthuntinggeninfo/a/aa060704_2.htm

My house is pretty much…haunted, lmao.

Submit some of your scary encounters! ((:

We will be posting some new ones tomorrow, promise!

Let me log in tomorrow to some scary stories that are going to scare me shitless, oh please oh please! 

 -K.

Before I tell you my story, I want to say I am a 14-year-old girl, I am a Christian and I have been ever since I was old enough to say “I love Jesus.” I have a twin and an older sister who both also feel things and see things. My mom and dad have also seen things, but that was before we were born.

My story begins in 2006-07. I was living on an Air Force Base in Florida and my dad was deployed to Iraq for 6 months. It was the hardest thing I had ever been through. It was the first time my dad had left and I was old enough to remember. I was 10. When he left we got internet so we could email him. It was the second time we ever had internet in my 10 years of living. My older sister’s friend got her into a thing called Naruto. My older sister was 3 years older then me and I always looked up to her. She was into dark things SO DEEP. When she looks back she doesn’t say anything but “I made a lot of mistakes and you better stop it with this paranormal crap”.

Eventually, my older sis and her friend were over at our house watching Naruto on our computer. I watched it and fell in love with it. When school started I did nothing but talk about it, until my mom said “no more” and said we couldn’t watch it anymore. I went crazy without it! I went on a hunger strike and didn’t eat until I could watch it. She let us watch 2 more episodes before she made us stop. But that didn’t stop me.

My twin and I would sneak out of my room in the middle of the night, be on the computer for 5 seconds before getting caught and do it the next night. (I know this seems like it is going nowhere but it is, trust me.) In the anime Naruto there is a guy named Naruto and he wants to be the leader of the village but he has a demon inside him. (See, this is where I was going with all of this.) The anime got me used to the word “demon” which, as you can imagine, was hard for my super Christian mother to accept. So she tried everything she could to keep me out of it. I would say horrible things to my parents. I was just the worst.

The time I changed everything was when my dad forced me to go to church. When I got there I sat in the big sermon. Every song hurt, every word the pastor said hurt. Later I realized was far away from God and I was alone. I told my twin that I wasn’t going to mess with Naruto anymore. She was upset at first but then did the same.

When I look back I think about some things that could have been paranormal but I never approached it because my mother, being the over-protective Christian woman she is, would yell at us if we EVER thought about watching Ghost Hunters (which personally I think they suck anyway. Ghost Adventures is 10, 000 times better).

When my dad came home from Iraq, we found out we were going to move. That is when things started to change. When we moved to Virginia, we moved to a small neighborhood that was very different. Everything was fine in that house for about a week. Suddenly my older sister had to move out of her room (the basement) because of mold in the walls. The week that she moved out of the basement, I started having nightmares. I could not walk down there without screaming for someone to turn the lights on.

One night I had the worst dream. It was about a tall, black figure that would run around the basement in a flash and could kill you even quicker. I never told anyone. I could not walk by the basement without the sudden urge to run. When I sat in the kitchen I felt like someone was watching me. I felt silly being afraid of something as stupid as a part of a house.

We finally got out of the contract we had with the landlords and moved. The distance of one house. We now live in a house RIGHT NEXT TO that one. I haven’t gone in our old house in 2 years. But in ways, we got something worse in this house. The people who own this house were Hindu. As soon as I walked in here, the spices were strong.

My older sister and I went down to the basement in this house and I thought it was nice. The family was still living here but they were showing us around. My older sister was being surprisingly quiet while my mom was showing us around. When we walked outside my older sister turned to me and said “I don’t like that house. I can’t breath in there. And it is not the spices. I can physically breathe but not spiritually.” I was surprised. I had never heard my sister say something like that.

When we moved in I was fine. I had no problems with the house. But at the end of my 7th grade year my dad found out that he had to go to Korea for a year. I was crushed to say the least. We dropped him off at the airport (on the 4th of July) and we walked out crying. I would say, about a week later my mom let everything go. We starting replacing my dad with T.V. Shows. GHOST T.V. Shows. About a week after that I saw him, in the basement.

I was coming up from the laundry room from doing something. My older sister’s room was separated by a wall and a door from the stairs and same with the laundry room. I walked out of the laundry room and ran up one flight of stairs. I turned on the landing between the two flights, put my hand on the railing, and I saw a man standing at the bottom where I was just standing. He had long black hair that framed his face, he was skinny, he had no features except his eyes that were wide and he had small black pupils. He was wearing a night-dress that looks like what a patient at a hospital might wear. He had pale skin and the best way to describe him is that he looked a little like the grudge but you could see his face. I quickly ran up the stairs and kept it to myself. Later I was joking to my older sister like “Hey, you know you had a grudge in your room?” and she would say “Yeah, I know, it might just eat you. You should be nice to me or I will sick it on you.”

I thought I had seen nothing and my eyes were just playing tricks on me, even though I had seen it in bright light. I thought I would just joke about it and never see it again. I thought it was fake. Until later that week. Later that week I was bringing my drawing things upstairs (because I am an artist) and I turned into my doorway. And I saw him. He was crouching in attack position and his tongue was long and hanging out his mouth. He had no shirt on and he was meaning to scare me. Because my hands were full, I couldn’t drop anything to turn on the light so I tried to turn it on by flipping it with my head. When the light was on I looked back and he was gone. I was so scared I drew him and it was terrible. Every time I saw it, I would freeze. It was terrifying.

Source: http://www.yourghoststories.com/real-ghost-story.php?story=14475

Dude, this one wasn’t like..SCARY or anything, but I tweaked out and had to turn the light on in the room I am in, lol. The ghost I see all the time, I first saw her in a dream too!

         -K.

The McPike Mansion
History & Hauntings of Alton’s Most Haunted House

Stories are based on the Book Haunted Alton by Troy Taylor

When just about any native of the Alton area thinks of a haunted house, normally one name comes to mind -  the infamous McPike Mansion on Alby Street. As I am NOT a native of Alton, I was allowed to have some doubts about the authenticity of the reported hauntings here. However, even as I began to dismiss the fanciful tales of so-called “psychics” and the breathless stories of vandals and curiosity-seekers, I was overwhelmed with accounts of strange encounters in the house. Many of them came from people with no reason to lie, reliable witnesses and ghost researchers who had gone to the house expecting to find anything but ghosts! What they found is another question altogether, but simply based on the number of stories that swirled about the place, it was soon obvious that I could not refer to the McPike Mansion as anything other than one of the most haunted houses in the city of Alton. As with many other “haunted houses” though, not many people know the history behind this once grand structure.

The house was built in 1869 for Henry Guest McPike. The McPike family can be traced back to Scotland and Henry McPike’s ancestry includes a number of patriots who fought during the Revolutionary War, including Captain Mose Guest McPike, of New Jersey, and Captain James McPike, both of whom were at Valley Forge with George Washington.

James McPike came west to Kentucky in 1795, bringing with him his sons, John and Richard. Henry McPike was a son of John McPike and came to Alton as a very young man in 1847. McPike soon became active in the business and political community of Alton and over a period of years was involved in a number of different companies, working as a real estate agent, box manufacturer, and insurance executive, along with other things. He also became the president of the oldest horticultural society in Illinois.

His political aspirations did not get off to a quick start however, although he did have an interest in the abolitionist movement. His father had been the editor of a Whig newspaper (the Whig party later became the Republicans in the time of Abraham Lincoln) and was an early advocate of the abolition of slavery. Despite this, McPike never sought political office, although it was offered to him many times.

During the Civil War, he was called upon to act as Deputy Provost Marshall of the District and this placed him in a management position in the War Department. After this, he was said to have begun acting as a representative in many conventions and with the city council. This would eventually lead to a stint as the Mayor of Alton from 1887 to 1891.

The McPike Mansion was constructed in an Italianate-Victorian style and stands as one of the more elaborate homes in Alton. It contains 16 rooms and a vaulted wine cellar and was originally built on a country estate of fifteen acres that McPike called “Mt. Lookout”. Thanks to McPike’s interest in all things horticultural, the estate was planted with rare trees and shrubs, orchards, flowers and extensive vineyards. The owner became the propagator of the McPike grape, which became known across the country.

There is no question that this was one of the most beautiful homes in the area. The McPike family lived on at the estate for some time after the death of Henry McPike, but records are unclear about some of the dates. It has been stated that they stayed in the house until around 1936, while others records say that the home was owned by Paul A. Laichinger, who purchased the house in 1908 and lived there until his death around 1930. Laichinger either lived in the house or rented it out to tenants.

Despite some inaccuracies about dates, the house has since been listed in the National Register of Historic Places. However, it has also been listed on another, not so prestigious list… the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois’ list of the 10 most endangered historic places in the state!

The years have not been kind to the McPike Mansion and has been abandoned and in disrepair since the 1950’s. Since that time, weather and vandals have caused some pretty major damage to the structure. The house once had a number of marble fireplaces and some very extravagant woodwork, but all of that was stolen during the time it was unoccupied. Windows have been broken, plaster cracked and destroyed, floors have deteriorated to the point they are not safe to walk on, and worse. The place is in desperate need of repair but the enormous price tag makes this a daunting task. Estimates for the roof alone reach up to around $50,000!

But some hope does remain that the McPike Mansion will not become just a memory. In 1994, Sharyn and George Luedke purchased the house at auction. As of this writing, they are continuing their efforts to restore the home and turn it into a bed and breakfast or a historical attraction. It has been an uphill battle, but they have continued trying to bring attention to the house as a historical site with tours and outings.

Sharyn Luedke also believes the house is haunted. Her unusual encounters at the house carry much more weight, given the time she has spent there, than the claims of trespassers, so-called psychics and curiosity-seekers who come to the house simply because it looks haunted. There have been hundreds of stories which have circulated about the mansion, from the chilling to the downright silly, but Sharyn’s claims that the ghost of Paul Laichinger haunts the place seem to be the most credible. He is one of the few spirits who is alleged to haunt the place for which a real historical connection exists.

Sharyn says that she had her first encounter with Laichinger’s ghost about six weeks after she bought the house. She was on the property watering some plants and saw a man standing in the window, looking out toward where she was standing in the front yard. A chill came over her but she noted that the man, who vanished, was wearing a striped shirt and a tie. Sharyn has a photograph of Paul Laichinger wearing an identical outfit.

Another spirit in the house is thought to be a domestic servant that Sharyn named Sarah. She was little more than a presence with an assumed name until a man came by the house one day and presented the Luedke’s with some books that he had removed from the house 17 years before. One of the books had the name “Sarah Wells” written inside of it. Since that time, Sharyn has been touched (actually hugged) by this spirit and she and her husband have occasionally caught the scent of lilac on the third floor.

As mentioned, there have been hundreds of stories told about this house and there are those who claim that a legion of spirits still haunt the place. The main problem with taking these stories too seriously involves the fact that his house was locally regarded as the “neighborhood haunted house” for years and was a place where teenagers would come to hang out and party. In more recent times, the claims of mediums and attention-seekers has further muddied the waters.

And while I am not convinced that all of the local stories are true… there is more here than meets the eye. I have been lucky enough to take part in some paranormal investigations at the mansion that have left many of us scratching our heads and have also seen some video footage that was filmed in the basement that remains unexplained. One investigation managed to pick up a curious event that is worthy of mention.

While the entire group was gathered in the wine cellar of the house (a step down below the basement) one of the group members became uncomfortable in the small, enclosed space and asked to go upstairs. She was accompanied upstairs by another woman who was present and soon the group in the cellar was waiting patiently for her to return. After a few moments, the sound of the second woman’s footsteps could be heard descending the steps, descending the basement stairs and then crossing the basement floor. The steps were followed by short pause and then the metal door to the wine cellar opened, scraping across the stone floor as it did so. One problem though - there was no one there! Both of the women who had left were still upstairs and no one had come down the steps? The entire strange incident was captured on video tape!

The McPike Mansion’s Infamous Wine Cellar

For now, I will leave you with that and allow the reader to be the judge of the authenticity of the events here for themselves. Don’t be as quick to judge as I originally was though - a visit to the house just might reveal that there is more here than first meets the eye!

Majik — Columbus, Ohio — November 9, 2011 

I want to put this down while it is still fresh in my mind. 

This happened here at our house just today. This is a home that came with at least two or three unseen residents. Last year added one more. 

We have four kids ages three, six, eight and eleven years old. The older two had already gone up to bed and as the six year old was about to go upstairs, she said “I am going to bed. Goodnight.” 

As soon as she said that, a man’s voice came from behind me and saidgoodnight as plain as day. I was the only person downstairs. My wife was in the bedroom on Facebook. 

Now, we have lived here for almost two years. The house dates to 1924 and we often hear at night what sounds like a man wearing boots in the upstairs hall. Last summer, I saw a woman dressed as if it were the early 1900’s standing at the front door. 

There are also sounds at times as if a little kid is playing in the attic (which runs the full length of the house). 

Last December, my mother died in the back bedroom. She was living with us after suffering a stroke. 

From time to time, she makes it clear that she is “visiting.” I have captured a few EVP and will do another session on December 5th, with is the first anniversary of my mother’s death. 

In all the EVP sessions, I have never gotten a clearer response than what I heard tonight with the male voice saying goodnight. 

There are people who are afraid of living in a house like this, but not us. The ghosts that live here are indeed part of the family.

Source: http://www.ghostvillage.com/encounters/2011/12212011.shtml

Lol, I’d freakin’ tweak if something responded to me or anyone else in the house like that, lmao.