Boo!

In the spirit of Halloween.....

I have never seen a ghost. I've loved ghost stories (and vampires) my whole life. Some of my favorite memories are of being a camp kid and then a camp counselor, sitting around the fire getting scared out of my mind with ghost stories.

I grew up in a huge old house on a farm in the middle of nowhere. The perfect place for a ghost, since the old part of the house had been built in the 1830's and just seemed like a great setting for a restelss spirit. The closest I ever came to thinking I heard something was one night when I was playing piano in the living roomn, far from the rest of the family (big house), and I started to hear this screeching sound coming from the corner of the room. I was freaked out for a minute, then I realized it was just two old tomcats fighting on the porch. Best to stay away from that - trust me, if you've been there, you know.

Even though there were rumors of ghosts living in some of the old dorms on campus, I never saw a ghost there either. Those big old Gothic brick buildings would've been perfect, though, what with strange staircases to nowhere and all. Again, the only time I thought I might've been hearing something turned out to be nothing. I was walking home in the woods one night, taking the shortcut from the guys' side by cutting across the bridge on the lake. I started hearing scary noises in the woods, whispreing and branches snapping. A little freaky no matter what time of day. As I was starting to get really scared, a guy stepped out and I saw that it was just ROTC doing some night drills. (MCB, Maj. Downer and Capt. Fail were nowhere in sight.)

The only other semi-spooky experience I've had was when I moved into this apartment. For the first month or so that I lived here, I found that I was really anxious, restless, and uncomfortable whenever I went into my bedroom to go to sleep at night. I remember it being so strange that I commented to friends about it, how I just couldn't figure out why the room felt so strange to me. Was it a different energy? I ended up thinking it must have been because the layout of the room was flipped, that every other bedroom I'd had had the bed facing the same way and the doors on windows on the same side, and this one was the opposite. Maybe that would make me uncomfortable and anxious? I don't know. The feeling eventually went away, but when I think about it now I remember that it did really bother me for a while.

So even though I've never seen a ghost, I still think I'd like to. But only if it's a good ghost, not something really scary. I've always been a little jealous of my friend ET, who is very sensitive and has several ghost stories of his own. I like to think that I could handle the unknown if it were to happen, but I don't know for sure. Check out this story of a woman who confronted a ghost in her new apartment. Could I have handled it so well?

What about you? Any good ghost stories out there?