Back in grade school, a classmate told me of a strange experience he’d had while sleeping over at a friend’s house. This friend claimed his house was haunted by the ghost of a boy named Eddie. The boys fell asleep around the TV in the finished basement. My classmate got up in the middle of the night to use the ground floor bathroom. On his way back, he was passing through the living room when an unfamiliar boy about his age descended the stairs from the second floor. Stunned, my classmate could only stutter “Eddie?”
“What?” the boy on the stairs answered in a guttural echo.
My classmate ran back down to the basement, threw himself down on the couch, and huddled under a blanket until he passed out. He never spent the night in that house again.
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Another friend from grade school shared this story with me shortly after it happened in the late 80s. He’d been riding back from soccer practice in his family’s van when a sudden thunderstorm had rolled in. He said the clouds were so thick and dark, they turned the afternoon to night. Rain pelted the van’s roof, and lightning flashed as my friend’s dad navigated the narrow roads winding through the park. It’s worth noting that this park adjoins the biggest, oldest cemetery in town. My friend recounted how a nearby lightning flash had illuminated a man dressed in old-fashioned clothes standing near a gazebo above the park’s lagoon. The view through the van’s window soon went dark again. A second lightning bolt lit up the same area a second later, but the strange figure was gone. Not long after, news reports of the nearby cemetery owner’s outrageous mismanagement of the premises caused a local scandal.
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Less than ten years later, another friend was among a carful of high school kids driving through that same cemetery late one night. My friend doesn’t drink, and he never got into smoking weed. He recalled seeing an unearthly light flitting among the graves.
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The same friend told me of the time he visited his girlfriend’s house and was shown an attic door with what looked like claw marks scratched into the wood on the attic side. According to his girlfriend, they’d tried painting, varnishing, and even sanding the door multiple times, but the scratches always came back. She also claimed that a previous tenant had practiced satanic rituals up there.
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A couple years after that, some college buddies and I got together for our regular D&D game, only for one player to pull an unexplained no-show. I talked to the missing player a few days later, and he told me he’d been about to leave for the game when he saw cop cars blocking off his street. Another cop confronted him when he tried to leave his apartment, ordered him to stay inside, and even confiscated his phone. It later turned out that some psycho had taken his ex-girlfriend hostage in a house right across the street.
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Multiple friends independently reported this incident, which happened to a mutual acquaintance in the early aughts. A few of them, including this guy, had been camping in a thickly wooded area not far from a mid-sized urban center about an hour away from where I lived. They’d been hiking back to camp when nightfall had caught them off guard. Picking their way along the dark trail in single-file, they’d been alarmed to hear the last man in line–the acquaintance in question–scream and go running past them. When they caught up to him, he was trembling and adamantly refused to discuss what he saw. He still won’t talk about it to this day, but a couple of the guys who were with him recalled hearing a lot of thrashing and twig snapping in the direction the spooked guy had run from, as if something big but unseen had been rushing through the bush.
“Dark and gripping space opera”
And watch the first episode of the new Geek Gab retro gaming series, Final Fantasy Tactics: Retro-Spective
I served as a sergeant in the Singapore Army in 2012. I was on guard duty one night and would sit in the guardhouse on my shift. Late into the night, between 2 or 4 am, the men on patrol called through the walkie talkie and said that there were strange movements around the multi-purpose hall. I told them I would to meet them there and sort it out. I thought it could have been an animal. When I reached the multi-purpose hall, the men were waiting downstairs whispering anxiously. They told me that they saw the shutter doors of hall close and then reopen, as if something had passed through the hall. I didn’t immediately understand what they were implying so I told them to wait downstairs while I went up to investigate. There was nothing in the hall or on the grounds on the other side of the hall. Only when I started back down did I understand what the men were really saying. When I reached the ground floor the men were still talking anxiously and were
doing their best to refrain from saying what they really believed was going on. Since nothing further could be done I said to them, “Whatever was there just now, it isn’t there anymore.” Then we returned to the guardhouse.
Another story from the Singapore Army, this time from 2011 when I was in basic training.
For some context, the basic training camp is on an island offshore of the mainland. There used to be Malay villages there until the government compulsorily acquired the entire island from the villagers and repurposed it (the right to property is not protected under the Singapore Constitution).
Towards the end of basic, our platoon began sharing scary stories to keep ourselves entertained. We would also dogpile each other while pretending that the victim was possessed and in need of exorcism.
One night, a member of our platoon had a nightmare in which a elderly, demonic looking woman told him to stop playing that game. He woke up crying. After that, nobody in our platoon played the dogpiling game again.
Final story from the Singapore Army.
This incident also happened during basic training. However, I was not present as I was hospitalised for water intoxication at the time. I heard about it from my platoon-mates after I returned.
The platoon had just finished a field camp and was about to return to the barracks. The recruit leader ordered the platoon to fall in and number off to count the strength.
No matter how many times the platoon numbered off, somehow there was always one extra row (or one extra person) on the count. No one in the platoon could figure out what was wrong. After repeating this several times over with the same result, the drill sergeant tersely said, “Alright nevermind, let’s go.” And the platoon returned to the barracks without properly verifying its strength and apparently with one extra member. Yet, everyone made it back to the barracks safely.
Subsequently, the drill sergeants told us that such incidents had happened before during. In one such incident, the platoon was similarly unable to verify its strength no matter how many counts were taken. There was always an extra row or person in the count. After several rounds of counting and punishing the platoon, the drill sergeant finally understood what was going on. However, he rather unwisely said words to the effect of, “The extra person, whoever it is, that is not part of the platoon: remain here.”
When the platoon returned to the barracks they realized that one of them was missing. The command team returned to the training ground to search for missing recruit and found him convulsing on the ground. Indeed, the “extra person” did exactly what the drill sergeant told it to do and remained at the training ground together with the missing recruit.
Chilling. Thank you for regaling us with your scary experiences.
Glad you enjoyed it!