Ghost Stories by Spaceman

Backstory:

I grew up in the DC area, and the neighborhood I lived in was getting worse and worse with crime,drugs, schools were getting bad, etc. So at the age of 14, my parents wanted to get me the heck out of there, so they found a townhouse for rent in Catonsville, MD (located just outside of west Baltimore). We were at this townhouse for about 7 or 8 years. While we were there, we all experienced some interesting things.

Here's a list of general and specific things that I experienced over the years.

General things that happened all the time:

• Our cat would randomly "go nuts" right before weird things happened. Her tail would get bushed up, she would meow and growl at the walls, and this would usually result in her taking off and hiding somewhere.

• The whole family has complained about this one quite frequently: We would be looking for something that we know was in a certain spot, only to find it an hour or so later in that same spot.

• Every week or 2 around the same time of day, we all hear a loud crash upstairs. It sounded like a full glass jar of marbles hitting the floor, breaking, and scattering across the floor. Of course, we would go upstairs to check it out, and there's nothing to be found. We eventually stopped going upstairs to inspect the sound. We would just look at each other and say "there he is again".

• I would wake up in the middle of the night and see a shadow of someone standing in my room, sometimes looking at something in my room, or looking over me while I'm sleeping. Sometimes I would sit straight up, wipe my eyes, shake my head and refocus on the figure, and it would still be there. I can even remember my night light would reflect onto the figure. Within 10 to 20 seconds, the figure would simply disappear, or sometimes even walk through a wall. There were many times I would see the figure looking over my turntables, and the light from the mixer that I had accidentally left on occasionally would reflect onto the figure as well. Sometimes I thought I was simply pulling images from out of my dream, but this would happen quite often, the figure would always look the same, and again, this has never happened to me outside of this house.

• When friends came over to the house, they would usually sleep on the couch which was bumped up against the staircase. Many friends - some of which didn't know each other would tell me they had dreams of getting sucked into the couch and trapped under the stairs. I personally never had that dream though.

• The basement was divided into 2 main sections. Once section was finished and the other section was used for storage which also had the washer and dryer in it. The lights were usually off in that room. There have been many times I was sitting in the one room and saw the outline of someone waking around in the other room when I know there was nobody in there.

• I used to have an Ensoniq ASR-10 keyboard in the mid 90's which is what I used to produce hip hop tracks. I would be up all hours of the night making beats and cleaning up recordings. About a dozen times that I can remember, the keyboard would start "wigging out" and randomly playing bits and pieces of samples and sounds all by itself - sometimes it contained sounds that were not loaded into memory - pieces of tracks that I made months and months prior. I would write this off as a weird overheating/memory issue that would occur every so often, but when adding this to the list of everything else that has ever happened, it makes you think differently. Especially since this never happened in any other house.

Specific things that happened:

• Night number 1: On the very first night, my parents left me at the new house alone with the cat. They were on their way back down to the DC area with the U-haul truck to get the last few things. They were only going to be gone about 3 hours or so. But within 20 minutes of being left alone, I heard the cat going crazy in the basement, which I thought was normal because cats usually take time to get adjusted to a new house or apartment. But I walked down the stairs and saw her tail bushed up and growling at the big walk-in closet. It sounded like something was rustling around in the closet. Kind of like clothes moving back and forth - you know that sounds where metal hangers are sliding across the metal rod, as of someone was going through clothes looking for something to wear. I opened the doors to the closet only to find nothing was there - and the sound immediately stopped.

• I used to love to mix hip hop tracks on my turntables in my bedroom. These turntables were Technics 1200's, which as some may know, were NOT the type of turntables that would load a record and start playing automatically. You would physically have to pick the needle up, and put it on the record. Well one night, around 2 or 3 am, I had just finished recording a new mix. As I was done with each record, I would take them off the turntable and put them on my bed behind me. As the last 2 records were still spinning with the needle completely off of each record, I had turned around to start putting each record back in their sleeve/jacket. About 2 minutes into the cleanup, I heard the needle scrape across one of the records and start playing about half way into the song. I still had my headphones on and about jumped out of my skin. The first thing I thought of was maybe my headphones wire was caught on the needle and dragged the needle across the record, but I didn't feel that happen, and the turntables were each turned 90 degrees counter clockwise so that the needle arm was at the top (which was the way I liked to use them). So there was no way that could have been the case. Also, the cat was no where to be found, so she wasn't there to bump it. Needless to say I didn't sleep in my room for weeks.

• Another time, I was playing Nintendo in the basement. As I'm playing, the cat starts freaking out again. The lights dim a couple times, the cat takes off upstairs, and within seconds, the Nintendo starts flashing and the lighbulb in the lap behind me explodes. Literally explodes. I remember sitting in the dark and calmly saying "I know you are here" and I casually walked upstairs.

• more to come!