Category Archives: general

The Humming Step-Grandpa

Age: 18

Context: The following story was told on April 28th, 2026, in my dorm room to me by the informant, who is one of my close friends.

Me: “Okay, so just go ahead and just tell the story like how you normally would.”

NB: “Okay, so this was the day of my step-grandfather’s funeral. I will never forget this day. This, I have no explanation for this. Still, no one knows. It’s like a complete mystery. We don’t know what was going on. But anyway, basically what had happened was my grandma had went to the church already with my uncle to take care of like a few things before the funeral actually happened. My mom was putting on her makeup in her room, and when we woke up, my dad wasn’t in the room, but, um, we just assumed that he was in the bathroom because the bathroom was closed. And my sister and I were just, like, talking and whatever, and we were like, oh my god, like dad’s taking, like, forever in the bathroom, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we knocked on the bathroom door, and then we heard humming, and we were just like, really?”

Me: “And this was in your house that you still live in?”

NB: “Yes.”

Me: “And you’ve lived in this house like your whole life?”

NB: “Yeah, my entire life. And yeah, it has a lot of history. Like every single one of my family members has grew up there, including my mom. So, yeah. And we’ve never moved. But it has a lot of history, but anyway, basically, we knocked on the door. Um, we heard humming, and one thing about my dad is he’s not a sing-songy person, like, he’s not someone who hums, and, like, that was just really unusual for him. And when we heard it, it was like weird because it was like in a much deeper voice. It genuinely sounded like my step-grandpa, and we were like weirded out by it because we were just like, dad doesn’t do that. Like, it’s very odd. And basically, we went back in the room and we were just waiting because we were like, oh, dad’s taking forever. And my mom was like, oh, what’s going on? And we’re like, ugh, like dad is taking forever. But she looked at us like, what are you talking about? Like, what do you mean dad? And we were like, I don’t know. And then my dad came home with breakfast. And we were just like, what the, like, what? You weren’t in the bathroom? Like, what happened? And, um, he was just like, no, like, I wasn’t in the bathroom. I was getting breakfast, and we were talking to our mom, and my mom was like, oh, like, maybe your step-grandfather was just, like, getting ready for his funeral or something in the bathroom, and we were like, what?”

Me: “So did he live in the house prior?”

NB: “Yeah he did. Okay. We all lived in that house together, just like one big Brady bunch, like genuinely, but it was…it was weird, and I still, like to this day, I’m like weirded out because we we’re the only ones home, and, like, I don’t know. Like, there’s no explanation for who was in the bathroom, but yeah.”

Me: “So like, overall, like, what do you make of it? Like, you think…do you think it, like, was his spirit or you just, you don’t know what to think?”

NB: “I just think that maybe, because I do believe in like the paranormal and stuff, I think maybe, yeah, if… I mean, if I died, I’d want to get ready in my house too. So I think that, yeah, it’s valid if he just wanted to get ready one last time before he was buried. Um, but yeah, and that day when I woke up, the house just like felt very off. I’m very like into like energies and like sensing tensions and stuff and that day was just really gloomy and it was just really sad. And then I remember as soon as we buried him, like the sun came out. So it was very, very strange and yeah, half of me just doesn’t know what to make of it. But then another part of me is like, maybe that was him, like, possibly.”

Personal thoughts and analysis: This story was very interesting to hear, as unlike some ghost stories, this one doesn’t really have a logical explanation, and as a skeptic, it has me very conflicted. I believe the informant and their siblings’ account, which conflicts with my views on the dead interacting with the living. The only explanation I can think of is perhaps some sort of appliance was on that sounded like a hum; however, this appliance sounding like the informant’s step-grandpa on the day of his funeral would be a very interesting coincidence. Overall, if it was the spirit of the informants’ step-grandpa just getting ready for the day one last time before he was put to rest, there is something very wholesome about that.

Don’t Touch the Cross

Age: 18

Context: The following story was told on April 28th, 2026, in my dorm room to me by the informant, who is one of my close friends (I apologize for the amount of “likes”).

NB: “Okay. Um, in my house, there’s a cross from my grandpa’s grave that’s hung up on a door frame leading up to the stairwell. My mom and my grandma always told us never to touch it, never to disrespect it, or play with it because we used to throw like balls in the house, like just to entertain ourselves. And, um, they were, like, for real, like, listen, you can mess up everything else. You can knock over vases, whatnot. But one thing you cannot do is touch that cross and we’re like, okay. So when I was four, my oldest sister, I think she was about like 17 at the time. Thought it would be funny to take the cross off the door frame for a bit.”

Me: “Why would she do that?”

NB: “No, actually, it’s just like, she was like rebellious and like she just like didn’t believe in that stuff. So she just wanted to mess around and stuff. Um, and then somehow she lost it, and we couldn’t find it for about a week. But during that week, just horrible things happened. Everyone in my family who lived there at the time got really sick. My parents, my sister and I got into a really bad car accident. It was totaled, and my dad had to go to physical therapy after because he was in a lot of pain. My oldest sister got cheated on and dumped that week. There was a lot of bad energy in that house, I would say. It felt much gloomier and dark. Everyone was just really depressed and everyone had trouble sleeping, and for some reason at night, there was a lot of noise around our house. I don’t know if it was just…”

Me: “Wait, sorry, whose cross was it?”

NB: “It was my real grandpa’s. Not my Step Grandpa. Yeah, it was my real grandpa’s cross that was on his grave.”

Me: “And he also lived in the house?”

NB: “Yeah, he also did. I think he was like a part of like building that house or something before he passed away.”

Me: “Oh, [redacted]”

NB: “Um, and yeah, everyone just had trouble sleeping because, um, I remember the wind being like really powerful. I remember. But this is like a common thing in my house. We, uh, most of us have like experienced hearing whispers and hearing like children running and stuff like that. But we never understood why, because no, I don’t think anyone lived in that house previous to us, so… and it wasn’t our neighbors, because we live in a duplex and like, we know when our neighbors are like making noise and stuff, like the difference between our neighbors making noise and then us like hearing stuff going on and like, we’ve established that…that week especially, like, there was just so much going on that, like, there is no way It was our neighbors. And eventually, my mom found the cross when she was cleaning, hung it back up, and it was kind of weird how, like, everything just went back to normal. Yeah, my dad’s pain went away pretty quickly. Um, we all got better, like, from our sicknesses overnight. We were in so much better moods, and I just really don’t know what happened. It’s kind of blurry. I’m pretty sure there’s probably more that happened, but I was like so young at the time that I just don’t remember everything to the fullest, but that’s, yeah, one of my earliest memories.”

Me: “So, what do you think? Like, do you think it was, like, your grandpa’s, like, spirit, or it was, like, another spirit? like bad karma?”

NB: “Well mind you, like, that cross was at the funeral at his, like, grave for, like, a while. I’m thinking that maybe other spirits like latched onto it. Maybe bad spirits latch onto it, and just like, I don’t know why we took it. I don’t know why we have it in our house. I don’t know why we decided to hang it up. But, um, because of that, we just can’t take it down. It’s like kind of like Annabelle, like we can’t.”

Me: “Yeah, you can’t”

NB: “We actually can’t mess with it. So now it’s just hanging and yeah. I don’t know. Maybe that’s another reason why I have like weird stuff going on in my house and like paranormal stuff going on, but, um, yeah, it’s really weird.”

Personal thoughts and analysis: This was probably my favorite story im submitting because it’s either supernatural or the most insane coincidence of all time. Both are equally fascinating to me. Initially I interpreted it as the informants Grandpa maybe being a vengeful spirit so it was interesting to hear the informants take that a spirit may have latched onto the cross itself which makes more sense because both sides of the informants family were affected. The story follows a typical trope in ghost stories of some sort of family curse and it was interesting to see a twist on that, that the family curse in this case may be coming from outside the family. I also think it’s interesting that the informant comes from a multi-religious background and so it might have something to do with religious tensions between their families. Im also curious as to how the informants mom and grandma knew that the cross shouldn’t have been messed with. Overall a very interesting story.

Flickering Lamp

Age: 19

Ghost story

After my great grandmother passed, I remember the feeling of being sad both because my grandmother died and because I couldn’t be around my family due to Covid restrictions. I sat in bed crying after my dad gave me the news and I was distraught. Because this is the first family member I had passin my life, I didn’t know what to do and so I asked for a sign that she was okay. About 20 minutes later my dad came in my room to check on me and turned on a lamp I had never turned on despite living in that house for a year already. As soon as he turned the light on, and I told my dad that I wanted a way to know that she was OK, I turned to the lamp and it started to flicker. I had never used the lightbulb in the lamp and to this day It hasn’t flickered again, but that was my sign. 

Context: This story was told to me during a topic of religion. It was me, my roommate, her, and her friend. She stated that she does not believe explicitly in god, but instead believes in spirits. She then elaborated, telling this story.

Analysis: She thinks that it was her grandma. I think it was just a coincidence. It resembles the flame motif and ancestral ghosts. One attribute that could represent why she believed more was that she was younger, and this was the first time that a relative had died for her. Her emotional state could have been less stable, making her easier to persuade.

Fallen Rose

Age: 19

I was there when my grandma passed. The room had that still, suspended feeling—like everything was holding its breath. I had brought a single rose and placed it gently beside her on the bed, not really knowing what else to do except be there and give her something soft, something beautiful.

When the doctor finally said the time of death, everything seemed to freeze. And then, right in that exact moment, the rose slipped off the bed and fell to the floor. No one touched it. There wasn’t any movement that I could see that would’ve caused it. It just… fell. It caught me off guard, but it didn’t feel random. It felt like something had shifted the second she was gone.

A year later, on her birthday, I went to visit her. She’s in a mausoleum—completely enclosed, no wind, nothing that could disturb anything placed there. I brought another rose and set it carefully on her tombstone. I stood there for a while, talking to her quietly, like I used to when she was here.

Then I said our phrase, the one we always shared: “I love you more.”

Right after I said it, the rose twitched.

I froze. I remember staring at it, trying to make sense of what I had just seen. There was no breeze, no movement around me—nothing that should’ve made it move. It was small, but it was real.

So I said it again, a little more sure this time. “I love you more.”

And that’s when the rose fell. Completely, unmistakably, off the tombstone.

I didn’t feel scared. If anything, I felt this overwhelming sense of calm, like something familiar had just reached back toward me. In that moment, it didn’t feel like coincidence. It felt like her. Like she heard me, like she answered in the only way she could.

I know I can’t prove it. I know how it sounds. But I also know what I felt standing there—that same quiet certainty, like the moment she passed. To me, that was her way of saying hi, of reminding me that the love we shared didn’t just disappear.

And ever since then, I’ve held onto that. Not as something I need to explain, but as something I experienced—something that felt real in a way that doesn’t need proof.

Context: This story was told to me during a topic of religion. It was me, my roommate, her, and her friend. She stated that she does not believe explicitly in god, but instead believes in spirits. She then elaborated, telling this story.

Analysis: She thinks that it was her grandma. I think it was just a coincidence. It resembles the flame motif and ancestral ghosts. One attribute that could represent why she believed more was that she was younger, and she was very close to her grandma. Her emotional state could have been less stable, making her easier to persuade. I also believe that in her family, ghost stories were accepted more, making her easier to sway.

The Sound of Anklet

Age: 64

Context:

This story was told to me by my grandmother, whom I’ll refer to as PS. My grandma is quite a religious woman, and so she believes in restless souls trapped as ghosts, but not in malevolent forces. She is a witness to this story, as she was brought in to confirm the presence of ghosts. The story takes place in 1978 in Kolkata, India, but she told me this story for the first time when I called her last weekend, inquiring about ghost stories for this class.

The Story:

Some years ago, PS’s brothers were looking to buy a house in Kolkata, and they found one quickly, a large, well-located, and strangely, almost suspiciously cheap one. When they pressed the previous owners for an explanation, the answer was given hesitantly: two maids had been murdered in that house. The owners were selling because they were frightened, and they had not been able to stay. PS’s brothers were not believers in ghosts. They were practical men, and a large house at a low price was still just that so they bought it.

They moved in, and for a while, said nothing to anyone. But at night, the house was not quiet. What they heard repeatedly, consistently, always after dark was the jingling of anklets. The sound of a woman’s feet moving through the house, the small bells at her ankles marking every step. The sound would drift through the hallways, unhurried, as though whoever was making it had nowhere in particular to be and all the time in the world to get there. They set up cameras in the hallways to catch the intruder but found nothing, in fact even the sound of anklets weren’t captured. So her brothers were unsettled enough that they decided to call PS, but they told her nothing about the sounds. They invited her to stay, and they waited to see whether she heard those strange noises too. 

The next morning, PS came to them with a question she couldn’t quite frame. She had heard something in the night, a strange sound she couldn’t explain. Moving through the house was the jingling of anklets.

Her brothers looked at each other as that was as all the confirmation they needed. They called in a tantric, a practitioner well versed in the rituals for restless spirits. PS says the tantric came in the way a tradesman comes to fix something that is broken. He performed the necessary rituals to release the spirits of the two murdered maids, to acknowledge what had happened to them, and to give them somewhere else to go.

After that, the house was silent. The sound of anklets was never heard again.

Informant’s Thoughts (PS):

My grandmother says that murdered people, in Bengali tradition, often become spirits not out of evil intent but out of incompletion, that because their deaths were violent, sudden and unacknowledged, they didn’t know how to leave. She said, the tantric didn’t destroy the spirit of the ghosts, merely released them so they could move onto the next life. 

My Thoughts:

What strikes me most about this story is the way my grandma’s brothers didn’t tell her what they heard. They brought her in blind, waited, and let her come to them. I think it was almost evil of her brothers to withhold the fact that there might have been ghosts. But I still can’t reconcile how 3 separate sets of ears heard the same thing while the camera captured nothing. My theory is that someone else was coming into the house at night, and maybe they were going through a part of the house uncovered by the camera. Their noise wasn’t captured as the cameras of that time were probably not that developed. This to me makes more sense, than believing it as a ghost story.