Category Archives: general

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.

Protective Ghost

Age: 49

So we bought the house from my old boss, Kelly, actually, who I worked with at Leo Burnett, and she had told me this story about the house before we bought it. She just basically said the house was kind of haunted, but not in a bad way, and she explained a couple of different situations. One was that in the middle bedroom, in Alistair’s bedroom, when she had her twin boys when they were babies, and they were crying in the middle of the night, it was like 2 AM or something, and she went to put her son Seamus back in the crib, and when she set him in the crib, the crib moved away from the wall by like half a foot. And she picked him up out of the crib, and then she eventually put him back in the crib, and it did it again.

It sounds terrifying, but she wasn’t scared. She had this feeling that it was her grandmother, and that her grandmother was comforting her in this time of need, where she was so exhausted with the babies, because her grandmother also had twins, and she could just, like, feel her presence, and she said it was very comforting.

So that’s kind of the context before we moved into the house. And the other thing about the house is that it was built in, like, the early 1900s, like 1912 or something like that. And, during the Great Depression, it was actually a boarding house, meaning the second floor of the house, there were individual bedrooms that were rented out, and they actually walled off, um, the stairs so that you couldn’t go into the living room on the main floor. That is why they put in a second entrance to the house as well on the side, so you could go in to the side, and you would basically enter on the landing of the stairs and just go straight upstairs. So anyway, um, it was a boarding house during the Great Depression. All of the bedrooms had a little mirror on the inside of the closet. And so it was just a little weird. It had some quirks, and they all had locks on the doors as well.

Okay, so when we first moved into the house. Alistair was sleeping in that middle bedroom, and Dad was out of town. I can’t remember where Dad was, and I was in the basement because we didn’t have a TV on the main floor back then. I was watching something on TV, and I had the baby monitor on, and all of a sudden, there was this, like, this really weird noise coming out of the baby monitor. It was this sort of metallic, just this super weird noise and it didn’t stop. The noise was just this ongoing buzzing, kind of. So I immediately went upstairs to check on Alistair, and when I was opening the door, first of all, the door felt like it was, like, stuck or something, and then it did open. And, um… What I saw was that the light was on full blast. He had this little, like, I don’t know if you remember, but it was, like, a bright green little lamp from IKEA. It has, like, an on-off switch on the cord, and it shines this really weird and bright green color. So it was shining bright green out from underneath the door. Oh, I forgot to mention that. I could see the light was shining bright green out from underneath the door before I opened it, which was totally freaky. 

And the light, I did not leave it on, and there’s no way it was turned on. And he was a baby. It was not… he couldn’t have reached it. There was… it was very strange. And I was, like, totally freaked out. So I immediately unplugged the light, and the craziest thing was that the plug was, like, burning hot, right on the wall where the crib was. I instantly felt like it was a sign.

So my immediate thought was thinking about Kelly and what she had said about her grandma, and I think this person or whoever, um, whatever the spirit was, was, like, trying to warn me, uh, because the electricity… it was all cloth wiring, which can burn a house down. And that was, like, the first time I really became aware of the wiring in that house and how dangerous it could be, and it always freaked me out the entire time we lived there. But anyway, that was my takeaway, was that this ghost was, like, protecting me, and protecting my baby, just like it had sort of done for Kelly in that same room.

And there’s some other weird stuff, too, in that house. Like, for instance, when you were little. You were, like, 18 months old and you said something so weird. I know what it was, because I posted about it on Facebook at the time, and it comes up in my Facebook memories and I still laugh about it. Out of nowhere you said, “Mom, there’s ghosts in here.” And that was in your little bedroom way in the back. And I totally believed you, and you’re a very, very sensitive person. You always have been, and I believe you do have, like, that kind of a gift. But also, you did watch a lot of Scooby Doo with Alistair at the time, so who knows, but I believed you. (laughs) But…yeah, it totally freaked me out that you said that in your teeny tiny voice. Like, what? You were too young to understand the concept of ghosts, I thought, but I just kind of knew you were serious. You and your brother are both this way with your giftedness, in IQ and other things, so, yeah, I believed you, and I still do. You totally have that gift, and many autistics, like, feel things others do not. There’s all this research now about autism and telepathy, and, like, parallel universes they travel to and stuff. It’s so cool, so who knows, but I believe it all.

But anyway, there was nothing scary in that house except for in the basement. Don’t you think? It had a little bit of a weird vibe in the laundry room, especially. But upstairs, I just always felt that we had like a friendly ghost that was looking out for us, or that’s what I told myself. But it definitely felt like there was a presence in that house. Ok, that’s it.

When is this story told? To whom? Where does it take place?

Vanessa told this story to me, Audrey, on April 24, 2025. The story takes place in the house I grew up in from ages 0 to 12 in Oak Park, IL. The house was built in 1912, and it was used as a boarding house during the Great Depression, with the rooms on the 2nd floor rented out to various individuals. 

What does the teller think of the story?

She enjoys telling the story. She gets very animated and excited retelling the story. You can tell it really made an impact on her, and it was a significant event that occurred, which is why the memory has stuck with her all these years. She believes in ghosts and thinks she can sense various energies. Our current house is a large old house built in 1905. Whether the house is haunted comes up in conversation all the time. She can sense and feel things about houses, especially, but she is not a person who likes or gravitates toward anything scary at all. I think she suppresses a lot of the things she can sense to protect herself. But this story is clearly a good/funny memory about a house that she loved. 

My thoughts – what do I think of the story?

The story is entertaining and totally believable, especially for me, because I have my own stories from that house. So basically she thinks the ghost turned the light on so that she would unplug the light and notice the burning hot cord and learn about the sketchy cloth wiring. The way that she associates the ghost with protection is an interesting theme with her that I have noticed comes up in other situations. For instance, she also talks about a bird, a cardinal, that visits a tree outside the window in our family room every day. She thinks the bird is her grandmother, just looking out for her. It brings her comfort. I think it’s sweet. She is a positive person, and she is looking for the positive almost always, even in her own ghost story. I think she believes spirits hang around to look after and protect their people. She isn’t religious, but in this way she is spiritual.