Tag Archives: ghost story

Scary Camp Story

Age: 22

Text:
“There once was an old man who lived in an old house, and he lived around no one else except for one other old neighbor. It was just an old man who lived there by himself, and this man became infatuated with the life of this old man who lived next to him. Infatuated. He was so intrigued by his life as a single old man that he couldn’t resist. So every night for a week, he went into the old man’s bedroom, snuck into his house, broke in. The old man had no idea, he couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear. He had bad senses, he’s an old man. He broke into his house and would just watch him sleep and try and figure out what he was thinking about. On the 8th night, he goes back to the old man’s house like usual, but he swears he sees the old man’s eyes open. So, instinctually, he grabs the pocket knife out of his pocket and stabs the old man in the heart. He’s panicking. He just killed a man and doesn’t know what he did. He was scared. So, he buries the old man under the floorboards in the old house. Eventually, the police came and asked him to go to the crime scene, as he’s the only one that lives around this old man. He works through the investigation, and nothing happens. He goes to sleep that night, but he’s awoken by a slow thumping. Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom. The sound of the old man’s heart beating from under the floorboards. Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom. Finally, he goes back. He looks under the floorboards. The old man’s still dead, but he can hear the boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom of his heart. This sound follows him for the rest of his life, and eventually, he tells the police that he killed the old man, and the police said, ‘We don’t know anything about this old man.’ He dreamed it all.”

Context:
A boy who grew up in Kansas City, Missouri and learned this ghost story when he was camping as an Eagle Scout.

Analysis:
This ghost story is interesting for a few reasons. I have often found that ghost stories that end with “It was a dream all along” are ones that are made up completely and didn’t know how to end it or, similarly, someone forgot the ending and changed it. I would be interested to see other versions of this tale and if they have a different ending or not. It’s also interesting that he learned it as a Boy Scout, potentially serving as a cautionary tale for invading privacy and lying.

Bloody Mary

Age: 22

Text:
As a younger sibling, my sister would always do things to try and scare me. But the one thing that I knew that she didn’t, as a mere four-year-old, was Bloody Mary. What you do is you go into one bathroom, and you spin someone around in the dark eight times, saying, “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.” Then you turn the lights on for a quick second so you can see the reflection of Bloody Mary in the mirror. I did it to my sister, and she screamed. She ran out of the bathroom while the lights were flickering on and off, and then you keep flicking them on and off. Then they believe that the Bloody Mary is actually trying to scare them.”

Context:
A boy from Kansas City, Missouri discussing how to scare people with the Bloody Mary legend that he learned at school.

Analysis:
He used a folkloric myth/legend/ghost story that he learned through his classmates to scare and prank his sister into thinking there was a demon ghost woman with a bloody face in their bathroom. You start by doing a ritual (turning the lights off, closing eyes, and spinning three times), making the person disoriented and confused when the light starts flickering. Children often see a woman because they are so scared and imagine it even though she’s not actually there.

The ghost at Catalina Island Marine Institute (CIMI)

A: “Um, so at my summer camp, which is located on Catalina Island in Toyon Bay, specifically.”

Interviewer: “What’s it called?”

A: “It’s called Catalina Island Marine Institute, CIMI, and there’s basically this big hill that you can hike up and climb, and at the top of it there’s kind of, like, a chimney, basically just a chimney stand. And so the story is that there used to be a house up there, and it was a wife and a husband, and they had a kid, and it was a boy. And they were playing or something, and the kid fell off the cliff. And the mother went over, ran over, saw the kid dangling there. And for a moment, was like, Oh my God this is perfect. I wanted a daughter – something about that. So then, the kid plummets to their death. It was tragic. The husband sees it as a tragedy. No one knows that the wife, like, could have saved the kid potentially. They have another kid, ends up being a girl, and when she’s about six years old, they’re playing again, and the kid, once again, slips off the cliff and is hanging off the tree, and the mom rushes over and tries to save it. And the kid looks up and goes, Are you gonna save me this time, Mommy? Also, plummets to their death. The mom is obviously so, like, traumatized and, um… You know, is very, like, distraught by what just happened and what the kid said to her that she lit the house on fire and committed suicide. And the only thing standing is the chimney now. And so the husband wasn’t home, and came to find only the chimney left standing without the wife and the kid.”

Interviewer: “Wow. What did the husband do after?”

A: “I don’t know. Yeah, but that’s, like, the ghost story. And so the ghost of the wife, like, haunts the camp. And the kids.”

Interviewer: “How old were you when you first found out?”

A: “I was in late elementary school.”

Context: In class, we were discussing ghost stories. A. went to camp at Catalina Island Marine Institute. At CIMI, this is a ghost story that is passed down from generations of kids at the camp. It is based on an abandoned chimney that is at the top of the hill on the island there and how the house came to be burned down, along with the ghosts that came with the event.

Analysis: This story is a good example of a camp ghost story that gets passed down between kids to make a place feel more mysterious. I have never heard of a camp without a ghost story or legend because those aspects are part of the camp experience and create a community within that tale. Inside info that only camp members are in on. The legend connected to Catalina Island Marine Institute takes something real, that being the chimney at the top of the hill, and builds a dramatic, creepy backstory around it. Overall, it’s less about whether the story is true and more about creating a shared tradition that makes the place feel haunted and memorable.

The Girl with the Red Thread

Age: 18

Context:

One evening, while walking on campus with my friend, we began sharing spooky stories. She suddenly recalled something that had haunted her for years — a strange experience she had as a child, which had blurred the lines between dream, memory, and legend. This is the story she told me.

The Story:

When she was around 7 or 8 years old, she lived in a home with a study room that had a bed but was rarely used. One night, after waking from a nightmare, she found herself in that very study — a place she never usually slept in. She remembered lying beside her mom, both of them facing the wall, and gently shaking her awake out of fear.

She asked her mom to tell her a story because she couldn’t sleep. Strangely, her mom — who was known to strictly avoid ghost stories or anything scary — agreed. What happened next would stay with her for life.

Still facing the wall, her mom began to tell a ghost story. In the story, a nurse was working the night shift at a hospital. One evening, while heading out from the first floor, she took the elevator — but somehow, the elevator inexplicably descended to the 4th basement level instead, a floor used as a morgue.

This floor had no button, no lights, and no one should have been able to access it. But the elevator stopped there, the doors opened, and the nurse saw a little girl standing silently in the dark. The girl got into the elevator with her.

As the nurse glanced over, she noticed a red thread tied around the girl’s wrist. In Chinese superstition, red thread on the wrist is sometimes associated with the dead. The nurse was so frightened she reportedly died on the spot.

What terrified my friend wasn’t just the story itself — it was the realization much later in life that this was a widely circulated urban legend. Many people she later met had heard it before. And yet, she had never heard it before that night, and neither had her mother — who later insisted, repeatedly and sincerely, that she had no memory of telling the story, or even of waking up that night.

My friend later searched the story online and found that it had indeed been turned into a movie, or at least referenced in popular media. This deepened the mystery: how could a widely known ghost story have been told to her by someone who had never heard it — someone who vehemently denied ever telling it?

To this day, my friend remains disturbed by this experience. She remembers it vividly. Her mother, however, insists it never happened.

The Informant’s Thoughts:

She finds this story creepy, not because of the ghost itself, but because of the contradiction between her clear memory and her mother’s absolute denial. She believes the most chilling part of the experience isn’t the plot, but the uncertainty of how she ever came to hear it.

Years later, when telling others the story of the girl with the red thread, people would say, “Oh, I’ve heard that one!” But she hadn’t. Not before that night. Not ever.

My Thoughts:

What makes this story so compelling is not just the content of the ghost story, but how it plays with memory, belief, and reality. The idea that a story could be “implanted” through a moment that no one else remembers adds an eerie, almost psychological horror element to the tale.

It made me question how many of our memories are truly our own — and how stories that seem personal might actually belong to something much larger, floating around in the cultural subconscious, waiting to find a host.

The repetition — her telling the story to others, retelling it to her mother, and hearing denials each time — builds a quiet but powerful kind of fear. Over time, the story’s scariness comes not from the ghost, but from the accumulated sense of being haunted by a memory no one else shares.

As a piece of folklore, it’s fascinating because it shows how legends can find their way into our lives, not just through media or hearsay, but through deeply personal and unexplainable experiences.

The Shadow Behind the Curtain

Age: 18

Context:

This story was told to me by a Chinese international student at USC, whom I’ll refer to as SG. We were sitting together in one of the quiet study lounges at Parkside after midnight, discussing the kinds of ghost stories we’d heard growing up in China. That’s when she told me something she had never written down or shared publicly—something that happened to her in her childhood that she still remembers with frightening clarity.

The Story:

When SG was 10 years old, she lived with her grandparents in Harbin, a city known for its long, dark winters. Her grandfather had a habit of rising very early, often before sunrise, to boil water and do light chores. Their apartment had large, thick curtains that covered the floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room.

One early winter morning, just before 6 a.m., SG woke up suddenly. She had heard soft footsteps and assumed her grandfather was up again. Curious and still sleepy, she wandered out to the living room—only to find it completely dark, with no lights on. She paused at the doorway.

That’s when she saw it: a silhouette of a person standing perfectly still behind the curtain, as if staring out the window. The form was unmistakably human—tall, slightly hunched, and entirely motionless.

Thinking it was her grandfather, she called out to him.

No answer.

She approached slowly, heart pounding. The air felt wrong—too still, too cold, as if the temperature had dropped. When she finally touched the curtain and pulled it aside—

There was no one there.

No one in the room. No sound of footsteps. No open windows. Just the snow falling silently outside.

Terrified, she ran back to her room and hid under her blanket. She didn’t tell anyone for weeks.

Informant’s Thoughts (SG):

SG says what disturbed her most wasn’t the sight of the shadow, but the fact that she saw it so clearly, and yet her grandfather had still been asleep in his room the whole time. Years later, she still isn’t sure if it was a dream, a hallucination, or something else.

What unsettles her most is that she continues to experience the exact same dream every few years: waking up in a different place, walking into a dark living room, and seeing a shadow behind a curtain.

Each time, she says, she wakes up before pulling the curtain open.

My Thoughts:

To me, what makes SG’s story haunting isn’t just the visual horror of the silhouette—it’s the way it has embedded itself into her memory and dreams, repeating like a ritual.

I’m struck by how familiar this setting feels: cold northern apartment, heavy winter curtains, the eeriness of early morning silence. Even though nothing explicitly supernatural happens, the ambiguity makes it even scarier.

It also makes me think about how many ghost stories we hear as children in China are tied to domestic spaces—kitchens, hallways, staircases—not abandoned mansions or graveyards. They are ordinary spaces made terrifying by something just a little out of place.

This story lingered with me long after she told it—not because of a ghost, but because of the uncertainty that still follows her.