Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

There are several instances of unexplained phenomena I’ve witnessed in my life. I’ll just touch on a few… not discussing possible causes, just describing what happened.

Woodbury, Minnesota – Early 1990′s

I was in junior high and staying over at a friend’s house for the night. After the usual pizza and movies, we went to bed in his room with me on the floor. Some time in the wee hours I awoke and intended to go to the kitchen to get a glass of water, but I didn’t make it that far. The bedroom hallway opened up to a large, open area of the house which included the entryway, stairs to the basement, and the living room, with the kitchen on the other side of the entryway. As I stepped into the entryway, in the light filtering in from the front door sidelight windows I saw a white-clad old woman rummaging in the top shelf of the coat closet and I froze, thinking my friend Joey perhaps had his grandmother living with him and not wanting to give her a fright. She turned and saw me, her face distorted into a cartoonish (yet terrifying at the time) exaggerated look of surprise with too-large eyes and mouth and she turned and fled down the nearby stairs as if she were a video on fast-forward. My thirst forgotten, I went back to the room and woke Joey, who told me with no concern in his voice that it was just Vera, his Grandma. “She stops by sometimes…”

Small Cabin, N.E. end of Lake Vermillion, Early 2000′s

There were 7 of us, all late teens-early 20′s, in a small cabin owned by the family of one of the guys that was with us. I’ll describe the layout so the story makes more sense. There were partial walls separating the two bedrooms, giving visual privacy, but only in the way a bathroom stall does… everyone in the cabin could easily hear and talking or motion that was going on. The other half of the cabin was the open kitchen/dining/living area, perhaps 8 feet by 14 feet. One couple was in one bedroom (barely room for a full-sized bed in these rooms), one couple in the other, one person on the couch, one other guy and myself on the floor in sleeping bags. My feet were near the head of the other guy on the floor, Dan. This cabin is supported by wooden blocks, so the floor sounds a bit hollow when walked upon, but there isn’t enough clearance for a person to crawl underneath.

No more than a few minutes after lights-out, there were two loud bangs on the floor right at my feet as if someone had dribbled a medicine ball at my feet, shaking the floor. No more than a second elapsed before I was up on my feet with the lights on, looking down at the floor where my feet and Dan’s head were. Everyone else in the cabin was in the main room now, all looking at the same spot (so I know I didn’t imagine it). No one bothered to ask if it was my heels or his head that hit the floor, because the noise was so loud and violent that neither Dan nor I could have made them without serious injury. Dan and I ran out and shone flashlights under the cabin, but nothing was there. Needless to say, we were all awake for awhile longer. While sitting in the living area, I could see out into the front porch where the swing started to sway with no occupant or wind. Just as the others turned around to look out the window and see the swinging, the rifles we had propped up in the corner of the porch were knocked over and the swing had one last heave and was suddenly still, as if someone had grabbed it to stop it. We also saw red lights coming in the back window, which someone thought were brake lights… until we reminded her the heavily wooded ground sloped sharply up at the rear of the cabin and there was no car access in that direction for many miles.

South St. Paul, Minnesota – 2004

I lived in the basement of an older house that had 2 other roommates. The laundry wastewater dumped into an old metal dual sink and since there was a leak when the cold water was on, we had to crank on the cold water faucet when we washed clothes, putting a makeshift rubber shroud over the handle to keep the fine spray from getting on the walls. When I first moved there, I only had sheets for walls, so I could hear the dripping if someone had forgotten to turn off the water after their laundry was done. One night I settled into bed and turned the TV off. Now that the basement was quiet, I could hear the dripping of the laundry faucet and muttered aloud to myself about my roommates forgetting to turn the water off. As I was getting up to turn it off, I hear the loud squeak-squeak-squeak of the faucet being turned and the water turned off. No one was down there but me.

I never felt threatened or scared by that or any of the other things that happened in that house. I even affectionately called our ‘ghost’ “buddy”. Several instances of green orbs were witnessed not just by me, but by others. A shadowy figure of a tall, slender man was seen more than once. My favorite experience, though, was when “Buddy’ played with me through my CPAP (look it up). I was woken up one night by my CPAP turning off by itself. Seconds later it turned back on. Then back off. Then back on. I said aloud, “Buddy, quit screwing around, I’m tired.” The machine turned on and off several more times in the next minute. When I told him to quit showing off, my mask turned back on and stayed on for the night.

Springbrook Nature Center – 2004

Myself and 4 others, some of whom were with me for the cabin experience, were walking through Springbrook Nature Center after dark. After about a mile of wooded paths, the woods open up on one side of the path to a clearing about the size of a football field. We get about halfway through the clearing and hear a noise behind us, turning our flashlights to see what it was. At the base of a several-stories-high tree at the edge of the clearing we all saw what looked like 2 glowing eyes looking back at us, standing about as high off the ground as a man or a tall deer. One other guy and I kept the flashlights trained on it and went closer to investigate. We were about halfway back to the edge of the clearing, somewhere around 20 yards from the ‘eyes’ when they suddenly flew smoothly and silently up the tree and blinked out when they reached the top after only a second of movement. Judging by the startled cries from the girls behind us, we knew it was not our imagination. The lights looked just like the reflection of a deer’s eyes in headlights. If it were a low-perching owl that decided to fly up, we would have heard wing flaps or tree branches being disturbed… and it would have had to maintain eye contact with us the whole way up while it apparently levitated. That still wouldn’t explain how the girls 30 yards behind us, without their own flashlights to reflect, saw the same lights. I have pictures of these and other lights from that park if anyone wants to email me and discuss it further.

Sent in by Jamie Rasbury, Copyright 2010 TrueGhostTales.com