descolada99b reminded me of an interesting topic in one of his posts to the sex thread: Does anyone have personal ghost stories? Is there anything that happened in your past that made you believe, even for a second? I have a few I haven't drawn up yet, but I thought I would toss the idea out there.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

Fuck this - mine will NOT fit into a strip, so here it is in good old-fashioned text...

The lady who is now my wife (Rebecca, or Bec most of the time) used to live in the Victorian country town of Bendigo (a couple of hours northwest of Melbourne), a town which boasted its very own oak forest. The forest is kind of pretty, but disturbingly still and silent, since no local animals like the imported trees, and no other plants can grow because European trees always hog the sunlight.

Two very strange things happened to the two of us there. The first was quite innocent. I was visiting Bendigo with a few male friends, and the five of us, along with Bec's best friend at the time, were having a picnic in the barbecue area in the middle of the forest. Bec and I decided to go off and have some private time away from the others, and walked off into the woods.

Like I said, there are no animals and hardly any birds in the forest, so it was eerily silent. I should also point out that the car park adjoined the barbecue area, and we were definitely the only people there. After a quick snog and some chat, Bec and I started to make our way back. Up ahead, we heard what sounded like somebody kicking fallen leaves with both feet as they walked - boosh! boosh! boosh! boosh! We figured it was one of our friends and waited for them to appear through the trees... they didn't. After a minute or so, the noise stopped, and we kept walking. It was only a short distance to the edge of the forest, and there was no-one there, except all of our friends, still sitting and chatting back at our picnic site. There were still only our cars in the car park, and definitely no animals large enough to make so much noise. It was creepy, but not really bad.

My second weird experience at the oak forest (and, I found out later, Bec's third) was one of the most terrifying things that has ever happened to me. I was living in Melbourne by this stage, and had taken the train up to visit Bec for the weekend. She had a car, and we went for a late night drive, and found ourselves in the oak forest car park - kissing, talking, the usual falling-in-love stuff.

I suddenly realised that Bec had frozen, and seemed to have stopped breathing. I asked what was wrong, and she could only whisper, terrified, "Listen!" I did, and what I heard turned by blood to ice - there were noises on top of the car, very quiet, but a distinct tapping and scratching. It wasn't branches or leaves, because the car park was completely clear and quite a long distance from the edges of the clearing that contained it.

The next bit may have been paranoia and hysteria, but it felt very, very real - I, and Rebecca, felt a blazing sense of hatred and malice from above us. Basically, something was on top of the car, and it hated us. It wanted us to leave immediately. Bec started up the car and raced out of there very quickly, while I sat and looked straight ahead, terrified to look behind in case I saw... well, ANYTHING.

Later, at home, Bec told me that exactly the same thing had happened to her with a previous boyfriend - the noises on the roof, the powerful feeling of hatred and malice, the sense of being chased. Her ex was, frankly, an arsehole, but he was a sensible, atheistic, sceptical-of-everything arsehole, and what happened scared the living shit out of him. Bec only went back with me because... well, there were two reasons: she thought that she and her ex might have been overtaken by hysteria; and she suspected that the hatred, if it was real, was directed at him, not her. Obviously, she was wrong on both counts.

I should stress that she only told me these details after our own encounter, so I was not affected by them. I don't believe in ghosts, as such, but I do believe that strong emotional events can leave traces behind. Being a Christian (albeit an rather odd one) I also believe in demonic possession, both of people and of places. I don't know what hangs around in Bendigo's oak forest, but whatever it is scares the hell out of me.

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I've been struggling with how to fit my ghost stories into strips as well. There is so much background that adds to such things. I'll cop out and go the text route too, for now. Maybe someone can conjure up comics based on these, or just make fun of us superstitious old farts.

Here goes one.

My birth-mother (didn't raise me but I knew her) was part owner of a nursing home. The home was in a Victorian mansion - a huge brick one with spires and circular stairs, a huge attic and at least one secret passage that I found. For decades all these old people were dieing there, often leaving their belongings behind (no family or they didn't care). As a young boy I used to play up in the attic in the antique wheel chairs, racing back and forth. Sometimes I would find an old wooden leg, glass eye, photo album, or lock of hair. The place was packed with fascinating stuff.

Between the ages of 12 and 16 I was the summer groundskeeper for the place. It sat high on a hill with a rolling lawn. I would mow grass and trim bushes in the summer a couple times a week, then go in to spend time with the old folks or play in the attic.

One day I noticed that a door in the attic, normally locked was slightly open. Then I heard noise - a voice. I approached and smelled cigar smoke. The voice became clearer and I could tell it was discussing baseball. There was just one voice - male, husky, soft. He mentioned Ty Cobb and laughed.

When my hand touched the door the voice stopped and the cigar smell vanished, replaced with the usual dusty smell of the attic. I looked in and saw an old bras bed with no sheets. On the bed was a dome radio with the cord cut before you got to the plug and a shoe box. I went in - the hair on my neck stood on end but I didn't feel threatened. I opened the box and saw ashes. The room was alive with a static electric feel.

I ran downstairs and told my mom about it. She turned white, grabbed a padlock and bolted the three flights up to the attic, then locked the door. She didn't say a word, but escorted me out into the lawn and we sat down.

When she recovered she told me about Charley. He was the gardener of the place when she bought into it. He was an old man then and not in full position of his faculties. Today you might peg him as retarded, but he kept the lawn nice. He lived up in that room. Charley liked cigars and baseball. Besides gardening, that is all he paid attention to. When he died my mom didn't know what to do with his ashes so she left them on his bed in the shoebox. Once, when up there storing some things for a friend of Charlie's (an old resident who had died recently) she heard the radio going, but the door which was always locked was still locked. She got the key and opened it. The radio was playing an old timer's baseball game and the smell of cigar smoke was everywhere.

It was she who cut the radio cord.

I played in the attic after that. Sometimes I got a whiff of cigar smoke, but no more voices. I never told my mom for fear she wouldn't let me play up there anymore. I got the feeling that Charley was cool with that. And I remembered to always be respectful of the personal artifacts I came across, I could feel him over my shoulder.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

The story I posted is my only first-hand brush with something creepy and nasty, but I had a non-ghostly encounter that scared me badly, a few years ago.

My first serious girlfriend had gone off to Sydney to study at university, and she came back to town during the first holiday of the year. Again, she was a girlfriend with a car, which was nice, and we drove to a place in Wagga (my home town) called Wiradjuri Reserve - a natural park enclosed by a horseshoe-shaped bend in the Murrumbidgee River. It was late at night, and not quite warm enough to swim, so we stopped the car a good distance away from the other vehicles there, then got out and sat on a blanket down by the river.

As you would expect, we were snuggling, kissing, talking, the usual, with the only light coming from the moon. Suddenly she froze, looking at a point up the riverbank, over my shoulder. She whispered, terrified, "There's someone there." I could barely think, because my mind was filled with the thought that a young woman had been found murdered in the river not a hundred metres from us about a year earlier, and the killer was never caught.

I slowly turned around, trying to look like I was just shifting to get comfortable, and I thought I could see a head and shoulders about twenty feet away, up the riverbank and mostly-hidden in long grass, but I wasn't sure. I decided that we just couldn't risk it, and whispered to my girlfriend, "Get up slowly, naturally, and we'll just talk and take the blanket with us, as if we are just leaving normally. If I say 'run', run as fast as you can to the car and don't stop until you are inside with the doors locked."

We forced ourselves to chat loudly while we gathered up the blanket and walked back to the car, travelling in a wide arc around the person we thought was there. I heard no noise behind us, and when we were most of the way to the car, I looked back - a man was slowly standing up in the long grass, right where we had seen him. We got into the car and drove like hell away from there.

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I remembered a couple of other stories, now. Both of them happened in the first flat Rebecca and I shared when we moved in together in Melbourne. It was a small first-floor flat (that's second-floor to you USAnians - we have the ground floor, then the first floor above it) and we lived there for a year. By the time we left, we were both convinced that something resided in there, though we didn't know what.

There were many odd little things that happened - lights and appliances being switched on or off at odd times, strange unexplained noises, moving shadows cast on the floor when no-one was around... There were three really odd events that stand out, though.

The first was the worst nightmare of my life, which I had the first night we stayed there. I woke up in the dream, in the same room where I was actually sleeping, but it was mid-morning, and Bec was still asleep. I could hear muffled noises in the spare bedroom, and as I walked toward the half-open door, I could see movement reflected in the glossy painted door. In my dream, I remembered that my mother was visiting, and sleeping in the spare room, and I was worried about her.

Suddenly the door opened, and a strangely-dressed man walked out. he was dressed all in white, with a weird floppy white beret, a bit like a chef's hat. He was carrying a knife with a short triangular blade. I was too surprised to react when he stabbed me, at the join between my neck and right shoulder. He must have severed my spinal cord, because I fell to the ground like a bundle of rags. He calmly stepped over me into my bedroom, and I knew that he had killed my mother and myself, and now he was going to kill Bec. I woke up noy just with tears in my eyes, but shaking and bawling my eyes out. I was so upset I had to call my mother straight away, though it was only 6am.

That was just a dream, but it was unusually vivid. One bizarre thing about it was that the killer had a distinct face that I still remember, and it was not a face I know.

One time I was home alone and Bec was at work. I had just finished showering, and was drying off, when I distinctly heard the following series of sounds: the screen door to our flat opened; the front door opened; the screen door and then the front door closed; soft footsteps crossed the loungeroom carpet from the front door; distinctly female high-heeled footsteps click-clacked across the lino outside the bathroom and into the kitchen. I called out, thinking it was Bec, and was puzzled when she didn't answer, and equally puzzled that she was home from work in the middle of the day. I eventually went to look, and of course the flat was empty, and the front door locked.

Another time I was in bed, getting warm and waiting for Bec to join me. Our bed was against the window, and an obnoxious streetlight meant that we had constant needles of light poking in around the blinds. I was rolled on my side, toward the window, with the blankets pulled up to my neck. Bec came in and said something to me, then came toward the bed. I heard her abruptly stop walking and talking, and I rolled over to see what was wrong. She looked scared, and asked if I had been sitting up in bed when she had walked in, and I replied that I hadn't. That was when she sat on the bed and began to tremble.

When she had walked into the room, she could see my silhouette (spelling?) propped up on my elbow, blankets around my waist, facing her, and she got the impression I was angry about something. She looked away for a moment, or blinked, and I was suddenly, and silently, rolled over and fully covered. It took her a long time to get to sleep that night.

That's it, my full collection of personally-experienced creepy stories. I collect other people's, though, so I could tell you some real goosebump-makers that others have told me, all of them sworn to be true.

Sorry these are all so long-winded. :)

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Same Victorian mansion - same nursing home - my sister's story. She was the night nurse in charge when an elderly man clumped down the stairs in his best Sunday cloths.

"Jake," she said. "It's 3:00 AM. What are you doing out of bed? Why so dressed up?"

"They'll be here for me in the morning, 7:00. I wanna be ready." He replied.

He seemed confused, or focused elsewhere. She took it for a senior moment and shuffled him back up and got him ready for bed, then tucked him in. All the time he kept mumbling softly, "They'll be here at 7:00. Don't let me sleep too late."

"Sure Jake." She replied. She had no idea what he was talking about. No one ever stopped by that early.

She thought she saw him come down again at 6:30, but when she looked he was in bed.

Later she watched as the doctor filled out the time of death for old Jake as 7:00 AM.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

I have a few.....but they would take forever to post!
Maybe I'll try my hand at doing a comic of them. OR does that take the scariness out of them?

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Women are fisher's of men because we all know.... The small ones you throw back. The medium ones you eat. The large ones you mount.

A college town on the plains of the USA. I gravitated toward a house that was rented to some 8 or 10 college girls (big shocker, I know). I actually knew 2 of them for a few years before. I eventually became the boyfriend of another, so I was there a lot.

We all started noticing odd things, all directed at the girls that lived there and nothing at me. The girls often felt an angry presence. I saw a mettle pot jump from a shelf one day and almost mash one girl in the head. She ducked when I yelled and it flew 6 more feet across the room, over her head. Twice knives dropped off of counters near girls' feet when they had been placed well back on the counter. The incidence were too numerous to remember.

Once day I asked if the girls would care for a séance. My grandmother gave me pointers as a kid - she claimed to have the gift. They agreed and we placed a candle in the middle of the table and held hands. I explained that spirits can communicate through the flame - moving it in response to questions.

I invited the spirit to join us. It wasn't long before we all felt a chill in the well heated, closed kitchen. The candle began to flicker.

I can't remember the exact order and wording of my questions, but I got clear indications that the spirit was a male who had been jilted by a woman. When I asked if he had killed her the flame stood still, indicating no. I asked if he had killed himself and the flame stood still. I asked if she had killed him and the flame went crazy, dancing in a violent rage. No one at the table felt a draft that could have caused the change. But we all felt a rush up our spines.

I expressed my sorrow for his death, and so did all the girls. I reasoned with the spirit that these were not the woman he spoke of. He agreed to think it over and consider putting an end to his haunting.

There was a marked decrease in strange activity.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

[Click to view comic: 'Ouija Ouija da da da da! Spookalata haunta lotta (part 1)']

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Women are fisher's of men because we all know.... The small ones you throw back. The medium ones you eat. The large ones you mount.

Ouija board are evil! Stick with cards and candles. That's what granny used to say.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

Hell, no! That squirrel-cat is freaking me out!

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I ate a hooker half a bottle of knife.

Hell, no! That squirrel-cat is freaking me out!

Yes! We need the comics! And if you post a story, it becomes fair game for others to turn into a comic or parody, cool?

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

By th' by Jael, I HOPE you're coming out with episode 2. I just love to yell at the screen during horror movies.

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

http://www.stripcreator.com/view.php?ID=21584
[Click to view comic: 'You can't hide Aces up your sleeve if you don't have sleeves']

Not to lighten the mood or anything. Those stories were pretty damn good.

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The what mentioned above is total fiction. Please don't take it seriously!

OK, this one is not mine, but was told to me by the guy in the story. This one is another example of what I believe most hauntings are - powerful emotion leaving traces behind, and those traces being felt by sensitive people years later...

I'll call this guy Floyd (that's his middle name, named after Pink Floyd by his ex-hippy parents). He was staying overnight at a friend's rented house, and in the middle of the night he got up to get a drink of water. The kitchen of this house was in the front, adjoining the living room, and a streetlight outside lit the living room quite well. He walked into the room and couldn't believe what he was seeing.

Blood was everywhere, glistening and black like wet tar in the dim light, but definitely blood. There were pools of it on the floor, splashes of it across the walls, even splatters on the ceiling, but worst of all were the smeared bloody handprints on the walls and windows. He began to scream - something he was embarrassed to tell me when he told me this story.

A few seconds later, one of the other people in the house ran out and turned on the light. As soon as the room brightened, all the blood was completely gone.

The story doesn't end there. One of the girls living in the house went to pay the rent a few weeks later, and, since she was quite friendly with the staff, got chatting with the receptionist. She casually asked if anything bad had ever happened in the house, and the receptionist shyly admitted that a girl was once murdered there by her recently-dumped ex-boyfriend. The details horrified my friend when he was told about them later - she had been sleeping in the front room, because there were a lot of students sharing the house at the time. Her ex came in through the front door, saw her sleeping there, and stabbed her over fifty times. According to the real estate agent's receptionist, the room had been painted red with her blood.

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Another one, this time from a high school friend of mine. He and a small number of male friends decided to drive to an old cemetery, well out of town on an old highway that had been made redundant by a new bypass. It was very late at night, and very dark, so they did the blokey thing and all went in with no torches, their way lit only by the moon.

They were joking and teasing each other, and teenagers do, and walked out to the centre of the cemetery. All of a sudden, one of them said, "What's that noise?" They all stopped talking and listened.

The cemetery was roughly square, with the main gates in the middle of one edge. Off to one side, there was a hig-pitched and constant whistle. My friend told me it sounded like a person whistling, but constantly, as if they didnt have to stop to breathe. It sounded like it was on the fenceline, and it was moving rapidly along the fence toward the fence that held the main gates.

As one, they all broke and ran for the gate. As they ran, they could hear that the whistling had rounded the corner, and was coming very quickly toward them along the cemetery's front fence. It sounded very close as they ran out the main gate and piled into the car, and it was definitely on the fenceline. Someone else that he told this story to said it was probably an old car on the highway with a dodgy window seal, but he told me that there was no car noise, and the sound was not on the round, but on the fence, though it was travelling as quickly as a car.

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[Click to view comic: 'Ouija Ouija we don't really need ya!']

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Women are fisher's of men because we all know.... The small ones you throw back. The medium ones you eat. The large ones you mount.

It was the invisible wombat of death.

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100 pounds of shit in a 25 pound sack.

DexX slaps Gabe about the head and shoulders with a nice fresh barramundi fillet.

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This signature has performed an illegal operation and has been shut down.

quote:

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We all started noticing odd things, all directed at the girls that lived there and nothing at me. The girls often felt an angry presence.

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Mine are just out-of-body experiences and psychic shit.

Like: One night when I was a freshman in college, I was up late, reading some channeling bullshit, one of those Seth books, and I thought, surely if this is real, then I can pull off a psychic stunt. My girlfriend was still a Senior in high school (legal! legal!) and it was like two in the morning, so I was pretty sure she'd be at home asleep. I was in a dorm.

BTW, I'm a sensible, atheistic, skeptical-of-everything arsehole. But still, the Seth book creeped me out (and so do all these ghost stories).

So, feeling right creepy, I put my fingers on my temples and closed my eyes, the way you're supposed to when you do psychic shit, and thought real hard at my girlfriend, "call me," repeatedly. Then I shrugged, turned out the light, and went to sleep.

An hour or two later, the phone rang, and it was her. She'd had a nightmare and felt she had to call me. I asked her what the nightmare was about, and she said she didn't know, but she was really scared. She was pretty groggy, not making a ton of sense.

I hadn't discussed that night's reading material with her (that I remember-- maybe I had, and that helps explain it). In the four-plus years we were together, she never called me in the wee hours before or since that occasion. I never tried it again, not wanting to spoil a perfect record.

I STILL DON'T BELIEVE IN MAGIC. Hmph.

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What others say about boorite!

Also, I had two textbook UFO visitation experiences when I was a kid. These were right out of Communion, down to the swooshing noises, little blue dwarf guys, tall almond-eyed guy, "covering" memories, and so on. But it was about 20 years before Communion was published.

Needless to say, that book made my hair stand on end, quite literally. I mean, these experiences were scary. But I think they were episodes of sleep paralysis with hypnagogic hallucinations.

Don't believe everything you see, after all.

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What others say about boorite!

[Click to view comic: 'Make your time']

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What others say about boorite!

[Click to view comic: 'Cannibal Baby Girls']

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet