SPO has a Halloween meme on his blog, and post about ghosts. I am inspired to tell a true scary story:
About 15 years ago, in Sacramento, Ca, my best girlfriend and I lived in the same apartment complex, right across from one another. One night she was entertaining some dude, and I popped over for a visit. Somehow, the three of us got on a discussion of ghost stories and creepy stuff. He began telling us about something in the movie 3 Men and a Baby…he said that there was a scene where the camera follows Ted Danson as he is walking across set, and in the background, you can see the figure of a small boy right in the background, dressed in old-time clothing, staring right into the camera. The story goes that the scene for the movie had been filmed in an upstairs room of a house where a father had murdered his young son, and then killed himself. ALSO, the story went, if you look closely, you can see what appears to be the ghostly image of a shotgun mysteriously balanced on the bedpost.
“I have a copy of that movie!” I cried, and so the three of us trooped across the hall to check out video and see if we could find this creepy scene.
I found the videotape, popped it into my old, top-loading VCR. Here’s where the weirdness began, and, as far as I know, never ended…
As soon as I hit “play”, Anne’s date said “This is the scene!” My tape just happened to be right at the scene we were looking for. Kind of weird, but anyway…the scene began, Ted Danson walks across the set and…there in the background…was the little boy in old-timey clothing staring with dead eyes, straight into the camera.
All three of us screamed.
And the tape popped out of the VCR. We screamed again. Then laughed. Anne said that it was the scariest thing she’d ever seen. “Let’s watch it again!” Anne didn’t want to, she was really weirded out, but I popped the tape back into the VCR, rewound for a few seconds and there, again, was what appeared to be a dead child, staring right into the camera. Hadn’t the actors seen this? The director, the camera operator? We screamed again, and this time the tape not only popped OUT of the VCR, but it shut off!
All three of us were kind of freaked out. But here’s where things got really strange…
That night, as I slept, a pounding began. This pounding began in the living room and I thought it was someone knocking on the door…with three baseball bats.
There was no one at the door.
Then the pounding began on my bedroom walls. One side, then the other. Then in the kitchen.
Now, when I say pounding, I mean a sound like nothing else I have ever heard; a real BANG! BANG! BANG!. Loud enough to wake me from my sleep. And all of my neighbors, too.
The pounding continued as the days went on, moving around the apartment. One neighbor came over, to ask why I was pounding on the wall…I told her I wasn’t. As she was standing in my doorway berating me, the pounding began again. Her eyes got real big, and she apologized for accusing me. She told me she’d been hearing the sound of a child crying, unexplained.
One night, the pounding woke me up at 3 am, and I got really pissed off and began screaming and cursing at it. “Shut, UP, shut UP, SHUT UP!”
As I stood on my bed, furious, I felt a presence so disturbing that I had to get dressed and leave the apartment. I went to stay with my boyfriend, it was really scary.
The neighbors continued to complain, and threatening notes began appearing on my door and a phone call came from the property mangagement company.
One afternoon Anne showed up with a Ouija board. We put out hands on the board and began moving the slider around. Anne suddenly let go of it and looked at me strangely…”Did you spell that?” I didn’t know what she was talking about, and asked her what had been spelled. “You did that on purpose…you spelled ‘I want to molest you’”. I hadn’t, and told her so. She really appeared to be quite disturbed.
I moved out.
Months later, I was visiting Anne and as we sat talking in her apartment, we could hear, coming from my old apartment across the hall, BANG! BANG! BANG!
