Here are some of the creepiest true accounts of hauntings ever recorded.
THE PROCTOR HAUNTING
Have you ever spent the night in a house reputed to be haunted? This story could make you reconsider.
It was the autumn of 1834 when the Proctors, a Quaker family, began to notice disturbances in their house near Tyneside in northern England. Every member of the family complained of hearing footsteps and whistling that could not be accounted for.
The sound of a clock being wound could not be explained. Over a six-year period, the intensity of the haunting increased. The stomping of angry footsteps echoed throughout the house, contrasted by faint whisperings. And then there were the apparitions. The white figure of a strange woman was seen in a window by a neighbor, and then seen in other rooms of the house by the Proctors. A disembodied white face appeared over a stair railing, seeming to watch the family.
The Proctor's plight was known throughout the area, and then, as now, there were skeptics who were certain they could explain it all away. On July 3, 1840, Edward Drury, a local doctor, volunteered to spend a night in the house with his colleague, T. Hudson, while the Proctors were away. Dr. Drury armed himself with pistols and waited on the third floor landing, unafraid of what he was sure were mundane house noises. Less than an hour into his vigil, Drury began to hear soft footfalls, then a knocking and an echoing cough. Hudson had fallen asleep. But at about 1 a.m., Dr. Drury watched in horror as a closet door slowly swung open out of which floated toward him the ghostly lady in white. Drury screamed and charged the phantom, succeeding only in tripping over his friend Hudson. What next happened the doctor could not recall. "I have since learned," he later wrote, "that I was carried downstairs in an agony of fear and terror."
Some years later the Proctors could stand no more of the unexplained manifestations and vacated the house in 1847. The building was later torn down.
THE FREEBORN HAUNTING
If a previous owner has died in the house in which you now reside, you might want to think twice before you redecorate.
After Mrs. Meg Lyons died suddenly in her Bakersfield, California house, it had remained untouched when Mrs. Frances Freeborn moved in during the month of November, 1981. Every piece of Mrs. Lyons' furniture was just as she left it. Her clothes still filled the closets and dressers. Eager to make the house her own, Mrs. Freeborn set about cleaning out the house and refurbishing it to her liking. And that's when the trouble started.
The first unsettling mystery was a loud thumping noise coming from the kitchen area, which Freeborn at first dismissed as noisy plumbing. But then there was other strangeness. Freeborn habitually closed all doors and cabinets before retiring to bed, only to find them wide open in the morning.
Lights would be switched on by unseen hands while Freeborn was out of the house. She tried to take these curious occurrences in stride, but was convinced a paranormal force was at play when she tried to hang a particular picture - a triptych (three photos in one frame) of pre-Civil War women.
The morning after hanging it, Freeborn was puzzled to find it on the floor, but neatly propped against the wall. Figuring it had merely fallen (and luckily not broken), she re-hung it. In fact, five times she tried to hang the picture, and each time it was taken down and set against the wall. A week or so later, following an impulse, she hung the picture in a spare bedroom much lower on the wall and too close to the light switch than she actually preferred. But this time the picture stayed put. Why? When Luke Cowley, the dead Mrs. Lyon's son-in-law, visited the house, he remarked that Mrs. Lyon had hung a very similar picture in that very spot.
In 1982, as Mrs. Freeborn was preparing to redecorate the master bedroom, the poltergeist activity increased. Throughout the day that she shopped for paint and wallpaper, she was unnerved by the sensation of being watched. That night, crashing noises and loud banging in remote areas of the house kept Freeborn from sleeping. She arose from her bed at about 2 a.m. and walked to the bathroom. She ran some water at the sink to wash her hands. Suddenly, the bathroom window flew open. She closed it, returned to her bed and sat, frightened. Again the bathroom window opened and in the same instant the bedroom window crashed shut. The folding doors of one closet tore open as another closet door slammed closed. Her dog barked frantically at the terrifying spectacle.
Scared out of her wits, Freeborn's solitary thought was to get out of that house. She picked up her dog and fled the bedroom into the hallway and ran smack into some unseen force. "There was a zone of pressure," she later related, "a mass out in the hall, as if something ominous and ugly was concentrated there. I realized I had to get out of the house or I would die."
Three distinct forces were in that hallway, she insisted - one to each side of her and one blocking her way out. Gathering all her courage, she shouted, "Get out of my way!" and forced her way past the dark presences. Somehow she sensed that the two entities at her sides her "surprised" that she was able to do this, and she felt that the entity in front of her was knocked back. She ran out the back door and sped away in her car... still wearing her nightgown.
Subject: True and terrifying ghost stories that will keep many night 
Mon Dec 31, 2007 6:53 am
