Years and years ago, my friend (A) and I were invited to stay in another friend’s (B) holiday home in the south of France. It was a beautiful old building in an ancient village on top of a hill, and B reckoned there’d been a dwelling on the spot for around 1,000 years. I’m not sure how old the house was, but the…

This is my first time posting because until recently I’ve never had anything that spooky happen, but this event floats back to my brain every so often and I still have no idea what the fuck this was about.

I am sharing this again this year because yesterday my kid happened to ask me if anything truly spooky had happened to me, and, well, yes:

After University I hadn’t yet found a job and needed an apartment that wasn’t going to destroy my savings. I live in Toronto and ended up finding a basement apartment rental in a beautiful old Victorian home in the Parkdale neighbourhood, which has a lot of historic homes but is known for not being the nicest area.

When I was about to start 5th grade, my mom took me and my older brother on a road trip to see the waterfall trails in Elmira, NY. A hotel would’ve been too pricey so we stayed the night in my step-grandmother’s place, which was a big, empty old farmhouse. I barely knew my step-grandmother and had never been to her…

1996 - Chicago suburbs - I was a scrawny 14 yr old boy. My sister and I were home alone - she was in her bedroom on the other side of the house. I was doing homework at our kitchen table facing a floor to ceiling window facing the backyard. It was already dark outside, which meant the window was basically a mirror…

When I was 14, I went camping with my Boy Scout troop in the mountains in summer time. This was in a campground with several sites you could rent, each separated by each other by some distance and trees - and with a common outhouse building at some remove. For our site, it was up a trail about a quarter-mile or so…

My ex husband owned a house when I met him. It had been abandoned when he bought it, left unlocked even, although a squatter lived in a bungalow in the backyard not the main house.

I occasionally get sleep paralysis which is pretty awful in its own right. Its not recurring and its not a consistent figure or entity, I usually just chalk it up to whatever I ate or watched.

One of the most vivid was that I dreamt I was on a tour of an old building (its the US, so 1800s old) with a group of other…

My great aunt was the coolest, chicest and beautiful woman I knew. She loved the color hot pink. She wore hot pink lipstick and blush. The carpet of her cottage was even the color.

This will probably not read as too scary, but it scared the absolute shit out of me at the time.

The time my oldest’s friends from school came to spend the night. They were a brother and sister who were both undersized for their age - like you’d think they were a good few years younger than their actual ages.

1988, The Suburbs. (imagine an Spielberg / Stranger Things style aerial-shot to set the mood)

From 2014 up until the pandemic, I worked at a small hotel in New Orleans. There are two wings to the hotel.

When I was about 12, my two cousins moved from Los Angeles to New York City. My aunt decided to make it a fun, family road trip, and she drove them to my house in the Midwest, and I got to join them for the rest of the journey. We were all pre-teens at the time (I was the middle in age between them), so the drive was…

The house I lived in for ~9 years was haunted. I would swear it was.

This happened to a friend and I on a camping trip to a really remote national park in the South. The first night we lost our tent in an intense sand storm that blew in from the south and ended up having to sleep in the Jeep. We were inside the Jeep just killing time while the storm is going on hoping it would be over…

Years ago, in late fall, we moved our young family from a house in the city to my grandmother’s old home, which was rural and secluded. My grandparents had passed on, and so had my mother, but she grew up in that house. It’s a two-story farmhouse with hidden rooms, and it’s more than 150 years old. When we moved…

I hadn’t realized it, but I’d been eagerly awaiting these stories for a whole year! This is my first time submitting; this is the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me.

The Watcher