'Tell Me Your Ghost Stories'
2005 Contest Winners

1st Place - Kate Duggan, California
2nd Place - Lynn Wood, Georgia


     I had a hard time choosing a winner in this contest, as all the stories I received were pretty creepy!

     I enjoyed them so much that I've decided to post not only the winning story, but a couple of others, as well. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did!


STORY #1: In The Vale of The White Horse

     When I first got married, my husband and I rented a 600 year old thatched cottage in a village called Uffington in Wiltshire in the Vale of the White Horse - a very ancient sacred area of Britain. The back door of the cottage was solid oak with a proper 'slide it home' bolt on it. One night, my husband went out to the detached garage to lift some weights and I went upstairs to put away laundry. About an hour later, I hear my husband banging on the door and yelling. When I got down, he's fuming because he thinks I've locked him out. Of course I deny it, but being in a state of newly wedded bliss we let it go. Two weeks later, almost exactly the same thing happens. We play around with the back door, seeing if we can make it lock itself, but to no avail. It kept happening - we also heard people moving around downstairs talking away to each other after we'd gone to bed. But I never felt scared there... it was more as if the house was trying to keep me safe. Strangely enough, it wasn't until we moved into our brand new apartment that my husband and I felt secure enough to even discuss this subject - neither of us had the nerve to bring it up in front of the ghosts!


STORY #2: White Noise

     My daughter was about 2 months old. We were living in an old apartment building in Wilmington, NC (right next to the club my husband was managing at the time, which, incidentally, was the site of another experience). My daughter was colicky, and since the hubby worked nights, I was alone with her. And going nuts. She wouldn't stop screaming, and I didn't know it at the time, but I was suffering from post-partum depression. Anyway, it was a little after midnight, and I was right on the edge. I needed relief, so I put my daughter in her crib and put my boombox on the floor next to the crib. I'd heard that sometimes the white noise between radio stations can soothe colicky babies, so I turned the radio on, set it between stations, adjusted the volume, and left the room. She quieted for a while, but soon started screaming again. I went back into her room to check on her, and realized I wasn't hearing the radio anymore. I checked the boombox and found that the volume had been turned all the way down. I was pretty sure the volume was up when I'd left the room before, but chalked it up to losing my mind. I turned the volume back up and left the room. Daughter quieted, but her screaming commenced again. I went back to check on her again. No sound from the radio. Again. I checked the boombox and confirmed the volume knob was exactly where I'd left it. I checked the plug -- still in the wall. I investigated further, and discovered the box had been switched off. That boombox had a power button...a pushbutton. I knew without a doubt that it had been playing when I left her. And since she and I were the only two people in the apartment, I had no explanation for how the power button managed to get pushed. I scooped my daughter up out of the crib and took her into the living room with me. As I sat on the sofa, holding and rocking my daughter, something dark caught my eye. I looked up at the top of the wall opposite me, and there, hovering near the ceiling and stretching the entire length of the wall, were a bunch of dark "shadows". Not one long shadow, but a bunch of small ones. I called my husband, begged him to come home early, and never felt comfortable in that apartment again.

STORY #3: Wanna Play?

My eldest sister used to live in an old 16th century farmhouse. When her husband began some construction work on one of the bedrooms, my niece, who was five at the time, kept telling her that there were two little girls in long dresses who came out of the wall to play with her. As my niece has a vivid imagination, my sister didn't really take much notice. Several years later, my sister was asked if an old former resident of the house could come and look round. During the conversation, the old lady turned to my niece and said "Did you ever see the little girls?" apparently, this old lady had also seen them when she was little.

Special thanks to everyone who entered, and remember... if you've got it, haunt it! :-)