Ghost storyish time!!! Because @lord-margolotta asked, most of these are going to be more "Oh hey, there's something there, and that’s cool" and not "oh no, that's scary!" For context for a lot of these, I grew up/live in this part of Ny which is the area between two cities (one is relatively small the other is the 5th largest city in new york and is best described as a dying city in my mind) so it is a shit ton of farmland, I now live in an area that is like a mix of the middle of nowhere and suburbs depending on which side of the town you are on (I am in the village which is on the more middle of nowhere side). I don’t consider this doxxing myself because I circled a fairly large area, and most of that area is small towns, so I am not being specific.
My first story takes place when I was about 7 (or 2014 if the rest of you want to feel old) at cabin on a reservoir that my great aunt rented. I stayed over one night while she was renting it to hang out with my second cousins (her grandkids). I remember me and one of my cousins where sharing a bed in the living room when all of a sudden we heard piano music when there shouldn't be any because we were in the room with the piano and the neighboring cabin, I don't even think there was a piano in that cabin, like one of our grandparents cousins was staying that cabin so we did get to see in side and had just moved out of that day. Needless to say it freaked us the fuck out. We would also hear cats meow when there were no cats, but that is decidedly less scary than having the piano in the room you're sleeping in start playing.
Now my next story takes place on the Erie canal, which is a big deal if you are from central New York and if (and only if) you are learning about the early 19th century USA, otherwise no one gives a shit about it. Essentially, before we had the railroads, the Erie canal was built to connect Lake Erie to the Hudson River (which then goes down to the sea) to make shipping things inwards from New York harbor in NYC easier. The city of Syracuse (the one that is the 5th largest city) which is where I claim to be from despite not living in it unless I am talking other locals then they get the actual town I grew up in, is almost smack dab in the middle of the state and exists because of the Erie canal. My paternal grandmother has a farm right next to the canal trail (that farm is where my dad grew up), so I've spent a lot of time wandering it (including at night, usually with my dad), fishing on it, and kayaking it. There is a bridge about 2 miles from my grandmother's house that is made of concrete, and once you get to the middle of this bridge, you start to experience a bad energy where it feels like you just need to leave, the other side of that bridge is even worse.
There's another area that my father has taken me to for years near the canal that just feels magical and like there is definitely a god of that place. I am not going to name it because that would be too specific, but this area shares the same name by everyone without people being told it.
I barely remember this story, but there is also a story of a lady who is half a donkey and half human who haunts the canal trail after having drowned it with her donkey by thieves.
Now on to my childhood home, there was this spirit of a little girl who would hang out around the orchard and occasionally on my swing set and shed at that house, some people didn't see her but could feel her presence instead. We also had a weird man in a top hat we would see around the orchard (the orchard was private and owned by my grandparents, so these weren't random people) and this woman who looked like a victorian lady in mourning and occasionally you wouldn't see her but you would smell a floral perfume and almost feel her there. They were just kind of there and weren't harmful. At one point, a former friend bought me an oujia board for my birthday, and we used it and might have talked to the little girl and tophat man.
My family's new house was built in 1900 and is next to a creek, and we have had some weird occurrences, but I wouldn't call any of them scary. I will randomly see someone in the hallways and in my bedroom, and we get a sense that they are happy that we are fixing this place up and that they loved the house. The one big story I have is that when we first started fixing the house and had just gotten the floors done (they are hardwood floors that we found under sticky tile), my mom stepped outside to smoke some weed and when she came back in she found a cross in the middle of the floor in the living room that not been in there before she walked out. The cross now sits on the doorway into the living room because it feels right. I think there have been other things found while working on the house, but I started college after we bought them, but before we moved in so I wasn't there for a lot of the beginning work.
