#neoghost

I used to actually be kind of cool and do stuff that wasn't basically just me watching Netflix and playing on the computer. When I was about 17, me and my group of friends used to go ghost hunting.

There are a few places around here we'd go. Gibbs Bridge which is basically like every other town's "there was an accident, the ghost still haunts the bridge, sometimes you can see a motorcycles headlights etc" and we had a few creepy things happen there. And one time we were pulled over by the cops who told us to stop going there since people did animal sacrifices under the bridge and all of this is online and people KNOW dumb teenagers go to the bridge to check out the stories.

There is also Holcomb Woods. 

http://www.forgottenoh.com/Counties/Wood/holcomb.html

Is the local story. And then a guy really DID hang himself back there, my best friends dad was part of the search party to find him.

We had a BUNCH of things happen there.

But this story takes place at an abandoned house out in Bowling Green. NOT the Potter house.

http://www.deadohio.com/PotterHouse.htm

Where we have also been, but the house itself is now torn down.

This is another house that my friend Rory told us about. Me, Rory, Hannah and T went there one night and me and Hannah have NOT been able to find this house since.

Obviously, the house was abandoned. It looked like it had been involved in a fire or something. My friend Hannah is a really big chicken shit, so she decided to stay by the car with it turned on, in case we had to haste the fuck out of there and she took a bunch of pictures of house with a disposable camera while me, T and Rory decided to go in. 

The inside was basically in shambles. I thought we would fall through the front porch before even getting inside. Graffiti was everywhere and it just felt wrong. The stairs to the second floor were in the back of the living room and T and Rory decided to head up while I was looking around the living room. While they start heading up, we hear a giant crash upstairs and those two idiots continued to head up, got halfway up there and came running back down, grabbed me and ran out of the house. On the landing of the steps were a bunch of dead animals that didn't look like they died naturally.

So we decided to go check out the backyard while Hannah takes some pictures. Behind the house is a shed that looks as dilapitated as the house itself except for the brand new green and white drapes that were hanging in the window. After the crash inside and seeing these new drapes in an obviously abandoned property, we decided to go.

FWD a few years. Hannah calls me and tells me she finally got those pictures developed and wants to show me them. So she picks me up and I go over to her house and she hands me the pictures. Flipping through them, there is nothing special except for one picture. She took it of the front of the house while we were inside.

Standing in one of the front windows is a very obvious figure of a person. None of us ever made it completely up the stairs to the second floor.

Nobody really knows why it was haunted, other than I guess it was just an old building so who knows what may have happened there. One of her co-workers died in the store, but these things were happening before that as well.

Mom was in something of a management position at this store so she had her own office. To get there, you went through the double doors in the back of the store by the hallway that led to the restrooms - we'll get to those in a minute - then you went up a steep little metal staircase to your left (basically the bottom part was where the deep-freeze was and stock was stored, etc.) and at the top was the door to Mom's office. It was small but pretty nice; the top half of the wall the door was in was basically a large window that looked out on the staircase and the stockroom below. Her desk was against this wall. Even without the window, though, you could always tell when someone was coming because the stairs made this clanging noise when you walked on them.

One day when she was hard at work and pretty much alone in the back, Mom heard the clanging of someone coming up the stairs to her office. She didn't think much about it until they got to the top and stopped, and after a minute she realized no one had knocked so she raised her head up from her paperwork and looked out at the landing. There was no one there. She even opened the door to check. They couldn't have gone back down because she would have heard them.

This repeated itself on occasion, sometimes accompanied by harsh, heavy breathing outside her door. Mom would tell us about it each time it happened, kind of laughing it off and it never seemed to bother her too much. It never actually did anything threatening so it wasn't really a big deal.

Now, to get back to the woman who died in the store - she was a cashier. She'd had a heart condition since she was a child - apparently her heart was slowly outgrowing her chest cavity, causing it to press against her ribcage. She wasn't expected to live past her early 30s, but as it turned out she didn't even make it out of her early 20s. One day, as she was running groceries through the scanner, she reached under a buggy for a carton of soda and her heart exploded; she died instantly.

Two or three years later, Mom had spent the day cleaning her office from top to bottom. After she had finished, she hung around in her office talking to 2 coworkers. The topic eventually turned to their coworker who had died - her family had had trouble raising the money to pay for a proper tombstone (many of the people who live around here are quite poor) and Mom's store had held a fundraiser which brought in enough money to buy one. The family had ran an article in the local paper thanking the store. Somebody had cut out this article and stuck it in the corner of a framed certificate in Mom's office - this was a couple years before the day I'm talking about now - but it had gone missing at some point. Mom had looked for it while she was cleaning to no avail.

Mom and her coworkers were discussing this, and when one of the women said she wished she could find the article, AT THAT MOMENT guess what comes floating gently down from somewhere over their heads, landing neatly on the floor right in the middle of all of them? You guessed it - the article in question. Mom thinks it must have been forgotten on the top of a shelf or something but still, the fuck?

Like I said, neither of these things were overtly threatening, more like 'playful' or 'curious' things I guess. Less 'friendly' things happened there as well, though.

One of the women my mom worked with had been having a recurring nightmare for about a week or so. In her dream, she would be standing in a blank, empty space with only a bright white light surrounding her. In front of her stood a little girl, her back turned to the woman. She had long, curly hair, and was wearing a fancy, doll-like dress with lacy white socks and black mary janes. She was humming a little tune. Slowly, she'd turn around to face the woman, and when she turned all the way around she had no face, only a blank expanse of skin without features. Mom's co-worker would always wake up at this point. She told her husband about it, but no one else until...

One day, she took a bathroom break. The bathrooms were located at the back of the store, down a dark little hallway and I can tell you they were always pretty unsettling to be in. I can't vouch for the men's room, but the light bulbs never seemed to work right in the women's room for some reason and they would always be flickering or blown out, and the room was cold and eerie so I never stayed in there any longer than was strictly necessary. Anyway, this lady was in one of the stalls, thinking she was alone in there when suddenly she heard someone start humming in a high-pitched, girlish tone. She froze up for a second when she recognized the tune from her dream, but after a moment she ducked her head down to check the stall beside her. Dangling some inches above the ground were a pair of child's legs with black mary janes and lacy white socks.

Needless to say, she booked it out of there. She told Mom about it later that day (they were pretty close).

Then there was the time with the deli. The deli was in a kind of alcove adjacent to the restroom hallway. It was extremely early in the morning and one lone deli worker was there, checking equipment and... doing deli stuff I guess, idk. She was just about to finish frying the day's donuts when out of nowhere, a person fucking CRAWLS out from behind the deep fryer and disappears in a blur under a table. She mostly only saw it out of her peripheral vision, but that was enough to tell that

1. It was a half-human, half-"creature" figure; and

2. It was crawling way too fucking fast to be an actual human.

This girl was either pretty brave or in denial, I guess, because apparently she tore the place up looking for the creepy-ass, crawling, teleporting burglar before finally coming to her senses and NOPEing it out of there.

Most of the things that happened were actually centered in that general area in the back. Another employee was pushing a buggy through the double doors that led to the stockroom, and caught a glimpse of a face looking through the doors' windows.

The last thing that happened brings us back to the stairs that led up to Mom's office, although Mom was not involved in it herself this time.

Three coworkers of hers were on the night shift, doing price checks/changes. After they'd finished, they all went to the back for their things they'd left in the break room. Coming out of the break room, you have to walk past those stairs to get back to the store itself, and they were walking past the stairs when they all heard a bang, bang, bang coming from them. They all stopped and turned their heads in time to see a kid's rubber ball bouncing down the stairs toward them.