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Phantom Footsteps

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Susan Price

This happened in England, in the West Midlands, in Dudley. I was about 15 at the time, so it would have been around 1970. The incident took place very shortly after Christmas.

At the time I shared a bedroom with my younger sister, but she was away from home, staying with relatives, so I was sleeping in my room alone. As usual, I lay awake reading for a long time. In the bedroom next to mine were my mother, my father and my youngest brother, who was just a baby of a few months old. At the end of the landing, my older brother was in his bedroom.

As I lay reading, I heard someone walk across the landing to the bathroom and back.

http://www.forteantimes.com/happened/phantomfootsteps.shtml

Link is dead. See post below for complete text.
 
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Across the landing down the stairs up the stairs, across the landing-did anyone else notice that it was making a definite shape?What's the pattern and what's it mean?

Seems to me tat it might have made the shape of a hex or somehting, but I wouldn't know abou that stuff. This bears further scrutiy.
 
I have heard phantom footsteps as well. It was about 1986 (give or take a few years). I was out with a couple of my friends hanging around on the street when we heard footsteps. They were walking down the street, coming closer, passign and then fading into the distance. It was fairly late at night, with nobody around. We checked everything and theyre was nothing moving that night at all.
Really spooked us.
 
idea!

Is the house old or modern?

Perhaps you heard a sort of echo of the past residents?

Just an idea.
 
I too have heard phantom footsteps. One particular night, in '86, I was at a friend's house. It was about midnight, and we were watching T.V. Suddenly, we both looked up as we heard the front door open, then shut. As footsteps came down the long hallway towards the living room door (shut), we both went to meet the intruder. As the footsteps stopped outside the living room door, my friend opened it, to reveal an empty hallway. Strangely, we were not spooked by this at the time, although we agreed that it was very odd, and that we had both heard the opening frontdoor, and the footsteps.
 
I personally find this kind of disturbance the most chilling, is anyone else the same? It kind of evokes the idea that their is something moving around your personnal space or close proximity that just shouldn't be there. The idea aswell of the footsteps running up and down is really freaky!!!
 
I had something similar happen to me regularly when I used to work in a petrol filling station. If I was having a quiet shift and no one was about I used to hear loud footsteps approaching me from the shop doorway. They were very distinct and could be heard over the natural shop noises. It would abruptly stop when it reached the counter in front of me. It turned out that a couple of my colleagues had also heard the same thing.

I also used to hear a noise rather like someone opening and slamming shut the fridge doors. From where the till was I had a really good view of the place and I can say with certainty that the doors where firmly shut.
 
My mum and my aunt, both departed now, were staying with a friend who was housekeeper to a rector somewhere in co. Durham. Said rector was out on business one evening. Mum and Marg were in the sitting room when they heard the front door open and shut and footsteps coming along the hall. The footsteps passed the door and disappeared toward the back of the house. Thinking it was the rector and knowing that he would be in need of refreshment, Marg went out of the sitting room and noticed wet footprints on the hall floor. She went to the rectors office to see if he needed anything only to find the office locked and, according to other staff, the rector not yet returned.
 
my own haunting experence started with phanotm footsteps (checkout haunted semi in the ghosts section of this board).

In the house in wich I was staying at the time me and my brother heard the door of the downstairs bedroom opening and someone walk across the coridor to the downstairs toilate. The next night the door was heard to open and the footsteps come up the stairs. It all got much worse wich thankfully your haunting (?) didn't.
 
I used to work in an institution which had one floor and a long internal corridor which was thickly carpeted.

On night shifts I'd walk down this corridor and often hear footsteps following me. Sometimes they seemed to come from above, i.e. on the roof, which was impossible. (For several reasons- security being one and my own roof-check another.)

This happened time after time. I don't know if anyone else heard this as I did not discuss it for fear of bringing pranks upon myself. Night work is hard enough without colleagues running round in sheets and tapping on windows!

I work in hospitals and everywhere I go I hear of phantom footsteps coming from the behind the heavily chained doors of the ward above. The lift usually goes up and down on its own, too. Brrr.

(One ward has a phantom backside but that's another story.)
 
speeking of phantom footstoes in hospitals (and care homes):

I used to work on a dememtia ward and often stayed for a cup of tea with the night staff (who had an hour to waste before their work began in ernest) and one of them had more than a few stories in this vein.

In one home that had been recently converted from a large house by having meny of the walls knocked out they would hear someoine walking about on the first floor and when they went to check it nothing. As soon as they went downstairs the noises would start up again. They had to go and check each ocurance just incase and each time nothing.

In anpother home footsteps where heard run domw the fire escape at the same time each night.

In the big mental hospital in Cambridge (posibly one of the most haunted places I have ever came across) something would go around at 2.30 each night opening doors in one of the wards. When new staff came across this for the first time the staff nurse would always reply 'oh her again'. I don't know how they knew it was a female ghost...
 
Was the house detached or was it attached to other houses (sorry, can't get to the full story, the link doesn't work)?

We often hear 'phantom' foosteps in our house - generally the front door opening and closing, footsteps going up and down the stairs, and walking upstairs when we're in the lounge.
It used to spook me out, until I realised it we had very thin walls and it was only the next door neighbours stomping about. :D
 
I live alone with my widow mother. A few weeks or so back my mother heard "me" coming up the stairs and going into my bedroom at around 3 AM . If i have nothing on the next day i often spend the whole night watching t.v or on the web. She thought i`d gone to bed, but the funny thing is she only heard "my" footsteps- my dog follows me EVREYWHERE i go in the house. Later on when i got up she said:" You went to bed early this morning".The thing is i did not. I went to bed around 7 am? But she was CERTAIN she heard "me"? By he way ,the bedroom i sleep in now was once my fathers who died on the landing of the house nearly 11 years ago. They shared different bedrooms you see. Just thought i`d share one of the little odd things that happen at my house from time to time. X
 
escargot said:
(One ward has a phantom backside but that's another story.)
Click to expand...

Please, please, please tell us the story of the phantom bum, Escargot, go on, please!
 
The Phantom Backside!!!

I was working in a Staffordshire hospital in the spring and was told several ghost stories by the actual witnesses.

One ward had a central nurses' station where staff could sit for the all-important brew while safely observing all comings and goings. In the corner of this ward was a bedspace whose bed had been removed so that excess equipment could be stored there. Wheelchairs, walking frames, dismantled beds and odd furniture had been ingeniously stacked up to totally fill the space and the curtain had then been drawn around it: there was absolutely no room for anyone to move inside the curtain.

Well.........

In the dead of night, a nurse saw the curtain lift and bulge outward, exactly as if moved by a nurse's behind as she bent over the bed! The nurse rubbed her eyes, looked again and nudged her mate with a 'Do you see what I see???' Her mate certainly did and both girls watched the behind move busily around the bed- which wasn't there, remember!

They watched, spellbound, for a couple of minutes as the movement continued on around the bed to the other side.
Eventually they tiptoed over and pulled the curtain back- nothing but a pile of scrap, and nowhere for anyone to hide or get past them.

Whooooooooo!
 
Flat Roofs?

I remember reading things about phantom footsteps years ago when I lived in a old terraced house. I had never encoutered them and had no desire to. When my family moved into my new house I slept in a loft extension this had a flat roof. and every morning I would hear footsteps walking around (this isn't a nice thing to be woken up by when you have to go to school belive me.
these would seemingly come from anywhere and scared the faeces out of me. it was only in the summer when I slept with my window open that I saw that it was crows walking across my roof.
Anyway I was rambling a little there but my point is that did any of the areas mentioned have flat roofs, it might explain one or two of them as crows are bloody loud. As for the one not covered by this I have no idea.
 
What a super subject - we should revive this thread. :D

I've only recently realised that we have phantom footsteps here. Most nights, I'll hear someone walking along our upstairs landing. It is 13' long so that's quite a few footseps.

The sound is like someone in shoes walking on a hard surface. The only people living here are the other'alf and me. We have a big bedroom each so I assumed it was him popping to the bathroom in the night.

However, when I mentioned this to him, I realised that a. there's never a light going on and off, as you'd expect, and b. he never wears shoes at night. He pointed out that he rarely gets up at night and wouldn't put his shoes on if he did.

I still hear the footsteps and they still don't worry me. There's usually a Jack Russell and a cat or two around to protect me. ;)
 
I've only heard strange footsteps once tho that was more than enough, and it's likely posted elsewhere on here (damned memory-first thing to go).
Used to live in a flat that was a 2 storey unit for elderly residents, the bottom one had been bought and rented out the top was occupied by an old lady. After being there a few weeks the old lady upstairs, whom i never met, died and the flat was duly cleared out and put up for sale. Not long after this had happened I was sitting up lateish one night, about 1 am, painting. It was a very quiet area after nightfall and i was sitting wrapped up in my daubing in silence, with just a dog for company when i heard footsteps as of someone in hard shoes walking across the bare floorboards above, starting at the far side of the room and stopping directly above my head. :shock:
Probably wouldn't have been so un-nerving if the steps had carried on the length of the room or even gone another way.
Never packed my brushes away so fast in my life before.
 
Ooh, you remind me that some years ago I was at our local Spiritualist church on some sort of course when we heard footsteps walking about upstairs. Apparently there's a library up there, but nobody was in the building but us...
 
My problem is all the interesting stuff happens to my brother.... heres three things he claims happened to him:

He was in the army (light infantry) and stationed in Germany. He was a nco so had his own room in barracks, which led off a long corridor. Several times he and others heard footsteps walking along the corridor, and loud knocks on the doors (sometimes his, sometimes other officers/squaddies). At first he would go open the door to find - of course no one. After a while he just ignored 'it'.

Later, in Northern Ireland, he was occasionally posted to a observation base which was surrounded by gravel and a heavily fortified fence. He and others heard footsteps crunching through the gravel, but no one was visible.

Nowadays he's in a job which involves regular physical training at a onsite gym. While in the changing rooms he and others hear someone walking across the gym, but when they look in its empty.

One extra story - a FOAB (friend of a brother) - one member of staff was locking up the gym alone, and went into the store room. Theres a 'Henry' vacuum in there and just being a bit daft, as he walked in the lad said out loud 'Hello Henry'. He claims a deep menacing voice repeated 'Hello Henry' right in his ear. Cue quick exit.
 
In 1976 I was a student at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. It was then a brand new, state of the art, 13 storey building. I did my turn of nightshifts on a medical ward. It was the standard design of two side wards each turning a right angle into a third open plan ward with the nurses station in the middle. Basically three sides of a square .

I was alone at the desk one night when I heard heavy footsteps coming up a side ward, approaching the central desk. I had my head down, studying, but looked up as the steps came 'nearer'. Nobody there. I jumped up, thinking an intruder had dodged into a side room. Nobody was out of bed.

I shrugged it off. A friend then took her turn at night duty on that ward and I asked her how she got on. Okaaaay, she hesitated, but I had a spooky moment when I heard someone coming to the desk, but nobody was there.
 
special_farces said:
One extra story - a FOAB (friend of a brother) - one member of staff was locking up the gym alone, and went into the store room. Theres a 'Henry' vacuum in there and just being a bit daft, as he walked in the lad said out loud 'Hello Henry'. He claims a deep menacing voice repeated 'Hello Henry' right in his ear. Cue quick exit.
Click to expand...

I can live with a spook around, I think we have been for the last 21 years in our house. We do hear footsteps from our bedroom which is above the living room, from time to time, not clomping, but the kind of shuffling you would usually do around a bedroom. It is nearly always at around 10 - 10:15 at night, all time of year. It is not 'the pipes' as we heard this before we had the central heating put in. (House was very 'original' when we bought it :roll: )
But hearing a voice like that mentioned above, in my ear, that would make me quite literally sh*t myself :shock:
 
Ah, phantom footsteps - I had these once! The following cut and pasted from an old posting of mine under "Ghosts" cuz I'm too lazy to type it all over again:


Years back I lived in an old house and we had the ghostly footsteps. It was precisely the sound of a man wearing hard-soled shoes walking across a wooden floor. It was not anything like the creaks and groans of old timbers settling. I was the only man living there, along with my wife and daughter. The sound always seemed to come from one specific upstairs room, and it happened maybe once a month. The usual scenario was: I would be home alone, engaged in something, and would hear the footsteps for a few seconds, and just about the time they quit would snap to attention and realize that I had heard them and that there wasn’t anybody there that could account for them. On several occasions I walked around the house to see if anybody had come in unannounced and somehow made their way upstairs without my knowing about it. After about a year there I told my wife about it, and she told me she had heard it too. It wasn’t scary to us, just strange and amusing.

The most dramatic incident occurred one summer day when my wife and daughter were out of town. I was putting up new sheetrock on a ceiling downstairs, directly beneath the room where the footsteps occurred. I was home alone, waiting for a friend to come over and help, but meanwhile was up on a ladder working. My hands were on the ceiling and my head was maybe a foot below the ceiling. I heard a man in hard-soled shoes walk across the floor just above me. The source of the sound moved; I could hear his progress through the room from my right to my left. The sound was so palpable I could just about feel the vibration from his footfalls in my hands.

I assumed that it was the friend I was waiting on, and that he had gone up the back stairs to the upstairs back door, let himself in, and was looking for me up there. I called for him, got impatient when he didn’t appear after several minutes, got down off the ladder and went upstairs to get him. He wasn’t there, the house was empty except for me, and the upstairs back door was locked. That was the only time that it really spooked me.
 
Well, I said "just about"; can't swear I did. But the point is that the sound was clearly coming from the ceiling/floor structure a foot above my head and the source was moving. So it weren't no clanking pipes.
 
The link in post #1 is long dead. Here's the complete text, salvaged from the Wayback Machine ...

-------------------------------------------

PHANTOM FOOTSTEPS

Susan Price

This happened in England, in the West Midlands, in Dudley. I was about 15 at the time, so it would have been around 1970. The incident took place very shortly after Christmas.

At the time I shared a bedroom with my younger sister, but she was away from home, staying with relatives, so I was sleeping in my room alone. As usual, I lay awake reading for a long time. In the bedroom next to mine were my mother, my father and my youngest brother, who was just a baby of a few months old. At the end of the landing, my older brother was in his bedroom.

As I lay reading, I heard someone walk across the landing to the bathroom and back. My bedroom door was shut, so I couldn't see who it was - and wasn't interested anyway. But then someone walked from the door of my brother's room to the door of the bathroom and back - I didn't hear my brother get out of bed or cross his bedroom floor, or go into the bathroom.

But I assumed I had just misheard, and took no notice.

I should say that at no time during this incident did I ever feel alarmed or scared - merely irritated.

The tramping backwards and forward across the landing became almost constant - and rather odd. The footsteps would start half-way across the landing, go down the stairs, and back up again. Next, they would go down the stairs, and then cross the landing without coming back up the stairs.
They would start at the door of my parent's room, go to the head of the stairs, stop. Then come up the stairs from the bottom. I had no doubt that I was really hearing someone walking - these weren't creaky floorboards.
It went on for hours. Several times I nearly got up, to go and demand what was going on - but it was very cold, and I was warm and comfortable in bed. I think I did call out to ask what the game was, but got no answer.

Eventually, in the small hours, my baby brother woke and started to cry. I heard my parents wake, and my mother said that they needed the gripe water. It was downstairs, she thought. I heard my father get up, walk to his bedroom door, cross the landing and go half-way down the stairs - and then my mother called that the gripe water was on the windowsill. My father came back up the stairs and back into their bedroom. Soon after I settled down and went to sleep myself - though I still heard someone walking about even as I was dozing off.

The next morning I demanded to know what all the tramping about had been in the night. My mother was mystified. She hadn't heard anything. Neither had my brother. I tried to list all the exasperating ups and downs that had disturbed my reading, finishing with the account of Dad going to fetch the gripe water. "But your Dad never went out of the bedroom," Mom said. "He hadn't even got out of bed when I saw the bottle on the windowsill. He only went round the bed to fetch it."

I was gobsmacked.

When my Dad got up from his lie-in, I demanded his version of events. He confirmed that he'd never left the bedroom. "But I heard you cross the landing and go half-way down the stairs!" I said, and I told him about all the other footsteps.

"I heard them," he said. "In fact, about four o'clock, I got up and went round the house, 'cos I was certain that somebody had got in. Nobody had, of course."

Nothing like this had ever happened in this house before, and has never happened since. Again, I must stress that the footsteps were totally real - my father and I agreed on this. I was so sure they were real, I simply took it for granted that it was some member of my family, even though I couldn't understand why they were up and down the stairs so much. Or why or how they would suddenly be heard in different parts of the house, without apparently having walked there.

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SALVAGED FROM: https://web.archive.org/web/2002120...ntimes.com:80/happened/phantomfootsteps.shtml
 
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