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Your Scariest Ghost?

One of my favourite IHTM's, from this site, was a ghost story...of sorts.

I don't have time to go scrawling back to find it now so you'll have to make do with my memory.

Like all of the best of such stories it comes spiced with ambiguity.

It happened in the UK in the Nineties.A group of about four recent male graduates were backpacking together around South-Western England. I think they were around Stroud sort of way. They had rented a shared room of bunker beds in a hostel and were settling down for the night. One of them switched the light off....

A few moments later, as they were sleepily chatting, one of their number suddenly cried out. The sillhouette of a male figure could be discerned standing by one of the beds....

When they turned the light on it had gone. The poster said that there was no way it could have entered unseen by the occupants.

Then another poster pointed out that a notorious serial rapist was at large in that area at that time. His modus operandi was to creep into people's houses at night. It was theorised that he could have been hiding under a bed all along - and then made his escape on realising that it was just a bunch of guys.

So it's a real double-edged sword of a story. If you accept the paranormal explanation - then it's pretty creepy. But if you accept the mundane one....it's downright terrifying!
 
Fanari_Lloyd said:
Scariest ghost story I’ve heard — or one of them (mind’s like an attic full of dusty lumber at the mo’ sorry). I heard this when I was a lot younger and still remember it.

It was the classic ‘phantom hitchhiker’ with a twist, and told to me by someone who was a bit of a raconteur and used to scare me rigid with his ghost stories (one of my uncle’s).

The story went that a man (let’s call him Pete for no reason) moved from town to a rural village and was getting to know the locals over a few pints in the pub. They were a friendly lot, and the conversation got into local folklore and ghosts.

The nearest market town (where most people shopped) was a few miles away, and there was the quick route to it, or one that was a bit longer.

‘Take the longer one,’ the locals advised. ‘At least when it’s dark. There’s a ghost with no face who haunts that road through the ‘avenue’.’

The ‘avenue’ was so called as the road from the village ran between tall dark trees. It was gloomy even in full daylight.

Pete laughed it off, and when he needed to shop, of course he used the quick route, but as autumn drew on and the nights crept in, he found himself alone on that road at night. In the day there were local buses and cars etc, but never after dark.

One night there was a mist turning to drizzle and then to rain, and as he returned from town with his weekly shop, he saw a man walking ahead of him wearing a long wind-cheater or cagoule. Pete thought it was a local going to the village and drew up, offering a lift. The man thanked him and got into the passager seat, still muffled up in a hood and scarf against the weather, and Pete drove on.

‘Where d’you want to be dropped off?’ he asked.

‘The end of the avenue will be fine,’ his passenger said.

Peter said he would take the man into the village if he wanted, but no, the end of the avenue would be fine. The car drove on into the gloom of the trees and as it was coming to the end of the avenue Pete pulled in at a lay-by.

The passenger thanked him and reached for the door-handle and Pete laughed and said, ‘I only moved to (village) a few months ago. They told me in the pub never to drive this way at night, because a ghost with no face haunts it.’

The passenger paused and turned to look at him.

‘What,’ he said. ‘Like me?’
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Sounds like your uncle updated Prince Kano. One of my favourite poems when I was wee ( a!ong with Colonel Fazakerly Butterworth Toast).

https://madeleineswann.wordpress.com/tag/poem/
 
Spookdaddy said:
Youth Hostel Intruder (Early 90s)
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Yes, I "enjoyed" this story very much too. Stuck with me a long time. This paragrpah particularly -

"One other probably unrelated detail is that the next day there was a very depressed, paranoid feeling between us traveling home. This was accompanied by my feeling a strange form of guilt or shame which I've never experienced since - it wasn't the exact emotion of shame but that's the closest comparison. It was this sort of retched, empty regret about the whole trip, almost remorse, despite having nothing to feel responsible for. I'd also compare it to a sad, loss-of-innocence sort of feeling, accompanied by a sort of physical thirst and a sense of something unforgivable (?!?)"

I've experienced this, and it's awful. A shameful, dirty feeling...depressed, hopeless. For no apparent reason. Like the whole thing was wrong and sickly. Diseased maybe.
 
Anonymous said:
The ghost that has frightened me most was actually on the cover of a book I had a child in the mid to late 1970s. It was a book of ghost stories; whilst I'm not entirely sure of the title I'm pretty sure it was a Ruth Manning Sanders one as the illustrations were done by the sadly missed Robin Jacques, one of my favourite illustrators.

On the cover of the book, was a photo of what was basically a mock-up of a ghost with a sheet, an old ladies wig and ping-pong balls for bulging spectral eyes. It does sound much but it terrified me and 30 years later still gives me the shivers as I can picture it vividly even now. I loved the book for both the stories and the fantastic illustrations but couldn't cope with the cover and eventually ripped the cover off.

I've just tried Amazon for likely candidates and the book I think it might be is going for 129 quid, a shame as I wouldn't mind collecting some more Jacques-illustrate books.
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I liitle late on a reply to this one but I wonder if this book is a likely candidate:
20240209_143959.jpg

It is one of the few things I still have from my childhood, together with its sister volume A Book of Devils and Demons. Both are well illustrated by Robin Jacques, the covers by Brian Froud. A couple of the Jacques illustrations:
20240209_144216.jpg


20240209_144223.jpg
 
SimonBurchell said:
I liitle late on a reply to this one but I wonder if this book is a likely candidate:
View attachment 73746
It is one of the few things I still have from my childhood, together with its sister volume A Book of Devils and Demons. Both are well illustrated by Robin Jacques, the covers by Brian Froud. A couple of the Jacques illustrations:
View attachment 73747

View attachment 73748
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I was so curious, I found it on the Wayback Machine website
https://archive.org/details/bookofghostsgobl0000mann

Great book, really enjoyed it. I loved The Thing at the Foot of the Bed and books like that, this was right up my alley!
 
I'd like to 'thank' the person who, on page 2 or 3 or thereabouts, wantonly posted a terrifying image of some scary, scary creature. Gulp.

*cries*
 
I remember the 'Ghosts Over Britain' book that my auntie had in the 1980s - one story & illustration really scared me and still does!

It's the description of very tall and slender opaque black human figures running up a lane in the night - they looked like cave-painting figures come to life to my 10/11 year old self, and I felt they were describing something very, very old.

This is the book - by Peter Moss 1979, and if anyone has it please could they find the illustration for me so I can see if my recollections match? Pretty please :kiss:

md862055166 - Copy.jpg
 
AnonyJ said:
I remember the 'Ghosts Over Britain' book that my auntie had in the 1980s - one story & illustration really scared me and still does!

It's the description of very tall and slender opaque black human figures running up a lane in the night - they looked like cave-painting figures come to life to my 10/11 year old self, and I felt they were describing something very, very old.

This is the book - by Peter Moss 1979, and if anyone has it please could they find the illustration for me so I can see if my recollections match? Pretty please :kiss:

View attachment 73761
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I've got it. If no-one beats me to it, I'll dig it out.
 
AnonyJ said:
I remember the 'Ghosts Over Britain' book that my auntie had in the 1980s - one story & illustration really scared me and still does!

It's the description of very tall and slender opaque black human figures running up a lane in the night - they looked like cave-painting figures come to life to my 10/11 year old self, and I felt they were describing something very, very old.

This is the book - by Peter Moss 1979, and if anyone has it please could they find the illustration for me so I can see if my recollections match? Pretty please :kiss:

View attachment 73761
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Lots of great illustrations in that book. I imagine this is the one you're referring to:
20240210_051119.jpg
 
SimonBurchell said:
Lots of great illustrations in that book. I imagine this is the one you're referring to:
View attachment 73765
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That's the fellow! Many thanks indeed :)

What I think now, 40 years later - I am reminded of the biblical legend of 'giants' in ancient times and of the fact that humans have lived in Britain (with gaps in migrations) for at least 100,000 generations before any recorded history. I still feel these ladies saw something old.
 
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Analogue Boy said:
I’ve had this book for decades and it’s a fascinating review of British Isles weirdness. And it’s beautifully illustrated too. Of course, we ALL have a copy of this don’t we?
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1761508
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A bit like my Map of British Cheeses, I’ve used this on planning stopovers on long trips. I’m not really keen on cheese but I love this.
 
I was reading the Croglin Vampire thread recently (admittedly not a 'scariest ghost' story), and wondering why some fictional and true-life stories remain long in our collective and individual memories: maybe it's simply because of the power of the writing, the atmospheres evoked in the telling by the reporters or the novelists or witnesses or whoever? Who could easily forget the tension and approaching horror of that hand as it sought entrance to the room at Croglin Grange? More saliently, who could easily forget how this scene was expertly described?

I'd say that even the fascination regarding a famous mystery like the identity of Jack the Ripper is secondary to any resolution and would be a far more niche i.e. specialist interest than it already is without the 'window-dressing' of it all; without the accidental or deliberate design of its presentation to us and to past generations. The mystery is, in this mooted scenario, almost incidental, and the victims - tragically and unfairly - rendered as mere players in a drama (an 'alternative historian' might suspect that the whole thing never happened). The Ripper is long past being a threat, yet the killer still haunts the imagination...because the novelistic story-telling of it all survives, because of the words.
 
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SimonBurchell said:
I liitle late on a reply to this one but I wonder if this book is a likely candidate:
View attachment 73746
It is one of the few things I still have from my childhood, together with its sister volume A Book of Devils and Demons. Both are well illustrated by Robin Jacques, the covers by Brian Froud. A couple of the Jacques illustrations:
View attachment 73747

View attachment 73748
Click to expand...
I have just stumbled upon my childhood copy of A Book of Devils and Demons by the above-mentioned Ruth Manning-Sanders, with some more fantastic illustrations by Robin Jacques. I love this book:
20240303_150614.jpg

Some sample illustrations to delight and terrify a child's mind:
20240303_150658.jpg


20240303_150716.jpg


20240303_150753.jpg


20240303_150813.jpg
 
I'm not going to repeat it here, but there's a story told to me by a work colleague which now rates as one of the most frightening I've heard. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure why I find it so. It's more about things felt, and possibly heard, than seen - and the entirely non-supernatural event leading to the finale is itself pretty terrifying, and bound to colour the rest. All said though - as someone who loves a good story (especially a good ghost story) and has listened to a lot, I really found this one quite disconcerting.

I related it on the Ghost Tales From Everyday People thread some while back. (At post #324)
 
Spookdaddy said:
This was not based on anything particularly dramatic, but rather a general sort of low level interference: stuff on kitchen countertops would appear to have moved by a few inches; soft scuffing sounds, rather than distinct footsteps; light taps, rather than loud rapping sounds.
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The things moving around on countertops reminds me of the recent case of the man who discovered the contents of his shed kept moving, so he rigged up a camera. It was a mouse! The actual mugging sounds terrifying.
 
JudSawyer said:
The things moving around on countertops reminds me of the recent case of the man who discovered the contents of his shed kept moving, so he rigged up a camera. It was a mouse! The actual mugging sounds terrifying.
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If they ever learn how to use stealth mode we will be in big trouble.
 
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