People share their home horror stories that may haunt your day. Photo / Getty Images
People share their home horror stories that may haunt your day. Photo / Getty Images
A man walks through the first floor of a house, then vanishes without a trace. An empty porch swing begins swaying on a breezeless day. The thick scent of cigarettes hovers in a home where no one smokes.
Among the people who describe strange occurrences in the places where they live, not everyone is quick to use the word ghost; some aren’t quite sure how to define what they’ve seen or heard (or smelled). But many can’t quite shake the suspicion that they’re sharing a living space with something, or someone, that isn’t actually living. And their experiences aren’t especially rare: A 2022 YouGov poll found 25% of Americans believe they have lived in a house they thought was haunted, while another 10% said they were not sure.
We asked readers to share stories of their haunted homes.The following accounts have been edited for length and clarity.
The sound of children’s voices
Our house was built before the Civil War. I’ve lived in this area my whole life, and this house always had a reputation for being haunted. At first, we figured these stories we’d heard were all made up.
But over the years, things have happened. My husband once saw a little girl peeking through the bedroom door. I’ve heard a child holler “Mom!” and I would think it was our daughter, who was 7 when we bought this place, so I’d run upstairs and ask her what she needed and she’d say, “I didn’t say anything”. I have been sitting in the dining room and heard kids running and playing in the yard, but our kids were at school, and the yard was empty. Our front porch swing has sometimes started swinging by itself when no one is nearby and there is no wind.
But the scariest thing to me was when we were renovating the oldest part of the house. That was when we heard the breathing. We heard it at night and, at first, it sounded like it was coming from one side of the bed, and then it seemed like it came from the other side of the bed, and then it seemed like it was somehow behind the headboard, which was against the wall. I could tell my husband was awake too, and I said, “Do you hear that?” and he said, “You mean that breathing?” It went on for a couple of nights. When we finished the renovation it never happened again. We’ve lived here for 38 years now, and occasionally we still hear footsteps, but things have diminished over time. I think either we’re used to them now, or they’re used to us.
One resident recalls hearing a child calling out for her mother. Photo / 123rf
‘Maybe he was looking for his wife’
The house was built in 1925, and the woman who lived there when we bought it was the original owner – Mrs S was 95 years old, she’d raised her daughters here, and she hadn’t wanted to move out. Her husband, Mr S, had worked for the telephone company. He’d died in the house at least 20 years before we bought the place. Mrs S died the day we moved in. We went to her funeral after she died. She was really lovely, such a nice woman.
We moved in in January 1995 and pretty soon after there was a night where I was making dinner, and I was talking to my friend on the wall-mounted landline in the kitchen. I am not one of those ladies who drinks a glass of wine while cooking – that’s just to say that I was not impaired in any way, and I was wide awake. From the kitchen I could see straight through to the dining room, there was a big archway there, and this man just came through. He was dressed like a 1950s workman – he had on kind of yellowish, tannish coveralls, and an Irish-style cap. He turned and smiled at me and then he went on towards the upstairs steps. I told my friend, “There’s a guy in our house!” And she was scared and said, “Call the cops!” So I told her, “Okay, I’m going to hang up, and if I don’t call you back in 10 minutes, you call the police.” So I walked around all downstairs, and I didn’t see him, and the front door was still locked. I walked upstairs and there was no one there.
The doors upstairs would slam sometimes, and we often heard footsteps on the stairs. And one time the temperature in an upstairs room suddenly dropped precipitously. I felt bad – like maybe this was why Mrs S had wanted to stay in their house, and maybe he was looking for his wife, maybe he thought she should still be here? I started to feel like we should tell him. So we had some friends over on Halloween, and we lit a candle and sat around the dining room table and said: “Okay, Mr S, hello, if you’re here, you should know that Mrs S isn’t here anymore, and you should go look for her in heaven.” And after that night, we never heard or saw anything in the house again.
- Bronwyn Taggart, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York
A resident believes her spooky encounter was Mr S still looking for Mrs S at the couple's old home. Photo / 123rf
A benevolent presence
Our house is 102 years old, and we’ve been here for three years. It happened to my husband first: he had to sleep in the reclining chair because he had shoulder surgery, and he woke up to this feeling of someone squeezing his toes very gently. Then it happened two or three more times. I thought maybe he was playing a joke on me, but he was so serious about it, and he felt so strongly about what he’d experienced that when it then happened to me, I wasn’t that surprised. It felt like an affectionate gesture.
I keep hearing noises upstairs in the attic, like there’s somebody up there. The creak of somebody taking a step or two. It only happens when I’m here alone, or when my husband is sound asleep. I’ve never gone up there to check it out. Whatever it is, it feels like a benevolent presence.
- Barbara Cambron, Louisville
One homeowner shares how they heard noises in the attic. Photo / 123rf
‘They were standing over me while I was sleeping’
The house was built in 1928, and I moved in in 1998 and lived there until 2004. I live on Galveston Island. Around here, we generally don’t think much about having one or two ghosts around the house.
When I first moved into the house, I had boxes of things in the dining room, and I was unpacking in the kitchen and I heard a box slide across the floor. I went into the dining room, and sure enough, the box wasn’t where I’d left it. Other things started happening: there were four windows in the dining room and one afternoon, one by one, each shade snapped and rolled to the top. There was a door between the dining room and the kitchen, and I’d smell cigar smoke, like someone was blowing it gently in my face as I walked through. My logical mind was thinking: “What’s wrong with you? Why are you thinking about cigars?” I’m a scientist, so generally, if I can’t see it or touch it, then it didn’t happen. But this continued to happen in the same spot over and over again, and at some point I just accepted it. Soon after that, I also started smelling rosewater perfume.
I decided I’d had enough after a night when I’d gone out with a bunch of friends. I was 30 at the time, and we were drinking tequila. I got home, went to bed and was awakened the next morning and I could smell both of them – the cigar smoke was on my right, closer to my head, and the rosewater perfume was coming from the same side of the bed, but farther down. It was as if they were standing over me while I was sleeping. All the shades in the room had been opened. And at that point I was like, “Okay, we’re not doing this anymore. It was fine when you wanted to hang out in the kitchen, the dining room, that’s fine – but not this.” Galveston has such a history of ghost activity that sage is readily available, so I bought some and cleansed the house. Never had another problem after that.
One person felt like an entity was standing over her while she was sleeping. Photo / 123rf
Unexplained occurrences in a former hospital
I’m in grad school and live in a hospital-turned-apartment building. I didn’t know it was an old hospital when I first moved in, but the elevators are long and extended to accommodate gurneys, and it has these long, dimly lit hallways. I never believed in anything paranormal before I lived in this place, but there’s just kind of this aura of spookiness and weirdness.
Probably a year ago is when I started coming home from class, and I’d find that the drawers were all pushed out of my dresser. That’s happened three or four times. And then twice now I’ve found that all the towels from my bathroom have been thrown on the floor. More than once, there has been a knock at the door so convincing that I got up and answered it, only to find no one there. Surely there is a rational explanation for all of this – but the weirdness is undeniable.
- Andrew Jacobs, Richmond
Hospitals have seen the worst and more deaths than any other place. Photo / 123rf
A presence sitting on the bed
We moved into our house near the beginning of the pandemic, in summer 2020. It was probably six or seven months in before I was ever alone in the house at night. That’s when I started noticing it – as I was falling asleep, I’d feel the sensation of someone sitting down on the other side of the bed, and then touching my hair. When I’d turn over and look, nothing was there. At first, I thought that maybe it was a vent, that when the heat or air conditioning went on, maybe it was ruffling my hair. But this is California, and there’s a good portion of the year where I don’t have heat or air conditioning running. Then I thought maybe I had lice, and I asked someone to check my head because I was feeling this weird sensation at night. I did not have lice, I’m happy to report. It doesn’t happen if my partner is here, or if I’m dog-sitting my son’s dog, who sleeps in the bedroom with me. The last time it happened was in June, when my boyfriend was away for a couple of weeks.
At a neighbourhood block party, I was chatting with a woman who said something to me about the people who originally lived here, and that the man had died in the house and it was very tragic. I don’t feel like it’s anything malevolent at all. But it is a little creepy to feel like someone is sitting down on your bed and playing with your hair.
We moved into our old house in Kingston, Massachusetts, in 1997. It was built in 1830. The house had old iron latches on the door going down to the cellar and some on the closet doors. We would hear them latch and unlatch, but then when you went to look, they wouldn’t have been moved. We would smell lavender perfume, and I don’t wear perfume, because I work in a hospital. We’d smell cigarettes, and neither of us smoke. After we moved in, we got a puppy, and my husband started sleeping downstairs in the kitchen with the puppy. One night he heard me – he thought it was me – come down the stairs and walk across the floorboards and rattle the puppy gate. The puppy woke up, so my husband woke up too and started talking to me, but it wasn’t me. Another night when we lost power, my husband heard footsteps on the wooden stairs and when he looked up he saw the shape of a short woman, and told me to go back to bed. He forgot I was staying at my mother’s house that night. We did a lot of research on the house, and we learned that it was built by a man for his spinster daughter.
It was a gentle haunting, it was nothing that made us want to move. We had to leave for new jobs, and I hope the new owners are coexisting with our lavender-scented, cigarette-smoking lady ghost.
