#they haunt me everyday

[spicimunni]

[demekii]

Haha what if you were a loser detective and I was the entity possessing your eyes… and we were both boys 🫣🥺👉👈

[wildbluesorbit]

bringing this back today because we moved on way too quickly😮‍💨

[cleolinda]

I grew up in a haunted house and I didn’t notice

This is not a story about boo ghosts or shadow people. If it were, I would have figured it out, at least.

When I say "I grew up in a haunted house and I didn't notice," you have to understand that there was a lot going on with this house. It's not the house that I've written about currently living in, the one with newspaper and soda cans stuffed where insulation should have been, the one with constant home-repair calamities. No, my childhood home was a crumbling pile of red brick built in the 1920s. Narnia was in the backyard, and the back deck was my ship on the high seas. The house was surrounded by banks of flowers, lilies and irises and roses, and it was full of creepy shit I didn’t even blink at. I loved it.

It didn't look haunted, or even particularly historical. It was almost disappointingly normal—I lived on a street with a house that had a turret, for God's sake. No, it was just old and small. There's a lot of pre-Depression houses getting torn down in these suburbs; my town has been awash in construction for the last 20-30 years as people buy up cheap old houses, raze them, and squeeze mini-mansions onto their tiny lots, all to get their kids into a good school system. It gives me a chill to think of it, but yeah, that might happen to my childhood home someday, small and plain and unassuming as it is. My pirate ship has already been renovated into an extra bedroom, the new owners told us.

When we moved into the house in 1983, though—it had clearly been renovated in the '60s or '70s; the wallpaper was hideous, and the upstairs bathroom was carpeted. Shag-carpeted. The house had closets the size of shoeboxes; my bedroom, the one with the peach wallpaper, didn't even have one. The room down the hall had four, including one cut into the wall, under a slanted ceiling tucked beneath the roof, that looked like you'd stash a witch there when the Salem HOA came by. There was a fan in the attic—well, first of all, the attic was just one more room on that upstairs floor. It was directly across from the (carpeted) bathroom, and that room (lit by one ominous, hanging bulb) was just a short corridor with storage spaces on either side, hidden behind big sliding doors. And the fan at the very end was built into the brick outer wall of the house. Like our house was functionally open to the elements, between the blades of that fan. I have no idea what the fuck anyone was thinking when they built that, and how the fuck anyone kept the wildlife out.

We certainly couldn't. Squirrels lived in the roof and bowled with acorns. It was like listening to a pinball machine at night. I have an abject horror of cockroaches because sometimes an adventurous one would fall off the ceiling in the middle night, onto me, while I was trying to sleep. (Like, try to imagine that—you’re awakened from a dead sleep by a vague, paper-light skittering sensation up and down your arm. When Pennywise comes to me, he will show up as a cockroach.) But wait! There was more! We had herds of crickets in the basement that felt compelled to jump at people. Sometimes there were centipedes! Those were polite enough to only come out at night. In the dark.

By the way, that basement was totally unfinished. I don't mean that it just had exposed beams or concrete walls. I mean that the basement had uneven, mostly shoulder-high masonry walls, and then it was just open on three sides, extending under the rest of the house. Like just dry red Alabama earth and rocks and grainy dust tumbling around in this vast, dark—it wasn't even a crawl space, a child could have stood upright in it. This child? Oh fuck no. And the washer and dryer were down there. I had to creep down there, down a rickety plank staircase, past the staring dark caverns of my own basement, through a low-lying fog of aggressive crickets, go BEHIND THE STAIRCASE, and then do my laundry there. There was also a firewood pile by an old fridge, and only God knew what was under that.

None of this was haunted. All of this was completely normal to me. This isn't even the haunted part.

So let's go back upstairs. The ground floor was lovely, homey, fine except for the time the living room ceiling fell out due to water damage. Upstairs was where it got weird. I've talked about being mildly bullied as an unknowingly autistic child; home was where I felt safe. In my bedroom upstairs, I had all those My Little Ponies and my easel with all my crayon-drawn fantasy maps and all the stories I wrote. It didn't matter if roaches fell on me in the deeps of the night; home, that's where I was happy. So when I was a young kid and I felt like a vampire was following me down the hall at night, I assumed I was just being silly.

I was aware of vampires in the 1980s as, like, the Count on Sesame Street (ah ah aaah), and Count Chocula, and Count Duckula on Nickelodeon, and the Bunnicula books that I loved. As a kid, I wasn't aware of movies like The Lost Boys or Near Dark, or any vampires that weren't broad caricatures of the Bela Lugosi look. I loved Spooky Stuff—I'm from the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark generation—but vampires didn't scare me.

But when I had to get up in the middle of the night to go down the hall to the (carpeted) bathroom, I always had the sensation that something was following me as I was going back to my room. Something Dark. Not terribly tall, maybe not even much taller than me. And somehow, I visualized this deep in my mind as a vampire. Kind of a silly one, you know, the white-tie formal wear and the ribbon medal and the cape. I wasn't desperately scared that a Chocula was behind me, but I knew that I needed to get back to my room quick, and, at all costs, I must never look back. I must never look over my shoulder or else I would See It, something silly massing in the dark—and, brother, Eurydice would have been safe with me. Never stop running, never look back.

And I'm sure all kinds of kids develop little superstitions like this. It's probably a developmental thing, like having an imaginary friend (which I also had at some point). Even as a seven year old, I was thinking, This is silly, I'm just making it up (but not looking back costs nothing. Not looking at monsters is free). And I continued to think this, until I laughingly told my younger sister this at Sunday Family Dinner one night. We were both in our thirties at that point. And my sister started crying. Like just staring at me in wide-eyed horror, her eyes filling with tears. And she told me that when she had a bedroom upstairs, there was Something in there.

I won't belabor the exact setup, but at one point, we got it into our heads that we'd like to switch bedrooms, just for a change. I was 14, and I moved to her ground floor bedroom with the flowered white wallpaper and the big bright windows, and she went upstairs and took my room with the peach wallpaper and the cool slanted roof-ceiling (and no closet).

There were three other rooms on that upper floor (and I promise you this is important):

1) One was a small, windowless room that we used as a playroom, with weird cerulean blue carpet and sky blue wallpaper, one dim light fixture, and a little door in the wall that led to dark nothing. Like, you opened it, and you were confronted by a mass of pipes and machinery and just enough space to edge leftwards in the dark. Towards what? Fuck if I know, I sure as hell wasn't going in there. I think it was supposed to be for access to the HVAC system. I don't know. It was fucked. But when I was a young child, I had cooked for my baby dolls at our plastic play kitchen right next to that door, nbd, because apparently you put me in a creepy situation and I just go, yeah, we live like this now.

(I had not ever felt alone in that playroom, but I had also been too young to articulate that. Of course I wasn’t alone! I was with my dolls!)

2) The next room was the (shag-carpeted) bathroom. It had a big mirror over the sink counter, very typical, facing a vertical mirror that was behind the bathroom door. I've heard two mirrors facing each other can create a portal for the spirits, if you believe in that kind of thing. I once did the "Bloody Mary" thing there and nothing happened, idk.

3) The next room was the bedroom with four closets, where an older family member lived with us, and when she moved out, my sister moved to that room.

?) The fourth room, not really a room, was the dark, narrow attic.

So, Grownup Family Dinner at my current house, a few years ago: my sister told me that Something had lived in the Four Closets Bedroom with her. I'm not sure if she actually said it lived in the little Hide A Witch closet or if it was just kind of... ambient. I don't know what it looked like, or if we're talking about ghosts or Something... Darker, or what. I don't think she's entirely sure herself. She doesn't like to talk about it in detail a whole lot. What I know is that she felt it was there, and she had chosen that room to sleep in as a young teenager, and not a lot of sleep was to be had.

"I never really sensed anything, like… demonic," I said, puzzled. "Just the Chocula that followed me." And my sister was like, ARE YOU LISTENING TO YOURSELF??

"What about Rebecca??" she sputtered.

Oh, yeah: Rebecca. (A name I've changed at my sister's request.) I had a friend as a teenager who liked to mess around with ouija boards (AM I LISTENING TO MYSELF?), and we did a session at her house one time wherein we discovered that the ghost of a girl? young woman? named Rebecca lived (so to speak) at my house, and she had been murdered by her boyfriend. How we arrived at these specifics, I don’t remember, but I had told my sister about it because I thought it was interesting, and also, I was kind of a shit. My friend also decided she had her own ghost named Dusty. It was all one big [citation needed, footage not found], but it was also part of our family lore.

So, many years later, my sister told me that she had long felt—without knowing about the Chocula—that there were two spirits on the upper floor of our childhood home: the dark one, and a younger, lighter one. I sat there at the kitchen table and thought about it.

"You know, I did kind of feel like there was someone up there, when I was a kid," I said. "Sometimes I would go into the attic, and it felt scary, but like there was something there watching that was okay? Like having a lamp on in a dark room, kind of. It’s weird, because it’s just a feeling, I remember it very clearly, but I didn’t really question it or wonder."

I thought a bit more.

"Oh yeah—there was also the time I just really felt compelled to go color in the playroom by myself at midnight, and it kind of felt like someone was there."

My sister stared at me, saucer-eyed, pale. Like I'm not sure I had ever seen anyone "go white" until that moment.

"Yeah, I just woke up and had this idea—I was maybe nine years old? That it would be super cool to do stuff at night when I was supposed to be asleep, so I got a flashlight and went into the playroom—"

"IN THE DARK??"

"Well, yeah. If I had turned on the light, someone would have seen it and told me to go back to bed. So I set this flashlight on the floor and got out the crayons and colored in one of my coloring books a while. Maybe the She-Ra one?"

Thinking back on it now—of course I was sitting right by the scary door. I think we all, you and I, saw that coming.

"And I had the same feeling I had in the attic. Like someone was sitting on the floor across from me, friendly, I guess I would say female, and it was cool. Like, it was chill."

My sister looked like she was about to pass out.

"I don’t really know how I could sense this then but not really say anything about it, or even think about it, until now," I said, shrugging. "I’m probably imagining it."

I’ll throw in here that one of the dolls I had in that room was a Raggedy Ann. Like, just for extra hilarity, Wee Cleo is hanging out, coloring, at midnight, with a ghost and a fuckin’ Annabelle.

So: My sister is adamant that our childhood home was haunted. And apparently I was entirely blasé about it (maybe possessed?), but then, I was dealing with a lot of suburban wildlife. My problems with that house were far more immediate. And crawly. Nor can we prove that the house was haunted—I certainly haven’t looked up any homicide records—and I don’t think that Vibes, In Retrospect, are valid evidence on my part. But I find it interesting that I knew what she was talking about. I find it interesting that I was like, "Yeah, that was chill." And I find it interesting that when I went away to college, and I lived in a dorm suite where sometimes I’d be the only person there while my roommates were out,

I remember noticing that it was the first time I’d ever felt alone in a room.

Who was that imaginary friend I'd had?

--

I asked my sister to read over this, partly because I wanted to see if she’d be willing to describe the Something Dark.

"Oh, I’ll tell you anything you want," she texted back, "but that’s not how it happened."

[hellboys]

THE WALKING DEAD 7.07 – sing me a song

[mhokday]

TRIAGE (2022) / DAYLIGHT • TAYLOR SWIFT i once believed love would be black and white, but it's golden

[kelin-is-writing]

i’m one hundred percent sure that dabi loves it a lot when you leave hickeys on his chest or abs, the reddish marks you gave him in contrast with his porcelain skin turns him on so damn much.

[bkdk-tgck-truther]

These two pics really drive me insane... The contrast between Toga's two "first times": when she used her quirk to kill and when she used it to save. The wild, divided face in the first panel vs the soft, harmonious face in the second. How both of them are undeniably Toga but in polar opposite ways. The way the halves' switch places. The fangy smile. The way both moments are Toga's answer to the question about her life and her choice. I'm going insane.

[why-the-heck-not]

writes with python ”ugh I wanna write javascript” -> writes with javascript ”ugh I wanna write c++” -> writes with c++ ”I have made a horrible mistake”

[high-noon-raccoon]

Finally finished reading Legionnaire but unfortunately it set me back on my bullshit and I'm trying desperately to spare my tabletop group from it.

I need to just sketch more, it helps me remember how to draw like an actual frigging adult.

[lorastyrels]

You don’t have to lose yourself to find happiness, you know.

[pineappical]

this looks way too similar to another fanart i reblogged before but i swear i just wanted to draw a whole bunch of crimms before going to bed 💛

[cleolinda]

My sister noticed

Previously on: I grew up in a haunted house and I didn't notice: So I told you a story about how a Count Chocula used to creep behind me at night when I was a child, and I described my very weird childhood home to you. I told you how my sister had Something Dark living in her bedroom, and I told you about the time she and I compared notes and realized that we also had the ghost of a young woman in the house. Maybe.

I asked my sister to read over the draft for me, maybe gather up the fortitude to fill in some details, and she texted back, "Oh, I'll tell you anything you want. But that’s not how it happened."

I am willing to believe her version for two reasons:

1) My memory has been shit after having covid umpteen thousand times.

2) I actually remember her version of the conversation we had, now that it's in front of me.

I also remember my version, is the thing—the one where I told her about Rebecca when we were younger. And that raises some questions about how independent, how uncompromised, our experiences were. But I think those questions are themselves the story. Can I trust my memory at all? I had such bad brain fog the first time I had covid that I could not remember how to scramble eggs. A lot of things are just mist to me now. There's what I remember and there's what actually happened, but what do I even remember? And that's before you even get into the idea that we're talking about ghosts we "felt" in the house. We saw no apparitions, no shadows, no odd movements.

This is not a story where I'm asking you to believe me.

There are things you experience, and things that happen. An example from the winter of 2016:

What I experienced was standing out on our deck one night and looking up at the stars. They were moving in a slight swirl motion, not unlike the painting Starry Night. I turned to my mom and said, "Well, the stars are moving, so if the world ends or something any time soon, here's our first sign." She stared at me.

What happened was, our upstairs heating unit had a leak, and I sustained mild carbon monoxide poisoning. (I like rooms to be cool, so I had used the heater less than most people would, at least.) This was only discovered during a routine furnace check, after my vision had been a little weird and I had been deeply fatigued for two or three months. I have had a CO monitor upstairs ever since.

Did I see the stars swirling? Yes. Were they? No. That's the distinction I want you to make while I tell you all this. Did my sister and I experience things? Yes. Do I know what happened? No.

So what I agree happened was, we were having Grownup Sunday Family Dinner a few years back, maybe 2019 or so. I had been really into Buzzfeed Unsolved, which later evolved into Watcher Entertainment, but my sister was refusing to watch any of it. She's a big fan now, but she only started watching the guys last year. Yesterday, we tried to piece this back together via text.

My sister ["MS" from here on out]: Like I feel like off and on for years you mentioned [Shane and Ryan's shows] and I refused

MS: And one day my argument was to talk about our own house

Me [let's go with Cleolinda Jones, "CJ"]: You said you felt like fake ghost shows were disrespectful to people who actually experienced [hauntings].

MS: YES I FEEL LIKE THAT WAS THE CONVO

I love paranormal investigation shows, whether they're patently fake or not, as long as I enjoy the people investigating, so I couldn't understand why they personally offended her. Pulling at this thread back in 2019 is how the the whole ghost story started coming out.

CJ: And I was like, okay, but here’s one show where they get, like, nothing, but I can promise you that it's real

(Because the Unsolved/Watcher shows pair a believer with an actual skeptic who still, lo these many years later, does not believe in any of it. I truly believe Shane and Ryan would not stage "evidence," for that reason. Shane makes fun of ghosts and people who believe in them, but he's honest about it, and my sister likes that.)

At this point, we go back to the first version of the story that I posted: my sister had told me that Something had lived in the Four Closets Bedroom with her when she was a preteen/early teenager. It felt very dark, very bad, and she had not told anyone else about it until that dinner. The way I relayed it to you, Dear Reader, was that she hadn't wanted to go into detail, and I wasn't sure what it looked like, or if it "lived" in the little witch closet, or what. That night at dinner, I had gone on to tell her that, you know, now that you mention it, I did feel like something used to follow me up there at night. And this was when "My sister started crying. Like just staring at me in wide-eyed horror, her eyes filling with tears" had come in.

1. Something Dark

CJ: So you were telling me about our house being haunted. Something in your room. How would you describe it?

MS: I think it more lived in the attic

(our pal the dark fucked-up attic room)

MS: but would roam the entire floor so I felt it in the peach room [my (Cleo's) old bedroom and then later, my sister's] but more so in [the Four Closets Bedroom] as it was closer to the attic

MS: The best way I can describe it is just never feeling like I was alone. Feeling like something was always behind me. But I refused to turn around to look. It felt like a darkness that almost oozed behind you in a way that was almost suffocating.

CJ: What I find interesting is that we both describe it as Just Feelings, and never feeling alone.

My sister texted me at this point that she used to sense Something upstairs whether it was day or night; "even in the day, it didn't feel safe." But night was worse.

MS: There was one night in 3rd grade when I was reading and had like my first panic attack because I was newer to living upstairs and I felt it come in the room at night for the first time

MS: I also used to feel compelled to keep the AC running all night like it was never cold enough.

Here's the weird thing: when we moved to the house where I currently live and our rooms were on the same floor, we always fought over the thermostat. My sister hated her bedroom being too cool, whereas I get hot. I remember one night, we were arguing over it, and she was weirdly on the verge of tears: "Why do you have to have it so cold?" In 2023, my sister texted me at this point that she didn't want our childhood home to be cold; it was like the thing wanted that temperature, even if she hated it.

You often hear that ghosts make rooms cold, that's a big ghost hunter show thing—but whatever was up there couldn't lower the temperature on its own?

CJ: "If you can’t make it cold yourself, storebought is fine"

CJ: And you don’t have a visual impression of it, I’m not just blowing past that?

MS: I refused. REFUSED to look. Ever. For any reason.

CJ: I did too, so that’s interesting

CJ: I describe it as a Count Chocula, which should tell you how much it didn’t bother me. Which I find weird

(Truly, there is a reason I titled that post "I grew up in a haunted house and I didn't notice.")

MS: I can’t tell if it was truly terrifying. Or if the amount of data I was getting from it was just so overwhelming that that alone was terrifying to a child. I wish I could answer that now.

CJ: Yeah, in some way I think we’re saying the same thing. I was seven years old and I couldn’t comprehend what it was, either, so I just imagined a silly vampire

CJ: like I can’t overstate how cartoonish it seemed to me at the time, while still being very DON’T LOOK BACK

Part of the problem, she added, was that she felt compelled to go turn down the air conditioning... and the thermostat was next to the (carpeted. shag carpeted) bathroom. And then she had to race back to her bedroom... the same way I used to, as quick as she could.

MS: I also felt like I could NOT run. Like the way you shouldn’t run away from a mountain lion. It would create the need for it to chase me.

MS: What is so strange is that [learning about paranormal investigation] has not changed my perception of my experience in the slightest. Whether that’s the reality or not. It is still something I find dark and terrifying.

CJ: I think you would answer this differently now than you did then: what do you think it was?

We discussed this by text for a while. I mentioned being intrigued that Something Dark wanted to be cold (but apparently was not able to make the room cold). My sister—having agreed to be quoted here—said, "I kinda hope to avoid someone being like 'you had a demon in your house,'" as she doesn't really feel like that's what it was. Her gut feeling (and, bear in mind, we are working off nothing but feelings here) is that it was a spirit or ghost: something formerly human. We agree that it seemed male in some way (again: a Chocula).

And you're probably thinking, This is total bullshit. And it probably is! I'm not claiming any of this to be real evidence! I just find it interesting that we somehow came up with the same bullshit.

CJ: It just fascinates me that I did not experience 90% of this, and yet I got a strong enough whiff of it that I’m like, yeah, I can see it

But what about the female presence, the one I went off to color with in the middle of the night?

2. Rebecca

MS: I didn’t find out you had done the ouija board until we were adults. You didn’t tell me when we were kids

MS: That’s why I was SO shocked when we talked at the dinner table.

See, I was convinced that I had told her about my ouija adventures when I was a teenager, and "What about Rebecca??" flowed really well in the first post. That conversation was already a bit fictionalized in order to condense it from what I remembered—that's how memoirs work, really, unless you have actual transcripts of your life and room to include them. You're telling a story. I thought I was telling a condensed version of a true story. And yet, I do remember how shocked my sister was at dinner that night. And she would have only been seven or eight when I was messing around with that shit. Those two things do support the idea that I wouldn't have told her.

MS: You did tell me skeletons lived in my closet tho

I told you I was kind of a shit.

CJ: when I told you about Rebecca, what was your reaction?

MS: That’s when I went white. Bc I realized we had had a similar experience and I wasn’t just crazy

CJ: The thing is, I WOULD HAVE SWORN I had told you about Rebecca when we were younger

MS: If you did you didn’t name her and that’s why it was nuts when I realized 2 decades later we pulled the same name and we both remembered it.

We did it again, too—I posted briefly about putting this whole saga together, and how my sister asked me to give the ghost a pseudonym (ghosts deserve privacy too). And in trying to think of a good replacement, we both came up with "Rebecca."

CJ: so how did you know the [original] name?

MS: Ouija board with [best friend, redacted] in the playroom when I was like 13. She cried the whole time. We both thought the other was moving [the planchette].

You'll remember the weird, windowless, sky-blue playroom with the scary door from the previous post.

MS: But she was crying so she wouldn’t have been. And I would have never pulled out the name [Not Actually Rebecca]

MS: There was part of me that wonders if I did it but I would have NEVER chosen Rebecca

CJ: So did I bring Rebecca up first in this conversation [at dinner in 2019], or did you? I did?

MS: You said it first. I would have never [told you first] cuz I would have thought you were placating me. Like I’d never really know if you weren’t just agreeing with me

And that's when my sister had "stared at me, saucer-eyed, pale. Like I'm not sure I had ever seen anyone 'go white' until that moment." And I had told her about getting up at midnight and going to color in the weird playroom, and someone else being in there with me, no big deal.

After all this discussion, we do think that Rebecca was briefly my "imaginary friend," but our mom told me to stop talking about that. Not because our mom was spooked, but because she felt like it was rude for me to talk about someone I was presumably making up in front of company. So that stopped. Thinking back on it, I just felt like someone was sitting next to me on the couch. I didn't feel anyone next to me; when I looked, I felt like I could see where... someone was not? The space that someone invisible was taking up? It felt like something reasonably friendly. "Chill" is the word I keep using. Not super eager or possessive, just like a girl who was a bit older, maybe a teenager, a babysitter age, who liked me well enough. There was some dark shit in the attic, apparently—it did feel very oppressive in there—but I would get a sense that a metaphorical desk lamp had been turned on. A presence that stayed back, relaxed, but emanated "hey, I'm here."

What my sister and I agreed on was that we remembered how these "feelings" were both vague and memorable. I can't remember events or chronology accurately, but I remember the actual sensations and presences very, very clearly. They resist reinterpretation. I can't sit here and say, "Oh, Rebecca was totally a guardian angel, I see that now." The Something Dark sounds functionally demonic, but my sister doesn't feel like that's accurate. (If anything, she gets a sense that this could have been a malicious uncle—not father—of some kind to Rebecca, if the two beings were related: particular in their vagueness.) These two presences just... were. My sister says she primarily sensed Rebecca outdoors in our backyard, when we were pretending (were we?) to play with fairies. I didn't sense Rebecca there—but then, I wasn't aware that what I sensed was a someone, not for another thirty years or so. My oblivious ass was up at midnight filling in my She-Ra coloring book with a ghost like, "Yeah, I'm alone in the dark for no reason, this is normal." It's only in retrospect that I recognize atmospheric feelings as things that actually took up space, and I don't know how I didn't see it at the time. I can't explain that, and I can't ask you to believe it. All I know is that my sister still feels very traumatized by her experience of it—and I can't explain why I don't.

I think one of the reasons paranormal investigation shows don't scare me a whole lot is because so much of the "evidence" is random knocks and creaks and movements and vibes, and I'm like, yeah, I've lived in two houses now like that. The door of my current bedroom opens and closes on its own all the time. It's probably a draft from the ventilation system (which does not have CO leaks anymore) (probably). I've seen something at this house that a lot of people might call a shadow person, but I was probably imagining it. So many of these ghost shows just have things that I grew up with and didn't even think a whole lot of at the time; I seem to be protected by a +3 Sphere of Sure, That's Fine. Is my current house also haunted? I honestly don't know. Would I notice if it was?

[morgaseus]

Three billion and you're still the one I like

[myriems]

Good omens has given me the great ability to reconnect every song I listen to to Aziraphale and Crowley, in every way possible and I could talk about it for hours

[cobbbvanth]

we won (good old fashioned lover boy in the show) but at what cost (no other queen songs this season)