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I forgot to say that my story about the school ghost was true. This one isn't really a ghost story but it still sends shivers down my spine!
Halloween mid 1970s - a friend and I decide to go out and find a ghost and what better place to start than in the back garden of my parents house, The back garden was basically in two sections - the top part (by the house) all neatly laid out and the bottom half a wilderness of tall grass, bushes and trees. Separating the two halves was a rose arch.
Anyway we set off down the garden armed with a large torch. Everything went OK until we passed the rose arch when the torch just faded out; we carried on for about another 15 feet and then stopped. At the bottom of the garden where four elderberry bushes and behind the far right one something was lurking, something evil and nasty was waiting behind the bush, waiting for us to get near to it. Needless to say we turned and ran, as we came through the rose arch the torch came back on. During this whole incident neither of us had spoken and it was only once we were back at the house that we both desribed exactly the same feeling of evil.
Steve.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-stories
From: satty@cix.compulink.co.uk ("Stephen Atty")
Subject: Footsteps in the night (True Story)
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 1995 22:41:54 GMT
Here comes another story - and oddly enough it's the garden that's involved again.
When I was about 10 and my brother was 12 our father brought us a tent. The tent was a large brown ex-army tent and could comfortably sleep 3. Anyway we took to camping out in the garden during the summer - often inviting friends over to stay the night.
We would lie in the tent chatting away and watching the night sky and mum would regularly come to the back bedroom window and call down to us to be quiet.
One night we were in the tent and we heard somebody walk down the steps on to the lawn (the middle step rocked with a solid clunk) and walk down to the tent, pause and then start to walk round it; we immediately assumed that it was either mum or dad coming down to tell us off for making too much noise; then the footsteps stopped. We looked out and there was nobody there.
This happened night after night and it didn't matter where the tent was on the lawn - the footsteps only ever made it three-quarters of the way round unless we stuck our heads out under the edge of the tent in which case the steps would stop immediately. We tried tying cotton thread across the route (trying to convince ourselves that there was some physical entity involved) but these always remained unbroken.
The footsteps carried on for the rest of that summer and through the June and July of the next. That August dad did some major work in the garden which involved rebuilding the steps. When he had finished the middle step no longer rocked. We didn't camp out for a couple of weeks due to the family holiday but after we came back we got the tent out and pitched it in the middle of the lawn.
That night the footsteps came again - and the middle step went clunk!
My parents still have the tent - it's hanging up in the garden shed but it hasn't been used for years.
Steve