Spooky Tales from the Great Beyond

Yesterday in my health psych class, we randomly got on the topic of the paranormal during break. Jumping into the conversation, our mild-mannered psych instructor told us, hand's down, the best "ghost story" I've ever heard in person by someone who took part in the events being recounted. It was so delightfully creepy that it bears repeating; in fact, it'd be a crying shame if I didn't do so. Unfortunately though, I won't be able to capture the fantastic spirit in which it was told, so you'll have to forgive me for that. Our psych instructor, who normally puts us in a state of catatonia with his gentle and mildly-cadenced voice, had everyone's RAPT attention while telling this story--one girl's mouth was literally agape the whole time as though she was just waiting for it all to end so she could finally inhale.

I never suspected the man would be such a wonderful storyteller, but his very careful and slow pacing, combined with the gentleness of his volume and tone and his attention to detail, just made this story combustible and all the more crazy, especially coming from the mouth of someone who's a psychologist and whom you expect to be a bit more skeptical about these kinds of things.

So again, I wish you could've been there to hear him tell the story, because he was so fantastically and surprisingly good at it, but this'll just have to do instead.

Growing up, his father's major hobby was restoring old furniture. He'd track down beat-up stuff and refinish and reupholster it, converting it back to its original beautiful vibrancy. Well, one day he brought home a couple chairs to restore--a male and female set (one had arms, one didn't). The wood on them was very elaborate and ornate, and they had a kind of gothic-style ring to them. Anyways, his dad put them down in the basement which was where he usually spent his time restoring the furniture. Some months ended up going by and his dad hadn't even begun to work on the chairs--the weather was nice and stuff, so he'd been distracted by other things and hadn't gotten around to it. But finally, once the weather started to turn, he decided to dig in and start working on them. As soon as he did, the house was in an immediate uproar.

The first thing he started working on was reupholstering them. He ripped off their old fabric and spent a day slowly working at reupholstering. That night, my psych instructor (who was about 14 at the time) and his sister (who was about 9) began to hear loud voices and other noises coming from the basement. The noises wafted up through the furnace vents and kept waking them up. It sounded like people were having a party downstairs, that was how loud and disruptive the noise-level was.

The next morning, the two kids asked their parents why they were having such a noisy party in the middle of the night, and the parents looked at them as though they were crazy, told them they hadn't been having a party in the middle of the night, and, of course, scoffed at the wild stories the two kids were making up.

The scoffing didn't last long though because, despite not hearing the voices the first night, the parents very quickly began to experience the same things as well... Voices reverberating up from the basement. The sound of people running around *on the roof*. As our instructor told us, his mom was a bit eccentric, and apparently--as he found out years later--she would spend the night running to the window over and over with a flashlight and shining the beam on the roof in the hopes of catching a glimpse of a real person in the light, to assuage their fears. Whenever his father would work on the chairs, the lights would begin to flick on and off. They all began to feel presences in the house, and in the middle of the night, our instructor would wake to feel the weight of someone sitting down on the edge of his bed, only to burst his eyes open and find nothing. (Years later, his sister would report that the same events happened to her in the middle of the night as well.)

And they knew it was the chairs. If his father didn't work on them, the strange paranormal manifestations would begin to dissipate, only to flare up again when he again began working to restore them.

So his father realized he needed to get rid of them. However, he was a bit paranoid that he'd move the chairs out and the spirits would accidentally end up not going out with them. So instead of tossing them out on the curb immediately, he began to slowly work them out of the house. Every few days he'd move them 4 or 5 feet or so, in the hopes that the ghosts would tag along. For the longest time, our instructor could *NOT* figure out why the chairs spent weeks in their kitchen, especially since they were ugly as sin (since they'd been stripped but his dad had never gotten around to staining them)--only years later did he find out that this was the reason, that his father was trying to make sure that the ghosts weren't left behind.

Eventually they made their way out to the garage without incident, and his father managed to find someone to take them off his hands. He didn't tell the woman who took them about the hauntings, mostly because he had made sure to find someone who would be working on the chairs somewhere other than her home. She had her own little space (a shack of sorts) where she did her restorations, so he didn't feel quite so guilty about pawning them off on her, since they would surely not disrupt her home.

Within a couple of weeks, his father read in the newspaper that the woman's shack had burnt straight to the ground. He never inquired about what had caused it or whether the chairs had been in the shack at the time because he knew that there could be no other explanation.

(Best ghost-story ever.)