As we said in our last Infographics Creep-show featuring tales about things going bump in
the night, some cultures take their ghosts very seriously.
You could say that much of the western world has perhaps grown skeptical of specters that
come back to haunt the living, but the West has a very rich history of ghost stories.
We might recall Henry VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn, whose spirit was said to haunt
the Tower of London after her hubby ordered the removal of her head with an axe.
Since then there have been sightings of the headless woman in the tower and elsewhere.
Or did you know former American president Abraham Lincoln has been seen in spectral
form all over the U.S., including the White House.
There are plenty of chilling ghost stories out there and today we are going to give you
best.
The Grey Lady Let’s start with some history and we’ll
get onto more contemporary ghost stories later.
This is the story of Lady Glamis, a Scottish noblewoman who was accused of witchcraft in
the 16th century.
The ruling king of the time, James V of Scotland, didn’t much like this unfortunate woman
or her family and what better to do in those days than to accuse someone of witchcraft.
James had her imprisoned and it’s said he had absolutely no evidence relating to her
meddling with the dark side, so as happened often back then, he just brutally tortured
her servants and family and got them to say she was a witch.
That’s 16th century Scottish justice for you.
On 17 July, 1537, he had her burned at the stake on the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle.
He also made her son witness this horrific spectacle, her screams no doubt giving him
a very bad case of PTSD.
So, if anyone had a right to come back and start haunting people it was her.
Since her death her ghost has been seen countless times running around the gardens of the Glamis
castle and running up the stairs to the clocktower.
This ghost then got the name The Grey Lady.
Many of those that have said they have seen the Grey Lady have remarked how sad she looks.
If you go into the chapel of this castle even now it’s said a knocking sound can be heard.
Word on the street is that this knocking is the sound of the workmen who had built the
pyre on which she was burned.
Ok, so that might not have scared you too much, but we thought we had to give you a
bit of a history lesson.
Now for some tales you might better relate to.
The Haunted Prison The Eastern State Penitentiary is not only
said to be one of the most haunted places in the USA but in the entire world.
In its later years it housed big name criminals such as Al Capone, but before that this frightening-looking
place housed mainly petty criminals.
It’s now open to the public and there have been many sightings of ghosts there.
Why would the dead want to come back and haunt people?
Mainly because the place was a hellhole.
Some prisoners were kept in their cells and not able to go outside much, and even if they
did they had a hood placed over their head.
Their only light was a hole in the roof, which the prison called “The Eye of God.”
What this all meant is that God was watching them and only God.
They had no other prisoners to communicate with.
If by any chance a prisoner was caught trying to communicate with someone he might find
himself wearing an “Iron Gag.”
This was an iron collar which was clamped onto the tongue of the inmate.
Worst still, the collar was also connected to the hands which were tied behind his head,
so if he moved his hands his tongue bled or even ripped.
There were many other horrid punishments here, and that’s why the spirits are still roaming
around today and scaring the hell out of people.
Well, at least that’s what some people say.
Home from school This is a story a young man told online about
when he was a boy.
He doesn’t mention where the story takes place, but we guess it’s somewhere in the
USA.
His family had just bought a really big, old house and they were doing it up.
It had many rooms, creaking floorboards, and wasn’t a place he liked to be alone.
He had no brothers or sisters.
The problem was, when he got home from school it would always be just him alone in the house
as both his parents worked.
One day he came home a bit later in the evening and so shouted “Mom” as he entered the
house as he thought she might have gotten home already.
From upstairs he heard “Yesssss” in a way he described as his mom’s singing voice.
Something wasn’t right though.
He shouted “mom” again and again he heard “Yessss.”
He went up the stairs to try and find her and was sure that noise had emanated from
the right side of the house.
There were many bedrooms, though, so he started looking in each one.
As he was just about to open the door he was sure the voice had come from he heard a shout
from downstairs, “Sweetie, are you home?”
It was his mother, she had just come home.
The Hitchhiker There are many iterations of this tale but
this is the story we hear the most.
A couple are driving down a quiet highway late at night.
They don’t know the area well as they have come from another town.
For miles they see no other cars and with just the flashes of lights at the side of
the road both the man and woman feel quite tired.
Then out of nowhere they see a figure at the side of the road.
The couple are going too fast to stop suddenly, but the man slows to a stop ahead of the girl.
“Was she hitchhiking, out here, alone at night?” asks the woman.
“We better pick her up,” says the man.
He reverses and the girl appears in his mirror.
He rolls down the window and tells her, “Get in.”
The girl is very polite and she tells the couple she is grateful they picked her up.
“You are very kind,” she tells them.
She then hands them a piece of paper with an address on it.
She says she is lost, but needs to go to this place.
It’s not far from where they are, so the man says no problem.
Then they drive ahead in the dark, transfixed by the intermittent gleam of lights.
At an intersection some time later the man asks, “Is it right here?”
No answer.
He then looks in the mirror and there is no girl in the car.
His wife is sleeping and he wakes her up.
“She’s gone!” he exclaims.
“What,” the wife says, still half asleep.
“That’s impossible.”
But the girl had gone, and the couple are perplexed beyond belief.
The address on the paper the girl had given them doesn’t seem far away, and out of curiosity
they head to that house.
When they get to the house they are greeted by an elderly couple.
They tell them, you’re not going to believe this, but we picked up a girl and she gave
us this address…and we don’t know where she went.
The elderly woman then suddenly breaks down in tears.
She tells the couple that her daughter had been killed in a hit and run on that very
highway more than a decade ago.
The Seven Barns This is the story of a family from Ohio in
the early 20th century.
The farming family had done well in life and had money to spare.
When the couple had their first child they built a barn in the child’s name and then
when they had their second child they did the same thing.
At one point they had six kids and six barns, and then the woman became pregnant once again.
But this time there would be no extra barn called after a child because the woman died
during childbirth and the child did not survive either.
After this, the farmer, who had been under some stress from falling crop prices and having
such a big family, had a breakdown.
He became mentally unwell, was aggressive to his kids he could barely look after, and
couldn’t function as a farmer.
The farm fell into a state of disrepair and the kids ended up looking after each other
for the most part.
Then one night it all fell apart.
It’s said the farmer, rather that admit failure and try and sell the farm, burned
the whole place down.
Rather than give his kids to the authorities where they would not have a pleasant life,
he walked into each of their bedrooms and killed each of them with a shotgun.
He buried all their bodies next to the barns he had set on fire and then he hung himself
at the 7th barn he had built for the new arrival that never came.
It’s said from then on no one wanted to buy this property, fearing it was cursed.
We are told all the barns were pulled down, but that seventh barn no one wanted to touch
for fear of reprisal from the farmer in spirit form.
To this day the land is empty, but many people have gone to visit what remains of that seventh
barn.
The people in this rural community know all about the curse and stay well away, but from
time to time young folks end up in town having heard there was a haunted barn.
They tell them to stay away, but there is nothing much they can do.
It’s said one couple went there with their only child, an excursion on a road trip.
They did not treat the curse seriously and thought the locals were just superstitious
crackpots.
A few days later and the family was reported missing.
Police knew they’d been in the area and asked the locals if they’d seen this family.
They replied in the positive and told the cops they had gone to see the cursed seventh
barn.
When police arrived they found the mother and child bludgeoned to death.
The man was hanging from the rafters of the barn.
Unrequited Love This is a love story and a nightmare.
It begins with a hardworking fella called Jim.
He doesn’t have much ambition and came from the wrong side of town, but whatever he does
he puts his all into it.
But people like this often get taken advantage of, and that’s what happened to poor Jim.
He was working in the countryside for an unscrupulous farmer who had Jim working all hours and paying
him little and certainly no over time.
This was back in the day when people would work on farms in large numbers picking fruit
by hand.
They lived in wooden huts and the work was back-breaking at times.
But Jim never complained and at the end of each week he collected his meager earnings
with gratitude, even though the farmer had been paying way less than he paid some other
workers who had a higher IQ.
Jim was handsome, and as you might expect, incredibly strong.
For this reason, and perhaps because of his childish innocence, the farmer’s daughter,
Emma, took a liking to him.
This relationship developed and it didn’t escape the eyes of the farmer.
He was not only overprotective of his daughter given that she was surrounded by vagabonds
and tough-guy laborers, but what on Earth was she doing speaking to a fool like Jim?
Then one evening when he’d been out looking for his daughter, he found the pair lying
without clothes in one of the huts.
He was more than angry, taking a belt to his daughter and having Jim beat up by some of
his other workers.
The daughter was then told to stay with her aunt in another state.
What she didn’t know is that this beating Jim had taken had caused internal bleeding,
bleeding that the farmer couldn’t of course see and so he ignored Jim’s calls to take
him to a hospital.
Jim died one night, and out of fear of the authorities the farmer buried him on the farm,
paying some of his workers to keep quiet.
It’s said Jim’s last words were, “Emma, come back to me Emma.”
Over a year later and Emma returned to the farm.
She told her father it was foolish what she did with Jim, but still asked how he was.
The father told her he quit and moved on.
Then one day she was out in one of the orchards and she heard her name being called.
She knew the voice immediately, but she couldn’t see where it was coming from.
Suddenly the voice got closer and she turned around.
Doing so she dropped her handkerchief on the floor but as she was bending down to pick
it up a man crouched and grabbed it.
It was Jim, right in front of her.
She then heard her father shouting from the distance, again out looking for his precious
daughter.
She turned to see him running towards her.
Turning back, Jim was no longer there.
She thought he must have been scared, fearing another beating.
She told her father she saw Jim in the orchard, and he said it’s not possible, he left a
long time ago.
“He was here, right here,” she exclaimed.
For days she protested that she saw Jim and kept sneaking out to look for him.
Eventually the father gave in and told her the ugly truth, that Jim died and they buried
him right there on the farm.
“I don’t believe you,” shouted the daughter.
The farmer realized the only way to make her believe him was to show her Jim’s corpse.
They went outside and he started digging.
At the sight of a leg Emma screamed.
More earth was moved and to both of their surprise clutched in Jim’s cold, dead hand
was her handkerchief.
Which of these did you like the most?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other show Most Terrifying Ghost Stories.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.