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The Thing In The Hallway

 

I've been reading the posted stories on YGS for over a year now, so I've finally decided to post my first story about my very first experience. While it isn't exactly a spine-tingling tale of horror, there is definitely some spine-tingling in it, and the spine being tingled is mine...

This incident took place in 1992 in Orange Cove, a tiny town near Fresno, California. My wife Jenn's mother had passed away unexpectedly that September, and we were there from LA to attend the funeral and help out Jenn's dad Bob wherever we could. We didn't know that her father would die within the month; as it turned out, we were in a one-month period between funerals.

Jenn's parents lived in an old adobe house that her grandparents had built in the 1940s. It was in an orange orchard, and as far as anyone knew, there had never been anything else built on the land before the house was constructed. It had a large, almost square living/dining room, a kitchen on one side, and a hallway opening off the other side. Along this hallway was a window looking out to what had once been a porch but was now an enclosed laundry room, a bathroom on the left, and two bedrooms on the right. There was also a door for a hall closet between the bedroom doors. To get to the bathroom, you had to walk all the way down the hallway, past the closet. The hallway had no lights or electrical outlets; a window at the far end held bits of decorative glass like insulators and jars. At night, it was as if the glass panes of the window had been painted on the outside with black paint; no light came from neighbors or streetlights, because there were none.

The night after the funeral, we were sitting with Jenn's father at the big dining room table; Jenn's sister Cynthia was also there. It was hot, and very dark outside and inside the house, the lamps in the dining room weren't very bright. At some point during the visit, I needed to answer the call of nature, so I walked down the dark hallway, heading for the bathroom door I knew was far down on the left-hand wall.

When I passed the closet door, the most amazing thing happened to me - for some reason, every hair on my body stood straight up, and I felt what seemed to be a massive charge of static electricity on my chest! There was no reason in the world for it - I had touched and seen nothing in the hallway. It was so strong that I could barely breathe. After standing for several seconds in complete shock, I continued on to the bathroom, where I completed my task with great difficulty, as the strange tingling effect was still in full force over my entire body and was very, very distracting. I had never felt anything like this in my life, and I have been electrified and shocked by Van De Graff generators, Tesla coils, capacitors and magnetos, among other electrical gadgets. This was absolutely and completely different.

I walked unsteadily back down the hallway, and the effect just stopped dead as I entered the big room. I walked over to my wife who was in the kitchen, and said "WHAT the hell is in that hallway?" My wife knew exactly what had happened--I was white as the proverbial sheet, and my hair was still standing on end; she said "Well, I see you've met our ghost!" Her sister then exclaimed "What? You knew about the ghost too?" As it turned out, the sisters had had many of their own experiences with the thing in the hallway, but, oddly, had never mentioned it to each other. When other family members who had visited the house over the years were later asked if they had ever noticed anything odd about the hallway, all of them replied that they DID NOT like it, and hated having to go down it in the dark to use the bathroom. The area just in front of the hall closet was singled out as the creepiest area by everyone, and the 'ghost' seemed to stay in that area; it apparently never came out into the living room.

Over the next few days, I experimented with the Tingler (as I called it), and found that I would get the hair-on-end/shock effect every time I walked past the closet door, though the effect was much less noticeable in the daytime. It seemed to like to follow me into the bathroom, but it would never follow me into the living room. It wasn't caused by static electricity, or exposed electrical wiring- - the hallway had no electricity, period. Our best guess was that something had been 'pinned' to the spot years before, perhaps by a murder or something traumatic, and the house was unknowingly built over it.

After Bob passed away and the house was empty, the effect became weaker and weaker until it was gone. Because of this, we think that people living in the house might have somehow sustained the Tingler, as the house was continuously occupied for many years. Thankfully, I never had another experience like that after the Tingler faded completely away. We visited the people who bought the house a few years later and walked down that hallway - and it was still gone.

I still wonder, though - the house was built with a wooden floor about a foot above the ground, which I don't think was disturbed in that area by the construction. If someone dug under the old floor where I first encountered the Tingler, what might be found buried there?

Gives me a bit of a tingle just thinking about it.

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The following comments are submitted by users of this site and are not official positions by yourghoststories.com. Please read our guidelines and the previous posts before posting. The author, DarkStar, has the following expectation about your feedback: I will read the comments and participate in the discussion.

DarkStar (1 stories) (25 posts)
+2
8 years ago (2017-03-18)
Hello, shelbyloree...

The idea of the glass objects holding or storing some sort of energy might have some application here, but I recently remembered something about the house that might have some bearing on this theory.

After my wife's father Bob died, the house and property were mired in probate issues for a number of years, as there was no will and there were many creditors clamoring for the meager funds that were left. As a result, the house sat empty for at least three years or more, apart for our visits every few months to keep things together (roof still on, house not stolen, etc), and to see our lawyer in Fresno. No one stayed there overnignt, not even us.

As the probate process dragged on, my wife and I noticed that when we would visit the house the Tingler seemed weaker and weaker as the months went by. At the end of the probate period, when the house could finally be sold to satisfy the claims of the remaining creditors, was when the glass items were removed and trashed. And at this point, the Tingler was essentially gone; neither I or my wife could feel it. It had declined and faded away while the glass objects were still in the window.

We wondered if it would come back when the house was sold and inhabited again, but our couple of visits to the house and its new owners didn't turn up anything. We think it had finally dissipated after those years of not having any people living in the house to perhaps sustain itself on, or with.

And speaking of electrical feelings or sensing, I have definitely had the spiderwebs-in-the-face experience a number of times in places that, on reflection, I'm pretty sure didn't have any spiders or their webs. I've always written it off as nothing, I guess. But if this really is a way of sensing EMF fields or entities, I might not be quite as paranormally tone-deaf as I had first thought.

And we will definitely post that Polaroid photo, when we find it.

DarkStar
shelbyloree (5 stories) (285 posts)
+1
8 years ago (2017-03-11)
Cute video! And I liked the electricity discussion - just thought maybe since there is no electricity within the walls and the feeling dissipated with the removal of stuff, it may have been attached to one of the glass objects. It may not necessarily be from the glass 'channeling' the energy, since you both know a lot about that kind of stuff and it's still theoretical glass does that.

My guess would be one of the objects housed something when it was brought in who knows how long ago, and it stayed around that particular object. Depending on your inlaws treatment of their things, it could have been from anything near or in that closet. Did they find recycled things from who knows where and bring them in by the truckloads? Did they go through stuff piece by piece? That kind of thing. If they brought it in and it stayed there for years, and they habitually did that, then they may not have noticed when 'it' started or was brought in.

And it never hurts to find a personality with something - gives it back some of the humanity it once was, even if it's only in pieces.
Bibliothecarius (9 stories) (1091 posts)
+1
8 years ago (2017-03-10)
DarkStar:

Thanks for the information about your in-laws. As I mentioned, I have no idea where the images are coming from when I'm reading an account on YGS. Most of the time, I don't get them; sometimes I do, and --when I describe what I've seen/felt/heard/thought-- I have serious doubts that what I'm writing will make any sense at all. Working with my memories of the mental image I do not think it was your wife's uncle.

Whoever I saw was between 18 and 30, but he was in the habit of deliberately looking away from direct eye contact (and from my mental impression). I had the sense of a deliberate avoidance of adult responsibility, sustained teenage behavior patterns/mannerisms, and a resistance to cooperating with *perceived* authority figures. This was a very hands-on & practical engineering type mind, too: more comfortable around machinery than people. Odd image, really, but with no apparent connection to your experience.

Ahh, well, back to the ol' drawing board.

Best,
Biblio.

P.S.: One example of Tesla's genius that I love to explain to my students is his suggestion of using sunlight to generate electricity --in the 1890s!
DarkStar (1 stories) (25 posts)
+1
8 years ago (2017-03-09)
Hi, BeagleMom and Biblio...Wow, so it really is finally on Youtube! I think that was back in 89 or 90... A LOOONG time ago. Thanks for finding it, Biblio!

BeagleMom, thanks for your kind comments about my story. I never expected to tell anyone about it outside a few people in my family, or actually write it up, until I found YGS. I find it really intriguing that you experienced something that sounds a lot like what I did.

Biblio, I must tell you that Tesla is also one of my heroes of invention; the underhanded, nasty stuff that dear old Tom Edison did to him (and Westinghouse, who wasn't a saint either) wasn't taught when I was a wee lad. Learning about the of the War of the Currents when I was older was eye-opening.

Biblio, I did some more research on the hallway, and it didn't lead to a garage or anything like that. In fact, it didn't even lead into the porch--you had to enter that via a doorway from the dining room. My wife's mom had an older brother who died unexpectedly from a heart attack at age 50; he was a much-beloved teacher at the local high school. But the unpleasantness of the hallway predated his death. And the walls of the hallway were adobe brick--no wiring in them.

Items made of glass supposedly have the ability to 'store' certain forms of energy, in certain traditional beliefs. The window at the end of the hallway was filled with glass bottles, insulators, and vases. When the house was sold, these items were removed and thrown out. My wife thinks that this may have had an effect on the eventual disappearance of the Tingler. Impossible to say now, but interesting.

And thanks to the members of YGS for giving me a nice welcome to the site!
BeagleMom (3 stories) (84 posts)
+2
8 years ago (2017-03-09)
Hi Dark Star!

First I have to thank Biblio for the Youtube clip! Way Cool!

I just loved your story Dark Star, It went into my Faves. Growing up, my oldest brother used to be the "Electrical" one in our family. He used me to do things like hold wires and tell him if I felt a shock. Somehow, when things went South, I was the one in trouble for being hurt! Enough!

I must tell you that I too have felt that sensation of being encased in a current, as Randy mentioned. I was in my deceased Mother-in-Law's house, where my hubby's Grandmother still lived. His mom was killed in an accident when my hubby was 7 months old. He was raised by his Dad and later on, Stepmother. We found ourselves, one time, in his Moms home town and couldn't pass up the chance to meet his maternal Grandmother. We were touring his moms rooms in her childhood home when both hubby and I were "frozen" in that strange vibrating envelope of tingles! We had just stepped into her bedroom. At the time, I thought we just had an emotional jolt of excitement at the thought of being in his Mom's room. (Her mom made it a museum of sorts, a memorial to a daughter, who died way too soon). Hubby felt much more of a jolt than I did, as I have mentioned to readers of this site, he is the psychic one in the family.

Thanks for the post! It's a great read!

Mother of Beagles
Bibliothecarius (9 stories) (1091 posts)
 
8 years ago (2017-03-08)
DarkStar:

You're on www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJw2Xfow6xk.

-Biblio.
Bibliothecarius (9 stories) (1091 posts)
+2
8 years ago (2017-03-07)
DarkStar:

I'm glad my odd "intuitive quirks" did not deter your response! (I don't get them often, but when I do it can be a bit unsettling.)

It is a pleasure to know that you survived being a curious child and that your career brought you joy, even if your electrical shocks appear to have been entirely self-inflicted! I'm interested in electricity, but I got a bit befuddled by Ohm's left-hand rule, resistors and capacitors, and the fact that electrical current can only be explained mathematically using the square root of negative one (the number "i"). In my field of expertise, explanations which require imaginary details to make sense of the whole are called "fiction." On the other hand, I've yet to meet a piece of technology that I cannot break. 😊 Usually, within fifteen minutes of having met me, every "expert" says: 1) "It can't do that," 2) "It shouldn't have done that," or 3) "The pre-programmed safeguards prevent it from having done that." I've diverted my "mad scientist" impulses into more construction- and art-based endeavors, so I'm a little jealous that you built your own Tesla coil! (That man was an engineering genius; his portrait is on my wall of heroes in my classroom!)

Back to the electrical-field haunting: the idea that the previous owner may be detected in your photograph is interesting. Vacuum cleaners generate a fair amount of white noise and build a static charge through the repetitive motions on carpets; I wonder if there's an electromagnetic explanation for the manifestation... I'd love to see the photo if you can get it to scan properly. I know that my dad scanned in a bunch of old family albums about five years ago, and the digitized photos appeared to be clearer than the original prints.

I'm looking forward to hearing more of your theories & your stories.

Best,
Biblio.
Miracles51031 (39 stories) (5000 posts) mod
+1
8 years ago (2017-03-07)
DarkStar - on several occasions I have felt static energy, similar to pulling a sweater or something out of the dryer that has static electricity. Each time I believe I encountered a ghost and sometimes I get an impression of what they look like.

I believe you definitely ran into someone in the hallway. Thanks for sharing your experience. I enjoyed reading it.
DarkStar (1 stories) (25 posts)
+4
8 years ago (2017-03-07)
Hello, everyone!

Biblio, the short answer to your question about my electrical experiences is: SCIENCE NERD! Growing up, if something lit up, moved by itself, or ran on batteries, I was all over it. I built my own Tesla coils (3), Van De Graaf electrostatic generators (two of those, including one four feet tall), a magneto (well, technically a DC generator, but it still zapped me a couple of times), and a kind of scary 'lightning in a light bulb' project that used a huge industrial light bulb and a Model T trembler coil to generate sparks 6 inches long inside the bulb. The sparks hit a tinfoil electrode taped to the big end of the bulb, right through the glass; made a hell of a noise. Got zapped by that one, too.

Years later, I finally found out that I wasn't generating soft X-rays with the lightning bulb project, which I was concerned about for a long time. A nice guy in Germany who is into extremely high voltage devices did the math and put my mind at ease about that several years ago.

I guess you could say it was real Mad Scientist stuff; one of my Disney comic book heroes as a kid was Gyro Gearloose. I always won the Science Fairs, the Merit Badge Shows my scout troop would hold, that sort of thing. I channeled this into a degree in Industrial Design, and later, a career designing toys.

And no, my toys never zapped or killed anyone, but some of my fellow designers and I were guests on the David Letterman Show once, showing outright "Dangerous Toys"; I think its on Youtube. I'm the Hot Potato and flamethrower guy.

As to the Tingler, I was probably the first to have such an extreme reaction to it. My wife, her sister, and all the cousins that ever stayed at the house and had any contact with the hallway simply hated it. They were not specific as to why, only that it made them mighty uncomfortable to walk through it. We asked everyone we could think of, without leading them with specific questions.

And, my wife and her sister remember the hallway as extremely unpleasant and scary from their earliest days in the house as children. Later, as my wife got older, she was able to detect an anger component to the scary feeling. She is of the impression that the Tingler may have been a former owner of the property and is looking into the property history.

There is a Polaroid photo that we took in the hallway at the time of the second funeral, for Bob. I'm in the photo in my suit, running a vacuum cleaner, in that hallway. There seems to be an image of a plaid shirt and part of an arm, walking through me as I vacuum. It is a real Rorschach kind of image, where you don't see it, and then you do. My wife took it to work and showed the image to various people to see if they saw anything unusual without indicating what was unusual. They did. Everyone saw a guy walking through me. Interestingly, while the arm and torso were pretty clear, there didn't appear to be a head in the image. If we can find it, I'll post it, but it has faded a lot in the intervening years and may not scan well.

But there is one other interesting thing about the photo--the image of the "shirt" is the right distance above the wooden floor if the "person" wearing the shirt is walking on the ground. It's about a foot and a half lower than I am.

Biblio, as to your other questions about the hallway and its origins, I'm working on them. And thanks for thinking critically about this event--I'm very interested to see what the YGS community thinks this might have been.
Argette (guest)
 
8 years ago (2017-03-07)
I'm fascinated by your comments and questions, Biblio, as fascinated as I am by this story. Can't wait to hear DarkStar's response.
Bibliothecarius (9 stories) (1091 posts)
+2
8 years ago (2017-03-07)
Greetings, DarkStar, and thanks for joining in the conversations.

I've got to start with the most bizarre sentence you wrote, "I had never felt anything like this in my life, and I have been electrified and shocked by Van De Graff generators, Tesla coils, capacitors and magnetos, among other electrical gadgets." What in the world...? Do you work in a technology museum? Are you a teacher of physics? Do you collect dangerous antique devices? Are you simply the unlucky "one" from "a million-to-one" who manages to get electrocuted by every damn device he touches?

The idea of an electrified field existing without a conductor is interesting; what's more interesting is the idea that this field had some range of travel with very specific boundaries. An electrical field can be distorted or stretched by moving an ionized object through it, but that would hold true for both directions and would have almost-identical limits before either dissipating or snapping back to its point of origin.

Did anyone in your wife's family experience any phenomena besides the stationary electrical field? Were there physical manifestations, voices, moving objects, etc.?

For the field to have drawn strength from residents in the home, but not to draw more strength from subsequent inhabitants seems odd to me.

--A note of apology for what follows. I have no idea where the impressions or details come from, but when I'm writing, I sometimes get odd ideas popping into my head. I've left them in the next few paragraphs, but I've separated them from the main questions/statements with parentheses.--

Did either of your in-laws have a sibling who had predeceased them? Had the field been present *always* from your wife's point of view, or had it begun to manifest at a specific time? Did your wife have a sibling (a brother?) who died young, potentially being jealous of the attention lavished on the remaining children?

Before the laundry room was built, what was the most common use for the doorway besides the porch? Did it lead to a car port, the driveway, or just the back yard? (Motorcycles? Vehicle repair? Grease, oil, a chain-drive? Regret & frustration. Denim. Slightly-longer hair than others? Eyes downward or away when speaking. A portable radio for company?)

I'd really like to know the answers to some of these questions, DarkStar, *especially* if the weird images/feelings I included are totally incorrect or irrelevant from your perspective.

Best,
Biblio.
Enlightened1959 (8 stories) (118 posts)
+1
8 years ago (2017-03-06)
DarkStar,

This was a very interesting story! I agree with you, I would be very curious to find out what was possibly buried under the ground there in the hallway next to or in the closet area.

Also, I wonder why it seemed to diminish once the house was empty? Do you think the entity fed on those who were living in the home?

Anyway, this was a very interesting experience and thank you for sharing.
RANDYM (2 stories) (266 posts)
+1
8 years ago (2017-03-06)
Darkstar

Welcome and thank you for sharing

All I can say is this.
I truly believe I was visited by my Mother a few years ago.
During the "visitation" I felt like my body was encased in a mild
Electrical current of some kind. It didn't hurt and wasn't uncomfortable in any way. Just like you described. In fact its hard
To describe in some ways. For me it was like my body was humming or vibrating. It felt good in a sense.

I too have been shocked and it wasn't like that

I have heard several people describe the same type of feeling when they felt they were near a spirit.

Hope that helps a little

Randy
Meghana23 (3 stories) (32 posts)
 
8 years ago (2017-03-06)
Nice story, you had any idea about that ghost why it is there in that particular area?
Argette (guest)
 
8 years ago (2017-03-06)
Welcome, Dark Star, and thanks for that spine-tingling account.

How interesting that the force or entity is gone, or dormant, now. I hope one of our more experienced commenters can shed some light on that for us. Your theory intrigues me. Pinned. I like that.
Seraphina (7 stories) (147 posts)
+1
8 years ago (2017-03-06)
Thanks for sharing your fascinating story with YGS readers, DarkStar!
Blessings,
Seraphina

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