Post your ghost stories here. Tell the truth.
A few years after my granddaddy died, we were all at the house for one of the biannual family get-togethers. It was about 10pm, and everyone had gone to bed. I was in the bedroom that adjoined a tiny utility room for the washer/dryer, which adjoined the kitchen. The doors were closed so that the air conditioners could keep the bedrooms cool. I was the last one awake, and wasn't even approaching tiredness yet, so this was completely real to me and nothing to do with dreaming or any other altered state of consciousness.
I want to wax poetic about all the memories in that little house, but I don't really have time, and now that it's gone, it makes me a little sad. So I just erased a bunch of stuff. Back to the ghost part.
Granddaddy had a pair of hard-soled slippers that made a distinctive sound when he shuffled across the kitchen linoleum. He didn't quite slide, but he didn't pick his feet all the way up, either. You knew it was him by his particular cadence -- you know how it is. Anyway, I heard that sound in the kitchen.
I immediately tried to dismiss it, thinking someone else had to be in there, but no light was coming under the crack between the door and the floor, so that meant the kitchen was dark.
I got goosebumps all over me, but I didn't get scared per se. Then I heard a chair being pulled out from the table. Granddaddy's chair was the one closest to the door on my side, and it was that chair being pulled. At this point, I was listening very intently, trying to decide whether to jump out the window or open the door and look into the kitchen. I couldn't have done either because I was rooted to the bed and probably couldn't have been dislodged with heavy equipment.
That's when every single cabinet door in the kitchen (there were maybe 10?), one by one, opened and closed like someone ran from one end of the room to the other trying to beat a speed record. The entire event took no more than 20 seconds from beginning to end.
I asked the next morning if anyone had been in the kitchen after we went to bed, and no one admitted to it. The thing is, you know what your family sounds like in the house. That was Grandaddy. I never got really fearful; I felt an odd combination of goosebumps, sadness, and longing. That was before I learned to turn off that sensitivity to things ghostly.
I still haven't told my mom that story.