We are looking for the best Written Real Ghost Stories. Any ghost story will do, we want to read them, and we want them to be real. The best ghost stories or paranormal stories (bigfoot, aliens, frog monster, ect) posted here will be published on EWR: Short Stories and on Every Writer as well in a future print addition. We are looking for scary and TRUE ghost experiences, and being we are a writer site, we hoping for them to be well written. Don’t worry though, if you’re not a writer, we will help you. So just count this posting as a first draft of your story, and if we like the story, we will work with you to fix problems or grammar and any other issues to help you create the scariest best crafted ghost story on the web.
Rules of this page:
- Stories must be paranormal or high strangeness
- They can be about anything paranormal it does NOT have to be ghosts…Bigfoot, monsters, aliens, any paranormal topic will do.
- The story needs to have been experienced by someone in real life. This means someone needs to be able to say, “Yep that happened to me.”
- The story can be no more than 1000 words long. Please try to get to the point quickly. The shorter the story the better.
We will review your stories here and then contact you about publishing it on our short stories site, and we hope in anthology some time in the future.
Post your Real Ghost Stories in the comments below! We are very excited about this one. I might be posting one myself.
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9-1-1 Hang Up
It happened when I worked as a dispatcher for the police department in Tarboro, North Carolina. It was Friday morning, quiet — Fridays generally were until late evening, after the booze had flowed for a few hours and tempers boiled over. When the phone rang, the shrill, pulsating tone of a 9-1-1 line, I snatched up the handset and punched the flashing button on my console.
“Nine-one-one. What is the location of your emergency?”
I could hear two voices, one that sounded male and the other female, yelling in the background, and what sounded like a struggle or objects of various size and weight being thrown around. I kept saying hello into the receiver, but there was clearly no one holding onto that end of the line.
I keyed up the radio and called the duty sergeant. “Central to Three-One.”
“Go ahead.”
“I have a disturbance at…” The call was from a landline, and I gave him the address emblazoned across the console screen. I told him that no one was saying anything to me, but it sounded like a man and woman arguing and possibly involved in a physical altercation.
Sarge told the officer working that beat to head to that address and said that he would
meet him there.
I remained on the line and occasionally yelled, “Hello!” in hopes of attracting someone’s
attention. I heard the continued arguing and the sound of breaking glass. I couldn’t understand everything they were saying, but occasionally certain words were clear.
“… son of a bitch …” the woman yelled.
“I’ll kill you!” snarled the man.
And while I wasn’t sure which one of them said it, I distinctly heard the word “knife,”
and the woman screamed. Suddenly someone slammed the receiver down on the phone, and I was left listening to a dial tone.
I relayed this information to Sarge while dialing the phone number to the residence. The phone rang and rang, but no one answered. I told Sarge that I was attempting to call back to the residence, but no one was answering. A few seconds later, the officers arrived on the scene, so I hung up on the still ringing phone.
This is a common occurrence with disturbance calls. One party will call 9-1-1, and before or shortly after the dispatcher has a chance to answer, the caller will either hang up, lay their phone down, or have it snatched from their hand by another party. In either case it is standard operating procedure to dispatch an officer to the address on the console.
When Sarge came across the radio and asked me to verify the address of the call, I gave him the address still displayed on my console. He confirmed it as his location and then called in a license plate number for a readback.
I ran the plate through the Department of Motor Vehicles database and read the information back to Sarge. The tag was on a 1999 Toyota Tacoma pickup truck registered to a man whose name and address matched the information displayed on my screen. Sarge didn’t ask, but I checked the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system for previous calls to that address but found only a barking dog complaint.
Sarge keyed the radio and asked me to call the phone number again. I did, and a few seconds later he told me I could hang up. After another minute or two Sarge cleared the scene, saying, “Everything appears ten-four.”
Sarge stopped by the station about a half-hour later and came back to the dispatch center.
He asked me to play the call back for him, which I did. He heard the same things I did — the
voices, the glass breaking, everything. He thought it was the woman who said “knife.”
Sarge sat down at the other workstation and turned his chair to face me. He told me that when he and the other officer arrived at the house, they found only that truck in the driveway. They walked around the single-story house, checked all the windows and doors, and found no signs of forced entry. They knocked on both the front and back doors and a side door, but no one came to either. There was nothing to indicate anyone was in the house; they looked through every window and saw no one. None of the television sets were on in the house, and they heard no radios playing. Nothing appeared out of place, and there was no broken glass to be seen inside. All the phones were on their hooks, and none were positioned in any way to suggest they had been disturbed. After Sarge asked me to call the number back, they heard the phones ringing inside.
Before the officers cleared the call, a nosy neighbor came over from next door to see why the police were snooping around her neighbors’ house. Sarge only told her that they were checking on a 9-1-1 hang up.
“No one could have called 9-1-1 from there,” the old lady told them.
“How do you know?” Sarge asked her.
“There’s nobody home,” she said. “They’ve been on vacation all week and won’t be back until Sunday.”
Sarge and I sat there and looked at each other for several seconds. I wondered if the hair stood up on the back of his neck then like mine was doing, and then we both shrugged.
“Oh, well,” I said, rubbing my neck and glancing at the telephone receiver lying next to my keyboard.
“Yeah” said Sarge, standing up to leave.
Once he was gone, I got up and walked over to the window in the dispatch center. It was a beautiful summer day. The sun was shining in a cloudless sky. As I gazed out the window, I decided that things that go bump in the night must sometimes go bump in the daytime.
COLD SPOT
Years ago, at the age of 15, I traveled in England on a large student tour. Four of us, one a professional goofball boy to our girl trio, made friends and a tightknit teen unit. On a rare bright sunny and warm-almost-hot day in late June our tour group visited Canterbury Cathedral.
We luxuriated in the cool interior of the ancient cathedral, half-listening and mega-bored as the tour guide droned on about fight between the King and Bishop and then the assassins waiting in the courtyard until Becket went into the chapel for evening prayers. Why should we care about an old man dead for almost one thousand years? The only part where we all perked up was in the guide’s description of Becket’s butchered body. Hacked to pieces? His brains spilling from his cracked skull onto the floor? Wow.
Afterward, the group lined up in the courtyard to proceed to our tour bus to go to lunch. Well, lined up isn’t accurate, us hungry teenagers jostled and clustered, eager to eat. And get out of the noonday sun, now blazing brilliant against the courtyard wall where we stood.
Danny, the de-facto leader of our quartet, pushed forward into an odd open space in the line. He turned and looked back at us, his face flat and tight, and said, “It’s cold.”
The identical twins, Jane and Jean (really), and I laughed at our always joking friend. “Yeah, right,” Jean said.
Danny didn’t reply. Instead, shoulders hunched, he stepped to the other side of the open area, bumping a gal in front of him and earning a scowl.
Still grinning, we three stepped forward.
Into the cold. Bitter to the bone cold. An ice of despair that clutched at my heart. And in the bright sunlight all I saw were shadows, dark, swirling, crouching against the wall. I blinked. Impossible, yet no light permeated into my mind. Dark and dank and oh, so cold.
A killing cold.
As one, the twins and I stepped away to huddle next to Danny and his great alive teenage warmth. I watched as the others of our tour group scurried through, detoured around, even turned back, nobody stayed there. In that cold spot.
We reached the cathedral’s tour guide, saying a proper British goodbye to each of us.
Danny pointed at the spot. “It’s . . .” His pointing finger trembled.
The tour guide nodded. “Everyone avoids that spot.”
“Why?” Jane asked. She rubbed her arms. Me too. A piece of me, where evil touched deep inside, ached with cold.
The guide tilted her head and gently said, “Remember, I told you the killers waited in the courtyard?”
Our quartet nodded. A glimmer of the answer to Jane’s question crawled at the back of my mind.
“Somewhere here the armed men crouched,” the guide gestured at the courtyard wall, “in the cold and dark, until Becket went into the chapel.” She sighed. “Then they murdered a man of God as he knelt at his prayers.” She glanced at the spot and then away. “They say we don’t know where they waited, that night, but perhaps we do.”
“I think they’re still there,” Danny said, “in that cold dark hell forever.”
I agree. Forever.