Ok as everyone seems to be into sharing their ghost stories here's mine, it's true and happened about two years ago. Sorry if it's a bit long!
I purchased the house I'm living in which is in the country surrounded by woods, it was a bargain but really run down. I thought it would make a great project and moved in and did it up room by room, the whole renovation took about six months of hard work and I was never at all uneasy about being in the house.
Everything was fine until about the last couple of weeks of work when I took the floorboards in the bathroom up to install the central heating pipes. Much to my surprise I found a sealed room under the bathroom with a gramaphone, a few mouldy books and a couple of pictures up on the wall. Walking around the house I realised that at one point this must have been part of the lower floor (the servants area when the house was put up) and I was able to find where it connected to the downstairs part of the house (it's on 3 floors, the lowest one is partly underground due the house being on a slope).
It didn't seem worth knocking the entrance out as the room was very small and I had plenty of space so I decided to remove all the objects, lay the pipes and replace the floorboards. Weird though it might sound I was very busy with dozens of other projects with the house and didn't really think much of it. I looked through the stuff I'd got out and only one thing seemed worth saving and that was a perfectly ordinary looking picture of a Japanese scene of a lake and fishing boats. Despite the room having been sealed and mouldy the picture was in perfect condition so I thought I'd hang it up in the bathroom. At the time I had very little of my own stuff in the house, most of it was in storage, so I just put it up and moved on to other projects. That's when things got a bit strange.
I was living there with my cat, up till that point she was just interested in exploring the house and seemed very much at home. To be honest she was more interested in exploring the woods behind the house and I didn't see a lot of her. For several nights though she would cry from the door outside the bathroom and more than once I saw her race through the house with her eyes huge and her tail sticking up like something had really scared her. I'm almost embarrased to admit that if I woke up in the night and wanted a glass of water I found myself avoiding going into the bathroom, which was nearer, and going instead down to the kitchen. Several times I was in the bathroom and felt as though someone was stood behind me or that the air didn't taste right, I can't explain it more than that. It was suddenly a very unpleasent place to be even visitors who came to look at the house commented that it had a bit of an odd feel to it. Again I was so tired and overworked that I just put it down to being alone in the house and ignored it but I did take the picture down and the room felt much better after that. I put the picture on the kitchen table with some other junk to be taken to the rubbish tip.
The evening I'd moved the picture to the kitchen table I woke at around 2am to hear something moving downstairs. Where I live is totally isolated and by that point I was well used to the sounds of the house cooling down in the evening and the various pipes and suchlike. It was a definite dragging sound that was coming from the kitchen. I was so disturbed I went into the study, loaded the shotgun and went downstairs. I'm not by nature a nervous person and to be honest though I like to be frightened by horror films the moment I turn the DVD off or stand up in the cinema any frisson of excitement or fear is gone for me, I'm sure many people are the same. What I saw down there though really did make me very afraid.
The kitchen table had lots of gouged out bits on it, I can only describe it as the back of the picture which had hooks in it had dragged around the table making a swirling pattern. I didn't see anything move but there was no other logical explanation. I suppose a hardline realist would say ok your cat jumped on the picture and moved it causing the scratches but believe me if you were stood there at 2am like I was and saw the marks you'd have been freaked out too!
I didn't even want to touch the picture and instead left it where it was and went back to bed but didn't sleep much. Through the night I could hear more sounds from down there including thumps and bangs that made me consider getting the cat and leaving to go and stay with someone for the night. In the morning I got up and took the picture outside.
I had a big pile of stuff to burn, old papers and bits of wallpaper and trash like that. I still had another room to do so I decided to leave off destroying it until I'd finished collecting up the rest of the stuff. I didn't like leaving the picture on the rubbish pile though so I threw it into the old greenhouse which was also full of stuff that was destined for the rubbish tip, an old mangle, a few pieces of rotting furniture etc. That night I slept fine, I'd finished taking down all the old wallpaper and was ready to burn the picture the next morning along with all the stuff I'd gathered.
When I went outside the next morning the greenhouse glass was covered in deep scratches, from the inside. The algae and moss that was growing on the inside was very definitely scraped away in picture sized swathes. Worse that that though was the absolute certainty that the picture had been rubbing against the door and window, like some kind of animal trying to get out. I got it out and burnt it along with piles of old rubbish.
After that the house felt a lot more peaceful, I never did use that room and everything else from there got burnt. I should say that I'm obviously a horror fan, and by extension a fan of ghost stories but up until those events I had never considered that something strange would happen to me personally. I definitely have a more open mind on things like that now.
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