So when I was barely twenty years old I was travelling with a small group of people through China, and we were spending about two months in Qinghai province, which used to be part of Tibet. Our destinations was a specific town to teach English, but we'd been stopping often in towns and small cities along the way. One day we arrived in a rural town, very small, nothing unusual. We spent only a couple of days there, shopping for food at the markets and walking around to see the sights, although there weren't many. This was in the dead of winter, in February, and all the grass on the hills and plains around the town was dead and brown. The overall feeling was that of the normal kind of bleakness that any rural place has in the winter.

At this time in my life things were going amazingly, extraordinarily well for me, and I say that because my teenagehood had been rather darkly overcast. But the overwhelming good luck of being able to travel and these close friends I'd made in the last year had more than changed my feelings and attitude towards life — it was like I was a whole new person. I was ecstatic to be in Tibet, went to sleep with a smile on my face every night.

On our second day staying in this small town I woke up feeling a little odd. Not bad, just odd, like my normal thoughts and feelings had been turned down low, like on a dial. We all decided to go for a walk on the hills right behind the town, where there was a small summit with a pile of rocks and some prayer flags (to be honest there were little "altars" like these on every other hill, but it gave us something to do).

As we hiked up the hills behind the town I started feeling stranger and stranger. I wasn't scared, and I didn't feel angry or any strong emotion. In fact, it was like emotion was trickling out of me somehow, and I was getting blanker and blanker, emptier and emptier. My mind started feeling a little hazy and more and more I felt like I simply didn't care about anything. A small and rapidly dwindling part of myself started to panic, knew that something bad was happening, but it was like my own inner voice was slowly getting quieter and quieter.

I remember we reached the little summit and I simply sank to the ground next to the pile of rocks. Without meaning to, I started tuning out the voices around me and fixed all my attention on the little pebbles in the dirt. I began tapping one against the other, repeatedly. Do you know the kind of horror that is opposite of feeling scared or feeling anything at all? The kind of vacuous hideousness of a fly buzzing against a closed window for hours on end in an empty room? That's what was filling my mind. It was demonic in its meaninglessness.

I touched my face and felt that I was grinning at nothing. Through all the emptiness a thought floated to the forefront of my mind: You should just die.

At first it sounded totally reasonable, but something in me fought it and I was momentarily troubled. Right then, my group started to walk down from the hill, and I followed. The further we walked, the more normal I felt, until we left the town that afternoon and I was totally freaked out. When another girl, Hanna, mentioned in an odd off-hand way that she had felt very strange and depressed while staying there, I told her that I'd felt the same.

When the group leader mentioned that a local had told him that the town had been plagued with a rash of young women under 25 committing suicide, Hanna and I went white.

What The Dog Knew, from Aeonflux072

In my old apartment, my dog would, on occasion, look down the hallway towards the bedroom, from the living room, and growl, for no apparent reason. Also on occasion, when I was sleeping in the bedroom (she slept at the foot of the bed), I would wake up with her staring intently at the door and growling. She was a big girl - 140 pounds of Great Dane, Catahoula, and slobber.

So I'm there for a couple of years of this, thinking, ok, my dog has a good imagination.

Wrong. One night I woke up due not to my dog growling, but barking for all she was worth. And not at the door... she was barking straight at me. I opened my eyes pretty much immediately, and there was a blur of light, leaning over me, very close - certainly less than six inches from my face. It was not distinguishable as a person - it more resembled a person-sized version of a colourful nebula you might see a picture of in a science magazine. Three dimensional and all. I immediately got the distinct impression that this thing had been watching me sleep. For god knows how long, and how many times before. For all the clarity of that distinct feeling, I had no sense of what it wanted, whether it was malevolent or just curious. I flipped right the fuck out - jumped backwards to the other side of the bed, too terrified to scream, and that blur of light receded and disappeared over the course of about 3 seconds. My dog was going absolutely ape.

So, shortly thereafter, I asked the building manager if anybody had ever died there. She investigated that, and came back to me a couple of weeks later with a yes, a woman had died of a drug overdose in that apartment in 1995 (so 12 years earlier), shortly after having her child removed from her custody because of her addiction problems.

My dog did still growl at the hallway from time to time, but I never saw it again. I moved out about a year later.

I've had other encounters, but this thing was literally inches from my face, watching me sleep. Getting shivers now just writing about it.

There's Something on The Stairs.

So when I was a kid, I would race up to the top of the stairs as fast as I could, like it was some sort of silly game. Well, I must have been five or six at the time. I'm not sure, but I know I was very little. Somewhere along the way, a voice at the top of the stairs started to whisper to me. It would make bets with me, such as... "I bet you a penny you can't make it to the top of the stairs." I don't really think there was a certain amount of time or anything. As I said, I was very little so I probably didn't have any counting abilities anyway. Ha. I recall just sitting at the top of the stairs, having conversations with this voice, about the betting, of course. :p

Eventually the voice (it was like a whisper of a man's voice, not my own voice in my head) started to bet me my life. Instead of pennies, it'd say "I bet you your life you can't make it up the stairs blah blah."

As I got older it stopped. I never really thought about it at all. I never mentioned it to anyone... UNTIL one night I was sleeping over at my brother's place (I was about eighteen, he was twenty-two) and we were talking about "spooky" stories. Out of nowhere I brought up the "voice at the top of the stairs" and my brother got all quiet and weird. Before I even mentioned the betting aspect, he said "Did it make bets with you?"

We both looked at eachother, horrified. It certainly was freaky after the fact. *shudder*

A lot of bad shit went down in my family at that period of time in my life, and my mother, a heavily religious lady, said there was a lot of "evil" in our lives at that time. I don't at all think our place was haunted, btw, it was built in the late 70's and as I got older, I never experienced anything like that again.