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Post by geneweigel on Oct 1, 2013 15:41:45 GMT -5
Heh, well that house had two pantries and three fridges so it was all set. It was a turn of the century tea house retreat for the heir of the Remington arms company which doesn't seem strange at first until spend a few nights there then its like what the hell is going on here? It looks like its been abandoned after they sold it twenty years ago.
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Post by geneweigel on Oct 2, 2013 8:59:26 GMT -5
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Post by GRWelsh on Oct 2, 2013 9:39:29 GMT -5
What did you see and hear there? Did you see any ghosts?
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Post by geneweigel on Oct 2, 2013 11:17:30 GMT -5
Yeah, I saw and heard so much crap in that house its phenomenal. Footsteps pounding on the stairs coming up from the basement and the basement door slowing opening with the doorknob turning by itself. And my Aunt was with me. I tell this story and most people (who don't know the situation) think I was sleeping in the bed with my Aunt. However, she had no use of her legs and was in bed quite a lot. When I talked with her, I was usually sitting in her wheelchair keeping her company. We tried to debunk this a million ways and we went through everything. The most activity was in a certain area. Here is two pics of the "haunted kitchen" LEFT PHOTO the hallway view from the kitchen and RIGHT PHOTO I'm in the kitchen with my back to the hallway (on the other side of the counter). That bench (where you can see someone's knee) is where I used to sit in the kitchen drawing pictures all night. I would see people going into and coming out of the space between the fireplace and the kitchen entry. I thought there was an explanation. That somehow there was a trapdoor that no one told me about but it was just wall and a covered up door that was plastered over. This shit happened when no one was around practically all the time. The worst time is when one came into the kitchen and I didn't want to look up but he was right fucking there nodding his head smiling with his hands on the counter and elbows locked. Then I looked up and... GONE! The dark-haired, bun-headed woman that I saw constantly in the hallway turned out to not resemble the well known owner of the house. I drew a picture of her but somebody swiped it. The kitchen windows were high and you could see over a person's height and you'd see the tops of heads or whole shapes out on the stone path moving outside all the time in the moonlight. In another part of the house there was a face outside the window on the second floor. In particular interest to this thread, there was a hearsay "SHINING" incident where this woman came for a surprise visit with her husband and they heard a party with music and laughing and went around the whole house and no one was home. As an aside, I dug up some weird temple structure on the back lawn too.
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Post by GRWelsh on Oct 2, 2013 12:34:20 GMT -5
Wow, that's some pretty amazing stuff.
I think its ironic that you played a lot of D&D to distract yourself from these things, when D&D has a lot of roots in pulp horror.
"Let's play Tomb of Horrors to -- you know -- take our minds off the ghosts."
Did you get sustained looks at any of the ghosts, or were they always fleeting or out-of-the-corners-of-your-eyes appearances?
The guy nodding in the kitchen... that's freaky, because I like the way you describe how you didn't want to look up. That's terror, to not even want it to be there or to even be able to see it!
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Post by geneweigel on Oct 2, 2013 13:14:06 GMT -5
Did you get sustained looks at any of the ghosts, or were they always fleeting or out-of-the-corners-of-your-eyes appearances? Yes, the face in the window I looked directly at. My aunt said no Ouija boards were allowed in the house. So my friend Eddie asked if we could secretly do it in my crunched room that I shared with my brother divided by this bunk monstrosity with space underneath for a dresser and desk. I had another dresser next to a window and we sat Indian style on top with the board on our knees. A person with googly eyes was outside the window. And it was nobody that I ever saw. I fucking ran like a maniac. We came back and the Ouija board was gone. The dog ate the entire thing with the plastic "planchette". Thats the same fucking dog (see below) that ate the large 1979 Kenner Alien figure and the 1980 electronic Dungeons and Dragons with the miniatures (I still have the minis. I got this BEFORE I started playing D&D too.). Anyway, the face in the window looked like a large-eyed woman or a femme man and it looked reddish. In regards to the "temple" that I dug up: My aunt bought the buddha statue, the benches and the doghouse but those pedestals, the steps and the walkway running out there I discovered from the upper pedestal protruding out of the dirt and spent all Summer digging it out. The upper pedestal had some kind of serpent wrapped around it that was broken. It could have been Oriental dragons because there were Oriental dragons at the head of the stairs. But why was it all buried in the first place? I still have etchings I made from the center of the top pedestal as it looked like a map.
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Post by GRWelsh on Oct 4, 2013 9:09:59 GMT -5
Was this before or after Marty Feldman died?
Seriously, did your friend Eddie also see the face outside the window?
Have you ever thought of writing a document or story based on what happened in that house? It's like you were living in a Lovecraft story, with the buried 'temple' and everything.
Colonial era cultists!
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Post by Merkholz on Oct 4, 2013 9:44:12 GMT -5
This reminds me of a weird autumn night twenty years ago when me and a friend decided to take a walk in the woods beyond a cemetary after having watched 2-3 horror movies. While walking in the woods we heard strange sounds and glimpsed movements among the trees but since the only illumination came from the moon it was fruitless. After getting a bit spooked we finally emerged in a large clearing where there were several man-sized pits in the ground along the clearings rim and a circle of large white stone blocks bathed in moonlight in the center of the clearing.
We were convinced that we'd stumbled upon a secret place of worship for a murderous cult and when we heard voices in the woods we fled - we were unarmed! When we returned in daytime we were dismayed to discover that the clearing appeared to be used while construction was going on in the cemetary. Our certainties during the black hours of night melted away into the ordinary parts of life.
IMO, a lot of weird experiences have totally mundane and boring exlanations which makes most people question these type of experiences. I've always been fascinated by those few cases where it's not so easily explained.
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Post by GRWelsh on Oct 4, 2013 11:17:35 GMT -5
I love ghost stories. I think it makes life so much more interesting. Unfortunately, I've never seen a ghost, myself.
I often think about how differently people can interpret the same event. When people are at my house and hear a noise and say, "What the hell was that?" I invariably shrug and say something like, "Some sound that I barely paid attention to and which has a natural, if unknown, cause." You don't often notice your own house noises.
So, who knows, maybe ghosts have appeared around me, but I'm just too dull to notice.
Now in Gene's case, seeing a doorknob TURN with his Aunt seeing the same thing -- that would be pretty hard to explain away. A door swinging open on its own -- not such a big deal. But a door knob turning on its own? That's not so easy to dismiss.
I remember one time a family that lived in an old farmhouse told me a ghost story about how, sometimes after one of them would come up from the basement, a little bit later they would hear footsteps coming up the stairs. But when they opened the door no one was there. Eventually, they figured out that the wooden steps, due to their age or being swelled, "popped" in order after being walked on and after a certain interval of time passed. But of course people only noticed this at night, or when it was quiet in the house...
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Post by geneweigel on Oct 4, 2013 14:18:35 GMT -5
Now in Gene's case, seeing a doorknob TURN with his Aunt seeing the same thing -- that would be pretty hard to explain away. A door swinging open on its own -- not such a big deal. But a door knob turning on its own? That's not so easy to dismiss. The footsteps were worse than the doorknob turning they were the most obnoxiously pounding footsteps that I expected someone to pop out and say "Surprise!" but nothing. Me and my uncle, who I roused from a dead sleep, thought it was someone hiding and went through the entire gigantic sized basement with hundreds of boxes and everything was locked from the inside. We were expecting a burglar so I went through every angle of it.
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Post by GRWelsh on Oct 4, 2013 15:33:27 GMT -5
Just imagine if, after living there for a few years, you actually DID have a home intruder! Hearing noises in the middle of the night, you might think, "Aw, it's just the ghost!" and roll over and go back to sleep!
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Post by geneweigel on Oct 4, 2013 18:08:23 GMT -5
Well, in this 1920's apartment house its safe to say absolutely nothing for the past 11 years however I believe the graveyard up the hill is haunted. I took these weird lighted photos after seeing a light coming from no direction after exiting my car. Before that I lived in 4 story 1800's Greenpoint apartment for roughly 3 years and nothing. The two apartments before, one a Greenpoint 2 story for about 3 years from the 1800's, I had a nightmare about the elderly woman who died there and the next morning I had scratches on my back that have no explanation. The other apartment in Albany that I lived in for 3 years was from the 1800's and that had some kind of weird tingling bell phenomena in one section of the room. Around 8 years or so prior to that absolutely nothing.
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Post by geneweigel on Oct 5, 2013 12:32:36 GMT -5
I started reading THE SHINING and I think I've been in this situation before at least 5 or 6 times. I 'm not going to say anything until that and the new book are done.
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Post by GRWelsh on Oct 7, 2013 8:52:01 GMT -5
I knew there were a number of differences between the King novel and Kubrick film, but I couldn't remember them all. But now that I've reread the novel, I've been thinking about them.
Room 217 in the novel was changed to Room 237 in the film. I'm not sure what the reason was for the number change, or if there was a reason. This is the room where the lady died in the bathtub.
Perhaps the most iconic moment in the film was Jack Nicholson sticking his head through the hole in the door and saying, "Here's Johnny!" and it wasn't in the novel.
Another iconic moment in the film was Danny riding his tricycle around the hallways of the hotel, and coming around the corner to see the identical twin girls in blue dresses standing there holding hands. This wasn't in the novel, either. Delbert Grady's daughters in the book were implied to not be twins, since Ullman at the beginning says they were about 8 and 10. This is actually retained in the screen play in the opening scenes with Ullman, and so makes it a sort of continuity error after Kubrick decided to make Grady's daughters into twins. Brilliant idea, though, since they are very creepy. The dialogue about "Come play with us forever. And ever. And ever..." is adapted from the scene in the novel when Danny is in the playground, and it is implied a little boy died there. Danny either perceives or imagines the ghost boy wanting him to stay there and play with him forever, and ever, and ever.
And another big one was the "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" scene which was in the film but not the novel. In the novel, Jack actually did work on the play, but couldn't finish it because his feelings about the characters in it changed.
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Post by geneweigel on Oct 7, 2013 9:35:23 GMT -5
There is some trailer channel on Apple TV and my wife was playing it on her phone and this trailer for a documentary came on which initally I thought was weird but may be coinciding with the sequel release: ROOM 237
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Post by Scott on Oct 7, 2013 9:47:24 GMT -5
The 'here's Johnny' line was an improv by Jack Nicholson. I read the room number was changed to a room that didn't really exist at the hotel. Room 217 was the room that Stephen King stayed in at the hotel that inspired the story. They girls ended up twins because somebody involved in the making of the movie had twin daughters, and they used them. It should have been easy enough to fix that in the script. The tricycle scene is great cinematography, very Kubrick. Some other big differences: No hedge maze in the book. No axe in the book; it was a roque mallet. No boiler in the movie.
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Post by Scott on Oct 22, 2013 9:10:52 GMT -5
I finished Doctor Sleep last night. Loved it. One of Stephen King's best novels. As I was reading it, I kept thinking 'he's going to blow the ending', but that was not the case.
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Post by geneweigel on Oct 22, 2013 9:29:46 GMT -5
Still hitting THE SHINING (Up to page 79) so I might get to it yet!
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Post by GRWelsh on Oct 23, 2013 14:05:40 GMT -5
I'm about 60 pages into DOCTOR SLEEP and really enjoying it so far. King's writing in this book is as good as ever, maybe better than ever. Interesting new "monsters" as well!
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Post by Scott on Oct 24, 2013 7:20:27 GMT -5
Yeah, I thought the same thing about the writing. I've sometimes thought that King could be a better story teller than a writer, but the writing in Doctor Sleep is very good.
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