Out of Pod Experience

Things that go bump in the night: me

I am a somnambulist, so when my brain is not taking me on a walk, it makes me a pretty restless sleeper (though I'm generally not aware of it). I'm not very pleasant to sleep next to. I invade space, I hoarde blankets, and a couple of times I've left bruises.

I have insomnia, but I don't think it's related.


Usually I just tie a string to my wrist and the worst that can happen is I find myself on the floor. Some beds don't have posts so I keep mittens handy, which prevent me from opening any doors. Before I had a handle on it, I'd made my way outside and sleeping under some bushes a few times, or in the laundry room or kitchen.. it was quite embarrassing.


Other things that go bump in the night: ghosts!

I have some ghost stories.. and scary. Is this the right thread for it?

Ok, I will preface this by saying I am a skeptic.


My best friend, I love her to death, sometimes occupies her time looking for ghosts (mostly with a digital camera). She's also a big believer in the supernatural, which I am not in any way, but I am supportive of her beliefs..


She used to live in this place that was right next to an apartment complex that she swore was haunted for months. After she'd been there 9 months, the local police discovered some bodies that were buried in a gap in the foundation. Weird, right?

So before this happened, I would visit her with other friends and she would always be pretty freaked out at night. So we all slept in the same room, relatively close to each other. This one night she told us that she was going through hell because she was sick of living next to a haunted place, and that she would feel a presence in her house on some nights. She said that what the spirit would do is step with its feet on her blanket as she would be huddled inside it, so she would feel this weight of a person walking around on her mattress.

I took this in stride, but I know.. I know there is nothing in this existence like ghosts. And my own senses were proof.. ghosts are never seen or heard from, ever. I am miss know-it-all, and SCIENCE is on my side, and reason, and Thomas Paine himself looks down at me from heaven and weeps at my levelheadedness. Anyway, I'm half asleep. Two of us are on the floor on a bedroll and two of us in bed. And sure enough, none of us are walking around.. we are all lying down, and I feel feet.. adult feet making steps right next to my body, pressing down the sheet covering me, stepping over my hand and then on the other side of me. I put my head up and check on everyone else.. all are lying down. No one is standing in the room.. and again, I feel feet.

I was never so scared in my life. This went on for 15 mins and then abruptly it stopped.


--

Second story. I was by myself. I was reading Jeffrey Archer, who writes good junk food for the brain. The story I was reading wasn't making sense to me and I felt sleepy. I thought I would take a nap. When I sleep I like to put my head inside the blanket and cocoon up. It's just a habit.. or maybe there's a scientific reason.

Anyway, I close my eyes and I cannot describe the feeling.. but I felt like there is a presence.. like somebody in the room. My cat was hanging out with a friend, so it was not him. The lights in the room are still on, and because I still feel the presence, I just put my head up still under the blanket and look around. I don't catch any shadows.. but I still feel the chill in my spine.


There are no ghosts, stop being silly. I put my head down and try to enjoy my nap. And right then, I feel like the blanket is pulled tight around my face.. I feel it actually constricting my face. And the worst thing is, I can't open my eyes, I can't move my arms. I am completely paralyzed. So, I'm paralyzed and I'm thinking.. what can I do? This can't be real.. let me verify for myself that it isn't real..

I mentally examine the sense of being constricted by my blanket. It feels very real. I can't deny that it's actually happening. Trying to move my eyelids.. trying to move my arms.. I can't deny that I am actually trying and that it's not happening. I start panicking.. I start begging to whatever spirit or ghost it might be, I'm a good person.. please don't do this to me. And just like that, it stops. I open my eyes, throw my blanket over.. and nothing. I'm just left with this feeling of dread..


Can't explain either of these events. I'm still a skeptic. Is that hypocritical?

@ Sibs:

Creepy stuff

But I can give you a full explanation for your second story: Sleep Paralysis. Especially since you said that you are a somnambulist. Sleep paralysis is basically inverse somnambulation, where your body is still asleep and thus paralyzed, yet your mind suddenly partially awake and fully self-aware.
This is usually a horrifying experience, often accompanied by really scary nightmares. I had it once, too- sick stuff. But sleep paralysis can occur in every healthy person and is completely harmless.

But since we are talking about ghost stories now, here is the creepiest (RL) story that I have ever heard.
An old friend told me, her grandparents used to live in an old parsonage in a small village in Germany (I have forgotten which village exactly, sorry). Locals kept shunning the house and telling it was haunted.
As kids, she often spent her vacations there, together with her parents and her little brother. They loved playing in the garden and exploring the many rooms of the house.
Now her little brother- he was 4 or 5 at that time- used to be a very weird kid, sometimes seeing things that were not there, talking to people even though nobody was in the room etc.
While playing high up in the attic, the brother suddenly dropped on the floor and started screaming, completely out of his mind, he just curled into a ball and screamed and screamed and screamed in a really unsettling way.
When their parents heard those screams, they rushed up to the attic and carried the child back downstairs into the living room, where the whole family had gathered.
They tried to talk to him, but he was like in some kind of scary trance, and kept just screaming.
It took about half an hour or so until her little brother calmed down enough to talk.
He told the family, that while he was playing in the attic, there had been a pale man in a blue suit, staring at him from outside the window. (4th floor, mind you).
The grandma suddenly paled and started shivering, completely freaked out, and left the room.
My friend was running after her, asking her what she knew, and after a while her grandma replied:
"You know why they say this house is haunted? Because about 50 years ago, when I was your age, a sailor hung himself on the ridge, just outside that window..."

Will add in some more sleepwalking stories here

First one i dident see my self, because i was the person sleep walking.

This was before i had started to play EVE, and during that time my bf and i where obsessed with Zelda. It really felt like any awake moment was spent playing it. Anyway, at the time i worked during the weekends and i had to get up at like 4.30 in the morning for work.
Im a heavy sleeper (it really takes a lot to wake me up, especially before noon) so i always put my phone (which was also my alarm) on the other side of the room so i had to actually leave the bed to turn it off.

This was an old Nokia phone, and when someone called or the alarm went off the whole thing started to flash with a blue light (relevant).
For those who have played Zelda, Majora's mask you might remember the heart containers you can pick up, and how some of them could be very tricky to get, and how they where red and blue (oh shiny).

So according to my bf at the time the alarm had gone off, i had crawled over him before i went down on all fours on the floor and crawled over to the phone at which point i got up, raised it over my head grinning like a mad man while nearly shouting "Look! I managed to find one!".

My x had apparently told me (in not so nice words) to shut it off, so i had shut off the alarm, put the phone back right where it was, went back down on all fours and crawled right back into bed with no idea what had just happened. I dont remember if i was late for work that day or not

Second story, also about sleep walking but different sleep walker this time.

This was actually my x's best friend.
First some background. Imagine the regular metal head kind of guy. Long black hair (thin black hair i should add), trench coat, pale, does his best to look angry at any picture you take... you get the idea.

My x and i lived in the city, he lived about an hour away by car thus he used to sleep over at our place during the weekends when we all went out. The fact that he would talk in his sleep was nothing new, but this one night he really just acted strange.

We had all gone to bed, when suddenly our bedroom opens (his friend would sleep in the living room) and us still being awake sees his friend standing there glaring at us, looking really pissed. Next thing i know a pillow gets thrown into my face and really quickly the door gets shut and everything goes quiet.

My x and i look at each other and decide to wait for a couple of minutes then go out and see what on earth was going on, and we bring the pillow for him. His friend is sitting under the living room table (and this is not a tall table, the kind where your knees barely fit under it) and he (im not kidding)baring his teeth's and hisses at us in nothing but his underwear. At that moment all i could think about was that he looked like Gollum.
Neither of us dared to approach him, he really looked hostile, and any attempts at talking to him caused more growling and hissing noises. So my x carefully leaned forward a bit, holding out the pillow, and the guy rushes out from under the table without actually getting up, snatches the pillow and backs straight back in under the table holding the pillow to his chest and continues to scowl at us.

We decide to go back into the bedroom and see what he does (expecting a new "attack"). but about 5 minutes later when we check in on him he is laying on his mattress sleeping like nothing had ever happened.

I really wish i knew what he had been dreaming about, even tho im not sure if i would have liked to know why i was the target for the pillow attack

You guys will like this site if you have not seen it before.

www.creepypasta.com/

I grew up in the rural south. When I was 16 years old my parents left for vacation for 1 week and I stayed at home to run the farm.

On about the third night I thought that I heard something in the house. As the house was old it always had creaks and pops as it would cool down in the night. I just kind of laughed at how funny it was that it even scared me a little. I mean we had plenty of weapons in the house; I even slept with an SKS rifle under my bed. As I dozed off I heard something again, like a clear but low volume click that woke me all the way up. Heart pounding and the sweet numbness that comes with a dose of adrenaline, I knew that now I had to check this out. I took my rifle and started to search the house.

In this search I was resolved to empty my entire 30 shots into anything that I found. The west side was done and I was moving back towards the garage entrance on the east, when I began to feel very uneasy of the area ahead of me.

The lights in the house were out and the moon had provided ample illumination for my search. The garage light was on and I had an odd fear, no really a dread of this. Had I left the light on? I could not remember. As I advanced toward this beacon terror I had to divert my gaze to the right to see into the front hall. A brief glance confirmed that it was clear. As my line of sight clipped back to the light I felt the second crash of adrenaline hit my system. A tiny flick of movement in the light so small it could have been my imagination in any other circumstance. Frozen I stood with my rifle pointed at the door.

With no more movement seen, I slowly advanced and cleared the garage, to find the door had been locked the entire time.
The next morning my when I had seen my best friend he had told me how he and his younger brother had took the hidden key to the garage and had made it to the inside door before they got afraid and turned around.

They had planned to scare me.

I am conflicted when it comes to the supernatural. Many stories have crossed my ears and I've personally witnessed the bizarre, yet I don't know how I fully feel on the subject. Let's say my family and soon to be family have bad juju when it comes to dealing with the spiritual shenanigans.

My grandmother lived in an apartment complex where her and my grandpops always saw a shadow move around the house. Didn't matter if the current room had windows, they'd occasionally see a glimpse and it would get the dogs on edge. At first my mother and I thought it was her medication screwing with her, until all four of us were sitting together at Christmas. A red bulb started to float for two seconds and when one of us went to point it out, it dropped and shattered on the floor. We all saw it; it's warped our minds since. Stuff falls from A/C, poor placement, or whatever but-- this floated.

As for my soon to be Wife's family, they have a creepy story about an Ouija board. Someone in the family brought one home, and another family member started acting stranger and stranger. When her great grandma tried to burn it, it wouldn't burn and breaking it didn't work. Not sure the rest of the details because the ones that witnessed it get uncomfortable. Even to the point of not wanting to finish the story. Makes me wonder what exactly that family member started doing to traumatize everyone else.

I was restless one night, and decided to walk in the cool night air. It's 2am, and, in my childhood, my neighborhood was a reasonably safe place to walk around. I'm a few blocks from home, headed back. I look up and see a faint jumble of colors in the sky, hovering low a few hundred feet over the houses in my neighborhood.

I started walking toward it, trying to figure it out. Large red and green balls of light in the middle and smaller red and blue blobs of light on top and bottom, organized like some kind of chandelier in the sky. It moved once, hovered for a few minutes as I began walking faster toward it.

And then it winked out. Gone.

This was before non car-mounted cell phones were a thing. No camera, no other witnesses.

Steve Martin and Bill Murray's sketch on SNL took on way more meaning.

Quoting when using a phone is hard

Actually my EVE name is way older then that. In college I had a small group of friends. Two of them had known each other for years and had transferred together.
They never used their real names but had given each other nicknames and only responded to those. The names where supposed to reflect something personal about them.

Ofc they wanted to give me one as well, and when they realized that I had a habbit of sneaking off during the night leaving school property they started to call me Nightcrawler. It ended up being well known and ever since I was 17 only my family uses my real name, for everyone else I'm NC.

Especially since I moved to USA it's come in very handy since my Norwegian name is very difficult to pronounce in English. My better half who is doing his best to learn Norwegian is not very fond of our R's

I will admit that I attempted to watch the movie once, and I can honestly say I stayed awake for a whole five minutes of it