"ghost stories are only good when they're first hand." fortunately i've never had a first-hand experience, but i'll try to recount all the people i've met who have claimed to have some supernatural occurence in their lives.

scary story #1
when they moved into a house in halifax, my fourth grade teacher had three rambunctious kids under the age of ten. she would constantly hear her kids making noises upstairs. "put the soccer ball away, don't play that indoors" she'd tell them; even into the middle of the night she scream at them to stop running around. her kids always denied that they were running or playing sports inside the house. nevertheless she never failed to hear someone running around. she couldn't help but think that her children were not telling her the truth.

some years later, plumbing work had to be done in the basement and the plumbers ripped apart the floor. there was no tell-tale heart, but they did find a tiny baby's shoe. my teacher recalled that she had seen a similar shoe in the attic. she put them together: undoubtedly the one from the attic was the right foot, and the one in the basement the left of the same pair of shoes. the sound of footsteps stopped.

scary story #2
or rather, potentially spooky story, along the same theme of hidden objects. Smiley because a friend of mine moved into a house in toronto, where there existed a large, heavy concrete and metal safe - probably dating from the 1800s. it was far too heavy for the movers to move out of the house, too heavy to even move out downstairs. her father had this manic idea that as a piece of antique, something inside must be immensely worthwhile. he tried to crack the code, but in vain. so he took to drilling through the vault. he acquired some sort of drill and began to chip away at the safe. the safe was (probably part of a bank) and compartmentalized into little drawers. he filed away at it until midnight and beyond, and made it through 5 or 6 rows of drawers. they were ALL empty. it was very disappointing.

more importantly, he had made a *huge* mess on the floor. the safe, minus its drawer-entrappings, was still too heavy to move downstairs. what could they do with a half-broken vault? they built a wall around it, hiding the box inside a wall.

you can only imagine what someone tearing down the wall in the next home-renovation project might think: mysterious antique box, sealed inside a wall... what lies inside? Wink they've since sold the house, with the secret untold.

scary story #3
i once worked at a community centre with a woman named susan. she's a native american, but has fair skin and hair, much to the joy of her mother who was happy her daughter could pass herself off as white. but though susan didn't look aboriginal, she certainly inherited some traits from her nature-attuned ancestors: for one thing, she could divine water. divining is one of the techniques that marvel me: how only certain people, holding a forked twig, can tell where water is to be found in the ground suitable for making a well, according to whether the twig is magically drawn towards the ground or not. she also had another spiritual connection: very soon after her marriage she moved into a house with dark oak cabinets. it was an old house; and she couldn't help but see faces on the cabinetry. everyone else merely saw the grain of the wood. it was only sometime later that she discovered the house had been used for the underground railway smuggling black slaves out of the u.s. to freedom in canada; and somehow susan knew that the faces she had seen were... you guessed it... faces of the slaves.

*flesh creeps.*