A story I posted several years ago to the old Something Awful forums:
The Basement
A little background : I grew up in a Southern Baptist church in Tennessee. As you may or may not know, it used to be common for a preacher to be at a church from his 20s until the day he dies without switching churches, leaving etc. This was the case with every church in town, except ours. From the time I was 7 until I was 18, we had 5 different pastors, which is VERY VERY unusual in the Southern Baptist Association. And to top it off, quite a few of them left under mysterious circumstances. One pastor’s wife became mentally ill, and she accused mutliple men(including deacons in their 80s, 90s) in the church of raping her, and another pastor’s wife(who was working as the church secretary) more than once claimed she was pushed down some stairs in the church, resulting in multiple broken bones, dislocated hip, etc., even though she was working in the church alone at night. These were just two of the multitude of stories floating around the church. The part that always spooked me was that my Dad would become cross with me when I asked him about this stuff. Mom on the other hand would get one of those “oh well” smiles on her face and quickly change the conversation.
Anyways, the church itself was (is) a fairly old building, built in 1924. It is a very large church, with two additional wings built on to accommodate the community. I was very active in the church growing up and spent a lot of time there. I had seen very odd things going on like lights turning off and on, although I accredited that to it being an old building with poor wiring, as well as a general feeling of creepiness anytime the church wasn’t inhabited by multiple worshippers. When I reached “youth group” age, we used to take several trips a year, to places like Six Flags, Mrytle Beach, etc. To make sure everyone would be on time, typically all of the teenagers would sleep over at the church in the “youth room”, and leave the next morning.
When I was 16, about 40 of us were staying in the youth room one night before a missions trip, and decided to play hide and seek in the church. Now, considering the church is a 30,000 square foot plus building, this was gonna be one heck of a game. I was a little wary of walking around in the church at night, as I had done so in the past on previous overnighters, and had heard and felt things I couldn’t explain. Strange noises, almost like a piano playing, but you had to strain to hear it, and that general feeling that “something isn’t right”, when I was in certain parts of the church. However, we pressed on, and my friend Andy and I were chosen as the seekers in the game.
We stayed in the youth room about 10 minutes whilst everyone went and hid. When the time was up, Andy and I ventured downstairs to the main level of the church and started searching the church chapel, in between the pews, in the balcony, etc. to no avail for the hiders. We checked the offices that weren’t locked, Sunday School rooms, bathrooms(both M and F), but no one was to be found. We took a quick peek outside to make sure no one was playing a trick on us, but the outside was as still and calm as inside the church. Finally, we worked up the courage to go downstairs into the basement to find the hiders. I say “worked up the courage”, because the basement was truly a scary place. Due to either some supernatural presence, or perhaps just poor building design, the basement was overbearingly humid. You literally could sweat just standing around, even if it wasn’t hot. Now, the basement had a LONG hall that ran the length of it, and the hall was flanked on either side by classrooms, and a large “fellowship hall”(dining area) and kitchen area. The hall wasn’t lit, save the emergency exit light on each end, and the dim emergency lights common in big buildings.
Andy was on one end of the hall, and I the other. We decided to start walking down the hall, checking each classroom, as surely this had to be where the hiders were. As I said “Ready Andy?”, we heard footsteps. The footsteps I presumed were hiders trying to move around and find better hiding spots from us, but I had the distinct impression the footsteps were in the hall. The sounds were loud and clear, not muffled at all by a door or walls. Andy asked “Do you hear that”, and I answered “Yes”, rather sheepishly. The footsteps were now coming towards me, getting louder, and moving faster. Fight or flight should have took hold of me, but I froze in place. About 5 feet or so(it seemed) in front of me, the steps stopped when Andy yelled out “What the hell’s going on” I was able to answer back “ I don’t know”, when suddenly they started again, this time running away from me at a very fast pace towards Andy. Right as I was getting ready to say “Lets go back”, Andy’s body hit the wall rather violently. I ran down to see if he was OK, and he said, “Who the hell just pushed me?” I told that I had seen nobody, just heard the footsteps. When I said that, a look of fright came over his face that I can’t describe, nor have I ever seen again on a human face. We both had the same thought, and bolted upstairs back to youth room. When we got there, we found all 40 of the others, waiting on us, asking where we had been. Andy was too ruffled to talk, so I asked “Who was hiding in the basement?”. Everyone, almost simultaneously answered that the basement was far too scary, and they wouldn’t hide down there alone. 12 years later (more like 30 now, as time has passed since my first posting of this story), Andy won’t mention this occurrence to this day.
It’s Just a Grumpy Old Building
Large churches in the south have these sort of banquet halls they call the fellowship hall. My mom was the social coordinator for our church growing up, so she would spend a lot of time at the church on Friday and Saturday night setting up for events - Weddings, Baby showers, luncheons, what have you for the next day. On a few given nights, I was tasked with helping her setup. Now, as I described above this particular church had a basement that was not to be trifled with. Kids from 5-15 knew about the basement, and scary stories circulated about what might live down there, why it was always so sweltering hot, etc. One creepy side note to this: Adults at the church refused to talk about the basement, even to counter argue against the kids. To this day if I bring it up, my parents clam up and change the subject.
Of course as fate would have it, the fellowship hall was smack dab in the middle of the spooky basement. So, I found myself one late Friday night as a young teen helping my mom setup for a Saturday wedding in hell’s basement. What happened that night was both scary and bizarre, including my mom’s reactions to it. We were setting up tables and chairs, place settings, centerpieces etc., coming and going from one room to the next. When we would leave the main hall to go to the kitchen, or out to the car to get somethings, I would occasionally hear sounds from the banquet hall, and would come back to find tables and chairs moved, forks/knives/spoons in switched positions and table centerpieces moved from one table to the other.
After the third or fourth time I noticed this, I asked my mom what the hell was going on, assuming she was paying no attention to it. Her response to me, which chills me to this day:
“This is just a grumpy old building”
The Stairs
If you read above, you know that the church I grew up in has a basement that is creepy. Maybe creepy isn’t the right word, but how do you describe the sort of place that you could use in a spooky film in without having to change a thing? The kind of place I still dream about regularly, having not stepped foot into it in over 15 years?
This is a quick story about the stairwell leading to the basement. As I said the basement had a long hallway, and was flanked by classrooms, and had stairwells at each of the ends of the hallway. Growing up, I had this habit, like I have found so many kids do of counting random things - cars you pass by on the way to the grocery store, number of cracks on a sidewalk, etc. Whether in church, school, public, etc. I always counted stairs when I climbed them.
One Saturday evening (I was around 9 or 10), as I was playing in the church by myself waiting on mom(the event coordinator from story #2 above). I was walking up and down the stairs to the basement to pass the time, counting the stairs as I went. Both stairwells had 30 steps exactly, having two flights a piece of fifteen. Several times up and down I counted thirty, until once on the way down I counted 37. . .wait what?? Confused, I walked back up the stairs from the basment and counted 41. More than a little confused (and already knowing the stories about the basement) I decided to try one more time. This time down there were 30 steps exactly(thank God) and 47 on the way back up. WHAT THE F***
I don’t know if the basement was trying to make it where I couldn’t leave by adding stairs, and I don’t want to know. I do know that this happened on more than one occasion to me, and the variance in number of stairs was always too great to think I may have just miscounted, or counted the last step once but not every time. I clearly remember having conversations with other youth at the church I started by saying “Have you ever noticed anything odd about the stairs?” More than once they answered(without hearing my story) that they believed the stairwell would add steps randomly on the way up and down.
Antique Mirror
Let me start off this last story with a little background on my fear of mirrors. On occasion my parents would go out of town without me, and I would stay over at my grandparent’s house. I was a rowdy, head strong kid growing up, and didn’t like to sleep at night. I was always getting out of bed, messing around the house. When I was around 7, my grandmother told me one night at dinner that if you look into a mirror in the house after midnight, you will see the devil (obviously an old ploy to keep kids in bed). Sounds silly, right? But imagine being 7-8 years old, and someone regularly getting out of bed in the night to either mess around or take a whizz. Thats shit scared the LIFE out of me. To this day, I still hate mirrors of any sort, and flatly refuse to look in them at night.
At the aforementioned church, there was a very old, large piece of antique furniture with a mirror on it that resided in the “vestibule” of the church. Here, the church would put flyers, programs, brochures, etc. for people to grab on the way into the sanctuary. The piece itself was a beautiful, hand carved piece of wooden art, the mirror was a different story. It was large, I’d say 3-4 four feet across, and very, very old. I dont know if it was handmade, or if thats even possible, but it had those peculiar spots and blurry places on it that you see on old ones. From an early age, the old piece of furniture gave the creeps, and once I developed a sense of dread relating to mirrors, it might as well have been a damn casket I had to walk by every Sunday.
I never personally had a creepy experience with the mirror, but a few years back several friends of mine that i had grown up with in church got together for a dinner party. After the normal chit chat, talk turned to the church, and the oddness surrounding it. After a few minutes I mentioned the mirror. Surprisingly, every single person remembered the exact piece of furniture in eery detail, even though the church was full of old stuff like that. I asked anyone if they ever got the creeps, and two of my friends said that the mirror wouldn’t always reflect, would show people who weren’t there, etc.
The creepiest story came from John. John is 36, a stand up guy and is a math teacher in the local school system. He finally worked up the courage to talk about the church, and the mirror after a while. “I saw something once”, he started. “You know the front doors of the church, directly across from that old mirror?”. “I looked into the mirror one time and they weren’t there. Where there should have been doors, there was just a wall. . .no exit.” That particular story gives me shivers to this day. If you were trying to impress people with a made up story, you’d say, “yeah I saw Satan buttfucking a pig” or something similar. Suzanne, another member of our dinner party who still attends church there mentioned the furniture still stands, and still gives her and her kids the creeps.