From: michaelg@Xenon.Stanford.EDU (Michael Greenwald)
Subject: Re: College Ghosts
Organization: CS Department, Stanford University, California, USA
Date:  6 Sep 92 06:11:29 GMT

In article <1992Aug30.212019.5081@news.columbia.edu> egl1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Elizabeth G. Levy) writes:
>In article <BttEFy.7t2@acsu.buffalo.edu> v095qhyg@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (CONSTANTINOS I. ORFANOS) writes:
>>
>>           The second report has to do with a kid who had committed 
>>    suicide by jumping out of a 10th floor dorm window.  About 8 years
>>    after that unfortunate event, the residents of that same room heard
>>    a knocking on their window around 11 pm.  Believing it had to be a prank
>>    since they live so high up in the dorms, they lift the curtains and
>>    found the same kid, who committed suicided 8 years before, floating
>>    in the air outside the window.  He supposedly decided that suicide
>>    was not the solution.
>
>I HATE stories like this.  I usually worry for a few minutes about
>looking out the window, thinking I'll see someone (probably very pale
>and dead) looking in.  Just one of my idiosyncracies.
>

Interesting.  This takes me back twenty, twenty-five years, to when I
was a kid.  My brother and a friend and I used to always love to set
up situations where people would be >fooled< into thinking they had
seen a ghost.  We were pretty young (i.e. these pranks were popular
from ages 6-14).

Our standard mode would be to establish a mood by telling ghost
stories, or supposedly "true" stories, all leading to the payoff with
whatever props we had set up in advance. 

People are pretty credulous; get them in a creepy enough mood, and
they can frighten themselves out of their wits.

Typical tricks would be to construct "dead bodies" by filling clothes
with towels and blankets, and telling a story about some corpse
supposedly haunting the place.  (Big payoff on this one would be to
reveal the prank, demonstrating the towels or blankets to the
(usually) frightened kid and convince him to help us pull it off on
some other victim.  (We'd usually add that the stories we told
>>were<< true, but >this< time it was just a prank).  Meanwhile one of
us would sneak off and get dressed in the dummy's clothes, and
position themselves in the same position that the "dead body" was in.
When the new crew would come in, and the dummy started to slowly get
up and move towards them, the co-conspirators were >really<
spooked...) 

We weren't doing this to be mean --- we loved to frighten ourselves,
and figured that others got the same kick out of it.  We're lucky we
never tried it on anyone with a weak heart.  (Actually, the "victims"
were usually the same people who, eventually, knew to expect it from
us, so I suspect they got the same kick we did.)  At age seven we
managed to spook >ourselves< (the three of us) so badly, that when we
re-entered our own home, and my brother (posted outside as a lookout)
saw the curtains blow in the breeze, and yelled, my friend ran out of
the house without opening the front storm door.  Glass.  Stitches.
Embarassment (because we had done it to ourselves).

Anyway, the reason this story reminded me of my youth is the following
trick we used >without< any props.  It needs to be at night.  You need
to be in a room with curtains or shades over all the windows.  Also,
you don't want street lights right outside the window.  Set up a story
that involves some ghost or corpse wanting to get in.  Wait for the
mood to get creepy.  If you live next to a tree, or it's a windy
night, then you can just wait for this to occur naturally, otherwise
make a noise in the room that sounds like it >might< be coming from
the window.  Be really spooked, letting the people not in on the trick
be the one to open the shades.  Slow them down so they have time to
think about what they >might< see.  If the lights in the room are
bright enough (you can turn them up as people go to the window
"because I'm really scared"), and it's dark enough outside, people are
generally pretty scared when they see their own reflection out there,
and don't usually stick around long enough to figure out that it's
their own reflection.  Sometimes, even if you argue with them and say
"That's just your own reflection", and show them what they saw,
they'll continue to insist: "You don't know.  What I saw >then<, was
>different<!".

(By the way, I've never seen a ghost, although as a kid we constantly
tried to find one, or to just spook ourselves.  The ambience was
right, (my parents bought a house that had been used as a basement
speakeasy during Prohibition (the basement windows were still painted
over so that the lights wouldn't shine out at night, there was a
closet in the basement locked for several years (it turns out we had
agreed to store some stuff by the previous owners)), the first year we
lived there a women commited suicide by jumping off the apartment
building behind my house, my friend's house (across the street) had
"secret passages" (narrow (even for kids) staircases leading between
closets in two different rooms on different floors; better yet -- all
but one had been sealed up when he moved in! (this actually had a
prosaic explanation, which we didn't figure out until years later))
there was a "haunted house" in the neighborhood (deserted for ten
years in a densely populated, popular residential neighborhood in
Brooklyn), camp in the woods, regular trips to a hotel in the Catskill
Mountains that neighbored a really spooky place --- a deserted
bungalow colony that was now owned by a hunting lodge.  The colony was
left exactly as it had been when it closed, ten-fifteen years before
that, with faded newspapers and posters for taxi-service to New York
City.  The only notice that it had changed hands was that there were
prominent "No Trespassing" signs posted all over, and lots of bullet
shells.  It was great: howling winds, and snow, cracked glass and
boarded up windows, trees growing in the paths, sagging porches,
overgrown handball courts in the middle of the woods.  Prime spooky
sites (given the description above, you can imagine we used it as the
site of many pranks....)  (Un?)  fortunately, although many of our
companions will swear they'd seen ghosts, I've never personally
witnessed one that wasn't somehow directly or indirectly caused by
some trick of my own devising.  That doesn't mean I can't get a good
fright; just that none of the frights (so far?) have been from truly
supernatural causes.

I don't believe in ghosts, but I >do< believe in telling and listening
to ghost stories.  (I disagree with the posters who think that
debunking various stories "ruins" them --- I'm pretty sure you can
continue to be scared by stories/events even after you have a
"reasonable" explanation.  People (myself included, or maybe even
"myself especially") have a great capacity to frighten themselves.)

I'm not sure whether or not I'm jealous of the people in this group
who have had >truly< inexplicable, scary, experiences.

Anyway, I'm enjoying reading this group, even though I don't have time
to do more than read three or four postings every couple of days.
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-stories