67 True scary stories to tell in the dark

27.A love story

"When my grandmother's second husband was in his death throes, he had a habit of knocking on the bedroom wall to get her attention, since he didn't have the strength to shout. This went on for a long time, because even though he was deathly ill he kept holding on. I was about seven years old at the time, and living with them.

Not long after he died, my grandmother told me that she was sitting at the dining room table alone one morning as they used to together, quietly drinking her coffee, when suddenly she heard the knocking on the wall again. She heard it clear as day. It wasn't me, because I was in their bedroom sleeping in her bed, and she could see me sleeping at that (it was a small house). She claims she heard it on more than one occasion.

As the years went by, other strange things happened. I began to have dreams of a young man in a navy uniform I'd never met before, watching us sleep in the house, or standing over me in my bedroom. I sometimes felt an eerie presence in the house, and at one point heard a disembodied voice call me by name in the middle of the day. My grandmother almost got into a car accident once, and nearly missed hitting a semi when all at once she swore to God she could smell his cologne like he was in the car. She also had odd dreams of her husband coming back to the house, telling her he hadn't gone anywhere and he wasn't dead.

Finally, a bird began to visit the house some days. I saw it and heard it myself. The bird would fly to her bedroom window, and tap on the window with its beak. It did this many times, and we learned to recognize it. That was the last sign before the odd occurrences began to taper off. My grandmother died a couple of years ago, and afterwards for the first time ever, I felt like the presence in the house had left us." — CaptainCruiser