So You Think You're Brave Ey?

Freshman year of college, I went on a camping trip with about thirty other students. Inevitably, one evening found the bunch of us circled around a campfire, trading ghost stories. Apparently, freshman year in college is too old to tell urban legends, so the stories were all ghostly "reports," similar to the creepiest stories on this website. Out of the dozens told, here are two that were so frightening, two years later I still remember every detail:

The first is a possession story that started when a bunch of boys decided to drive past a reportedly haunted house, to see if they could see any ghostly phenomena. As they slowly drove by, the boys were all consumed with fear and ducked down in the car to hide from the house. All except for one boy, "Jordan." Jordan looked straight into the highest window and saw a green, disembodied head on greenish fire, staring Jason in the eye. In the days that followed, Jason started behaving bizarrely.

He would say insulting, mean things to people, in a voice that sounded just off-pitch from his own. A moment later, when the insulted party would demand an explanation, Jordan couldn't remember having said the words he was accused of saying. Another incident occurred in the weight room at school: out of the blue, Jordan made an uncharacteristically arrogant claim that he could to bench press a certain weight, far heavier than was realistically possible for him to lift. Boys being boys, the rest held Jordan to his boast, and Jordan was able to lift the exact weight he claimed, but not a pound over or under. A few minutes later, Jordan tried to lift the same amount again, and couldn't.

Unfortunately, this is the end of the story. The narrator stopped associating with Jordan, and never heard what ultimately happened to him.

The second story is about two boys at Boy Scout camp who decided to play with a Ouija board. They managed to contact a spirit called Barbara, but the boys broke one of the cardinal rules of Ouija play: they didn't respect Barbara. For several nights, the two boys sat in their dorm and harassed Barbara with childish, insulting, and lewd questions. Barbara repeatedly told them to leave her alone, but they didn't. On the third night, Barbara had had enough. The dorm had two doors, on opposite sides of the room; later, the boys described the incident as a tornado flying through.

One door flew open and the room was filled with wind, sound, and an impossibly bright, blinding light. The boys huddled on the floor in duck-and-cover style, and could only hear the tremendous noise and sense the overpowering energy in the room. The opposite door flew open, and Barbara left as quickly as she had entered.

Slowly, the boys took in the wake of Barbara's wrath: every single object in the room had been picked up and thrown. Furniture was knocked over, books and toiletries on the desks were across the room, even the footlockers under their beds had been pulled out, emptied, and tossed aside. And on the forearms of the boy who had most aggressively harassed Barbara, was *carved* into the skin: "BARBARA" on one and "BYE" on the other (as in, "good-bye," "leave me alone").