Happy Halloween! Here Are Some Spooky Stories From Some Cool Bands

It's Halloween, folks! The best possible time of year, nay, the officially sanctioned time of year for sharing spooky stories about the supernatural. With that in mind, we thought it'd make for a good time if we reached out to some bands and got some ghost stories off them. The results are below, so get yourself comfortable, have a read and just promise you won't send us the electricity bill after you have to sleep with the lights on for for a month. Enjoy!

Laurent Barnard from Gold Key had a visitor in his room:

My parents' cottage is about 130 years old. It's creaky, has uneven windows, all the things you'd expect from an old house. I must've been about 6 or 7 years old. I remember climbing into my mum and dad's bed one morning because it was so much bigger than my own and infinitely more cosy. While getting lost in the giant duvet I caught a glimpse of a man in the corner of the room. He had big wild hair and his eyes were as wide open as anything you could imagine. His skin was the colour of burnt ash. We made eye contact and I immediately buried my head in the pillows. It took me a while to get the courage to run out from under the covers to my parents who were downstairs having breakfast. I told them about what happened and even drew a picture of the man in my sketchbook. For years after the drawing served as a reminder to never go back in that room. Even when I go back to the house now I still have to have all the lights on at night.

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Wednesday 13 was threatened by a ghost:

When I was eleven my family moved into the house my parents still live in, and not long after moving in we had a garage sale. Over the course of this, four or five different people from the neighbourhood came up to us and said something along the lines of ‘you know this place is supposed to be haunted, right?’ My parents didn’t believe in any of that, while being a little freaky kid I thought it was cool, until two weeks later the freakiest thing happened. On Saturday nights I always used to sleep on the couch downstairs so I could stay up and watch Headbangers Ball until around 3am. As usual, after the show finishes I switch off the TV and light, I lie down - and I feel a knife at my throat. It’s completely dark and I hear this voice whisper in my ear ‘Do you want to see my face? Do you want to see my face, motherfucker?’ I can’t even breathe, I was paralysed, and all I can do is whisper ‘no’. I feel the pressure leave my neck, I sit straight up, the light goes on and there’s no one there. I didn’t sleep at all that night, and believe me, I have a lot of creepy dreams and nightmares and night terrors but this was not that, this was something else completely, and to this day I can’t explain it. But, nothing else like that has ever happened in that house, I feel like maybe that was the test or something, and once that was over I was left alone.

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Fia Kempe from The Great Discord, had a problem with a piece of jewellery:

So, something really weird happened to me on one of our tours. After one of our shows we met up with some fans and one of them gave me a present. To my big surprise and great pleasure it was a beautiful pendant and I started wearing it immediately. Later that night I was trying to get some sleep in the nightliner and I felt like I couldn’t fall asleep.

I have always had trouble sleeping, and I have always had a lot of nightmares, but this was more a state of mind where you know you’re not awake, but you're not sleeping either. I heard a strange voice started talking to me, and this is actually something that isn’t that strange when your in a nightliner full of people. But this was different, I could not figure out what it said, and I did not recognize the voice at all, and what was most scary, I felt like I couldn’t wake up, like my body was trapped. Suddenly it felt like the voice screamed in my ears and I sat straight up in the bunk and hit my head against the ceiling. I poked my head out through the curtains, ready to give the guys a scolding, only to find that all the other seven beds were empty, there was no one else there.

This strange voice continued to speak to me the following nights and I talked to the guys in the band about it and everyone just kept saying that it must be the crew talking downstairs in the bus or some other explanation, but I just knew that was not it. The voice was so clear and it really started to scare me. The sleepless nights was starting to get to me and I really was wondering what the hell was going on. I have never been interested or believed in witchcraft or occult things or whatever, but I did somehow feel like this began to become really unpleasant and that it was something else happening than me just being tired.

So, I called one of my good friends up, who is a medium. I have never let her give me any readings and she knows it does not interest me, but I explained to her what had happened and she asked me a lot of questions about what I had been doing during the tour, and what different kinds of people I met. Once I mentioned the pendant she asked me to describe it and I did. I won’t do that here though, since I do not want this to happen to anyone else. She told me to take it off immediately and get rid of it, which I did. After that I slept for almost fifteen hours straight.

I have never asked her more about what she thought was happening to me, and I won’t do it either. All I know is that something that I can’t explain happened once I wore that pendant. I'm not easily scared but that pendant really scared the shit out of me.

Kaya Tarsus, vocalist in Blood Youth, saw a man in the middle of the road:

This is a story from when I was very young. I was in a car with my mum, asleep in the back seat. We were driving along a country road near Leeds, when she suddenly came to a stop because a man in a raincoat walked into the middle of the road. She swerved out of the way and managed to stop the car when he appeared. When she got out the car, the road was empty and he was gone. She was so freaked out by it she went to a psychic, who told her that she had heard about this ghostly raincoat man before, apparently, people had the seen the same ghostly figure on that road many times!

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Fynn Claus Grabke of The Picturebooks had someone take back what was theirs:

So we were on tour and we're in Norway at that time to do the Scandinavian part of a long ass tour all around Europe and the U.K. I was really stressed out at that point - we had been on the road for 3 years straight at that point, non stop! For some reason I was getting these really weird bouts of sleep paralysis. I would fall asleep and then wake up, but my body was completely paralysed. I was completely aware of what is going on around me and I could hear everything around me but I couldn't open my eyes, move my arms or anything like that. 

I was so shocked when that first happened. It was in the car on our way to Oslo after a rough night with very little sleep. It would last for a minute until I finally could move again. I was trying not to pay too much attention to it and told the guys what just happened and we laughed about it. We stopped at a little white chapel that we saw from the highway on a beautiful hill and decided to stop there to get some rest and maybe shoot some photos. When we arrived there it was very beautiful, and we took some cool photos. All of the sudden, I found this very beautiful necklace in the grass with cool looking Viking style stuff on it. I decided to take it with me because there was no other house or people around us. "Finders keepers". Off to the club, load out, soundcheck, interviews, show, merch sale, load in back into the bus... And all that jazz. 

After a fantastic night, we went to the hotel. I was telling the guys that I really need some rest and decided to book a single room for myself which I occasionally do when I feel like it. I clearly remember putting the necklace next to my bed on a little table after taking a closer look at it before I fell asleep. I don't know how long I was sleeping for, but I woke up because I could hear someone opening my hotel room’s door. I didn't know if that was real or the sounds from another room and wanted to turn on the light, but I was paralysed again! Fuck! I was fully aware of what is going on around me now but I couldn't move or do anything about it! I could hear steps coming closer to the bed, I could hear someone breathing until it sounded like it was right in front of me. I was scared to death, I couldn't fucking move anything, I just wanted scream or run. All of the sudden I hear this person grab the necklace from the table. I could hear it slide over the wooden table, and I could hear steps walking out of the room again! I don't know how but at some point I just fell asleep again I guess. The next morning I woke up and wanted to see if the necklace is still there or did I just dream all of this?! I was so confused! It was freaking gone!

Schuylar from He Is Legend met something in a barn:

When I was a young boy I was labeled as "troubled". I know now that this meaning has probably changed some 15 years later, however back then families would often look towards the church to instill some sort of morality in children such as myself. I spent many years smoking cigarettes behind Christian schools and getting my first tastes of the female form in empty baptism pools and youth group overnight lock-ins or darkened wilderness hayrides. Oh, what long lost memories are jumping forth as I type this.

One of the last trips that I remember was when we were sent out to do some repairs on a 200 year old Virginia farmhouse. On the last night of our stay, which had mainly consisted of doing chores around the grounds, all of the kids gathered in the hay loft of the old barn that was tucked away behind the farmhouse. You had to climb a rickety ladder beside the stables to get up to the loft. Everyone gathered around on bails of hay, telling ghost stories and trying to hold the hands of the girl or guy you had made nice with over the course of the trip.

I was a shy kid really - I hadn't been to the toilet the entire trip for fear of getting made fun of. At this point in the trip I was at the point of having a life crippling accident, so I rushed down the ladder and out into the darkness around the side of the barn. I dropped my pants to my ankles and squatted down to relieve myself when to my left I noticed the silhouette of one of the youth group kids. It was Hunter, I could tell by his size, and I could make out the overalls he always wore. Hunter was a big kid and I assumed all of the adults were still in the farm house, so it had to be Hunter. He was the only one of us that could pass for a full grown man. But with all of these thoughts plaguing my tiny mind, and my vanity immediately grasping at an excuse as to what I was doing, I asked Hunter, "Are you going to help me scare them? find a rock and let's throw some up on the roof".

Hunter said nothing. Just stood quite, still like a statue. I pulled my pants back up without standing. I hoped he hadn't noticed and I was glad I hadn't done any business yet. I asked again... "Hunter is that you?" My eyes had yet to adjust to the darkness and I could still only see the outline of the figure, which now seemed larger, more menacing, hunched over me, quietly looming. Just as I realized i was dealing with a stranger, possibly worse, I heard a scream from inside the barn, followed by a thud. My neighbor who was also on the trip with me had fallen off of the ladder and landed inches from an upturned pitchfork. A girl upstairs was screaming bloody murder. She claimed she saw someone up in the rafters. Other girls agreed. Some boys were crying. I was in shock.

Everyone on the trip was spooked. I could tell the adults had even given it some thought and passed it off to overactive imaginations. i remember running onto the porch with everyone else and noticing Hunter had beaten us to the house... and he wasn't wearing his overalls. I never brought up what I had seen. Too many other kids had seen something otherworldly in the barn. I kept my experience to myself. I'm just glad we didn't have to spend another night there.

Aksel Holmgren also of The Great Discord, and a former Nameless Ghoul, had an encounter near a mine shaft:

The event took place roughly five years ago in and around the same place we usually record our albums, which is in a cabin way out in the old and dense swedish woods. It's usually a very peaceful place, with nothing around but trees, some critters and a lake. A sense of deep peace usually sets in when you get out of your car, get inside and start warming the place up by kindling a fire in the stoves.

There is also another, more ambivalent, feeling about those woods. I guess it’s the same feeling you get when entering a very old church or a graveyard, a foreboding feeling of knowing that while this place usually is a sanctuary for peace, rest and reflection, it also contains a lot of fears and tragedy. And sometimes, even a sense of restlessness or danger.

The incident I’m referring to in particular here took place during a longer walk I took with my mother. Another thing you need to know about this story for context is that these woods are littered with very old mining shafts. Hundreds of years of mining took place here under horrid conditions by today’s standards, with cave-ins being rampant. People lived and died in these mines, searching for iron ore mostly, and entire communities lived and died around them.

During this walk, we stumbled upon one of these mines, one of the bigger ones. Literally a big, jagged hole in the ground, filled up with deep, dark water. These mines stretched roughly a hundred metres down, slightly angular, into the earth. This mine, being a bigger one, had an information sign next to it, and it read that a catastrophe which happened during the 16th century forced the miners to close it down. Roughly 50 people had died during the cave in.

As we read this we both felt a small tremble, seemingly originating from the ground, and a small ripple swiftly moved across the water. A high pitched note started to ring in my left ear, and I felt suddenly out of breath. My heart which was still a second before started picking up speed. I hesitantly moved towards the edge of the black, bottomless water and peered straight into it. I could have sworn that something moved down there, a pale shape, maybe three meters down. I gasped and just told my mom that we should go. The trembling happened again and the sharp note in my left ear had reached peak level. As soon as we hurriedly walked roughly fifty meters away from this horrible body of water, the ringing dissipated and I felt a little more at ease.

It might have been a fish, and it might just be because I’m a drummer and stress causes my tinnitus to act up, but this really rattled me. It left me thinking about the last terrible moments the people had during the final cave in, trapping all those people deep underground, never to be seen again.

Needless to say I’m not in a hurry to go caving after this.