Thread by @Delafina777

Okay, so I know that ghosts are probably just low-frequency sounds messing with our brains (gizmodo.com/some-ghosts-ma…) but honestly the stories I find most unsettling are the ones where no one's terrified--it's just WEIRD.

Like the time I maybe saw a ghost. I grew up in a lovely house that my parents bought from the old woman who'd lived there for like the last 70 years. Her father had been the architect that designed the house, and she didn't really want to move out, but she needed more care.

She accepted my parents' offer, even though it was lower than some of the others, because she wanted a family to have the house and liked us. So we got the place, and moved in.

It was a very traditional brick Colonial, very New-England-looking, but she'd gotten a bit eccentric in her later years and gone to New Orleans and been impressed with bright colors and made some decorating decisions that were... not in keeping with the architectural style.

She'd torn out all the landscaping in the front yard, put up a wrought-iron fence and painted it baby pink, painted the dining room electric blue, etc. So my parents immediately take down the fence, paint the shutters, plant some landscaping, etc.

The former owner, who we'll call Edna, has this giant white Cadillac she drives. And every day, around noon, she drives by the house and just STOPS, in the middle of the street, to stare at what my parents are doing to the house.

And it becomes this regular thing in my life, like clockwork (it was summer, so I was home from school). Every day, like a clock chiming, there's Edna in her car, sometimes with other cars behind her honking, glaring through her window.

It becomes the subject of a lot of sort of resigned joking in our family. But then one day it just... stops. For several weeks, no Edna at noon.

And we figure, oh, maybe she finally has made peace with the idea that someone else owns Her House, and that things change, and all that. We go on about our lives.

So one day, around noon, I'm in the dining room and my mom's in the kitchen making lunch and I look out the window and--there it is, the old white Cadillac, stopped in the middle of the street in front of our house.

By some trick of the light, there's a ton of glare on the windows so I can't see inside.

So I turn to the kitchen and am like, "Hey Mom, Edna's back!"

My mom comes out of the kitchen, drying her hands with a dishtowel, and shakes her head. She's like, "No, sweetie, that's not possible."

I turn to point out the window, but the car is gone. My mom tells me she was just talking to the neighbors that morning and learned that Edna had passed away the day before.

So, I 95% don't believe in ghosts. But before I say more about that, I want to just take this moment to point out that if it WAS a ghost, Edna wasted exactly zero time getting back to her regular routine as soon as she was dead. She was an iron-willed old lady.

But more to the point:

This is an utterly mundane ghost story. There was nothing dramatic about the appearance, I wasn't scared at the time, I wasn't EXPECTING to see her--as far as suggestibility, there wasn't much suggestion.

And look, I suppose it's possible that someone ELSE in a giant white Cadillac decided to just STOP in the middle of the street and stare at our house one day at noon, but it seems pretty improbable.

But I've heard a lot of stories like this from other people, too--things that weren't frightening, that they read as normal until they found out that what happened wasn't normal. And those are way more convincing to me than the ones where the person has a sense of dread.

It's like, there's no spooky environment here, no low frequency sound causing fear and possible hallucinations, no grief and longing for a sign that some bit of a loved one persists.

And as an adult that doesn't believe in supernatural manifestations and is agnostic-leaning-toward-no on whether there's any sort of afterlife, I find the mundane, not-emotionally-charged ghost stories way more unsettling than the scary ones.