Ever spook yourself at the barn?

[hijumpin1]

Whoa, it is like the Blair Barn Project!

[JLS]

The barn I boarded at had a gate in the middle of a half mile driveway. Far enough from the house and roads that there is NO light, unless it's a full moon. The last person who leaves has to lock up behind them. I hated being the last person out, but usually was. I always had the creepy crawlies walking from the car to the gate, and once a bobcat screamed and I about had a heart attack.

[In the Air]

Great, now I have to try to go to sleep...

[two sticks]

I definetly fall into the totally afraid of the dark category and have been known to do the sprint from the barn to the car and sprint from the car to the house in fine style.

I was camping with a bunch of friends once and had to walk back from the guys tent to the girls tent (i think we were maybe 15?) late late at night in the middle of nowhere in the pitch black. I asked my friend Justin if he would walk me back, because i was afraid of the dark. He said,
"Its not the dark you should be afraid of. It's what is waiting to get you that you can't see that you should be afraid of."
Gee, Thanks.
Every time i freak myself out this seems to pop into my head.

My best friend and I were trail riding and exploring, and we found a house in the middle of a bunch of orange orchards. It is in a little square of totally overgrown, unkempt, dead orchard, right in the middle of very nice well maintained orchards. It has a cement driveway that leads to nowhere. We got there and of course, started poking around. We could not get the horses to go near the house, they were FREAKED out. We went inside and it was sooooo bizarre.... there was an upstairs but the stairwell is filled in with cement. The house is full of stuff, photos and things, but really old. It looks like someone just dissapeared one day. Walking in the house made our skin crawl. We lasted about 3 minutes before we BOLTED out of there. The house is still there, but no one has any idea about it's history. (we tried to find out). Totally creepy. I have told friends about it, and they tried to get me to take them there last haloween. I was like, oh H-E-double hockey sticks No.

[Dazednconfused]

Originally posted by Aggie4Bar:
vtdobes - Have you ever seen The Ring? That's the movie I think about when I'm washing shampoo out of my hair. Very disturbing film. I suppose it could also make some people uneasy about haylofts.

Annetta - You live next to come really creepy people.

I trashed that video right after the horse went under the boat - and it wasn't even that scary, it was stupid and then gory and horrible with the horse in the boat rudders

[Hrsnaround]

These posts have been great!!! So glad that I am reading them in the daylight.

I'm not a good writer, but will try to add my story. The last barn that was with (was there for about six years or so) was on a 150+ year old farm. It is on the border of Maryland and Pennsylvania (Mason-Dixon line is right down the street). Supposedly, the farm was used as a stop on the Underground Railroad. And actually, the folks from the History Channel's "Haunted History" program came out and interviewed my trainer's family, and the farm in mentioned in a book about Chester County ghosts.

The trainer and her husband lived at the farm. Very pretty, older, main house, old (sometimes creepy) bank barn, had originally been used for cows, converted to a horse barn. The trainer's family would hear the stairs and floorboards in the house creaking under someone's footsteps - no one was there. There was a great story of a plate from a shelf in the kitchen flying off and landing at the feet of a guest using the kitchen phone, seeing orbs in the hayloft, etc.

Three stories that stick in my head. (I'll try to be brief with them). The trainer had a person who would help with the stall cleaning. The gal would sometimes bring her two boys with her. The boys were off playing one afternoon, and came back to the barn. The younger one had brambles, etc. stuck to his clothes. The kids had been playing in the brush on the perimeter of the farm. The younger son told him mom about "the man with a feather in his hat" helping him get out of prickly bushes. A few months later, one of the boarders thought she saw the "man" briefly in the barn.

One day the trainer was doing the stall work. Was working in the stall that had a tie chain in it. Said chain starts swinging - no wind - no reasonable explanation. Trainer moves over to it to stop it - and it wraps around her arm. Well, stall cleaning for that day ceased, she high-tailed it back to the house and waited until the hubby came home from work. It was the first time she felt scared when something odd happened.

Last one - trainer and I were in the barn, nice still, quiet, spring afternoon. We were chatting in the barn, filling up water buckets, haying, sweeping the aisle or something (don't remember). The stalls had half doors that swung open into the aisleway. We were in the older (creepy) section of the barn, where the stalls were smaller. As we were talking, we hear kind of a creaky metalic sound - sort of like turning off an outside water faucet on your house. So I asked the trainer if her husband was doing something with the water in the barn - it really sounding line a water pipe handle. She said no, that he was off mowing. (hair on back of neck starts standing up)..........we look down at the stall latch - it was swinging like a pendulum - from like 3:00 to 9:00. It was a heavy old iron latch. There was no wind, neither of us had hit the latch - no reasonable explanation for its movement. It slowed down and stopped without us doing anything. Creeped me out more after it happened, then while it was happening.

In this same barn, when I was in the tack room (alone!) - I heard the sound of horse's shoes on the cement aisle - no one else around - no horses - very strange.

For a long time, I would NOT be in the barn by myself when it was dark. If I had a lesson - my trainer stayed with me until everything was cleaned and put away. I joked with her that I needed to pay her extra for "babysitting" me. I would not ride by myself at night - always made sure one of the other boarders was there. Luckily, the barn had other adults who worked the typical 9-to-5 and rode after work.

Yep, I have an overactive imagination, and do a great job of scaring myself. Yep, saw the 80's horror movies as a teenager. Yep, watched the X-files. Yep, keep extra lights on when the husband is out of town.

The barn that I am at now is not as old, and does not seem creepy at all. It has a ton of cats, but other than that, seems pretty tame.

[fourhorses]

I used to spook myself constantly at a barn I was boarding at, and it has carried over full-time now.
The only time I used to have for riding was very late at night, sometimes I was out there until 1 or 2 a.m. Two incidents happened to me which are forever burned into my subconscious, affecting my behavior from then on and making my sanity come into question more often than not:
I had to go get a young horse I was working with from the end stall down a very narrow aisleway, the lights at the top of the aisle didn't work, no matter there was enough light to see through the aisle you just couldn't see the floor, I simply walked down the aisle, collected the horse in the dark and walked back, dumb, but nothing came of it except some acting up on his part for part of the walk which I chalked up to youth, worked the horse, led him back -- still in the dark and still with the same acting up; after putting him back in his stall I located the breaker for that aisle ( I was rather tired by this point of walking in the dark), flipped it, and found to my everlasting horror the reason for the colt's antsyness -- a very long, very fat, black snake, taking up the majority of the aisleway. I have no particular fear of snakes but the thought of having just missed steppping on that sucker almost made me faint -- and I went around the outside of the barns to get to my car rather than walk past him. On another night as I started to pull out of the farm driveway this fella in an old fatigue jacket, skinhead "do", and face tats came bursting out of the cornfield on the side of the road (that's right, a person and he was real dang it!). I floored it all the way home and ran to bed.
From then on I have turned on every light in any barn I've been at after dark (or insisted upon carrying a flashlight), with a trusty pitchfork or other weapon of mass destruction in hand, and checked out every nook and cranny to make sure no character from Hellraiser nor "Jake the Snake" is going to jump out at me.
My family and friends like to scoff and believe me to be perfectly batty.

[Feenikks]

I believe the man on the bicycle is always after me... there is no man nor bike though

Or when I am grooming in the shed row and all the horses in the stalls next to the indoor all turn that way, ears up and have that, what was that look on their faces... enough to rattle me

[fourhorses]

Oh, I forgot another little incident that happened to me as a teenager -- really kinda funny, makes for a good story for my kids:
Two friends and I decided to go on an all day trail ride to a local state park with horse trails -- lovely beginning of fall day; tree-lined, quiet back country roads, packed lunch, the works. On the way there we rode past an old country cemetary on an old dirt road -- jokes all around about how it looked like the one in "Night of the Living Dead" (which we had stayed up and watched the night before); "har, har, hope the zombies don't get us and eat our brains, har, har". All was forgotten until the ride back, at sunset, past the same cemetary. Now it didn't look so funny, with the sun going down behind it... we got very quiet and decided the horses needed a little trot, canter, gallop for the day after all that walking -- which was probably a pretty sight as we all kept looking back over our shoulders at the cemetary and the flesh-eating zombies which would surely pop out at any time.

[Ryllie]

HopelessHunter
Grand Prix
Posted Mar. 02, 2006 05:18 PM
Compared to some other stories, mine is pretty lame, but I was still freaked out nonetheless.

So I was at the barn by myself, dark, spooky, the whole nine yards, waiting for my mom to come pick me up. I really needed to use the bathroom so I decided to just stop being a sissy. I come back out (bathroom is attached to the tack room) and I was walking to the door when I hear this "POOF!" and something shoots out at me. I yelp and jump like five feet and then I look to see what it was.

It was the air freshener, the motorized kind that sprays scent every 15 minutes. ""

Done that before, just about pooped myself, at work, in the daytime, 3 days in a row

Won't even go into what your mind can do to you wandering around the paddocks at night tucking the neddies in when you live just down the road from an mental hospital when it was still open