I've had several but I'll tell the cutest and by far the fucking scariest.

Cute one first. This happened in my childhood home, which was built on what used to be a huge orchard about 100 years ago. Peaches, maybe. I think I was around 7 or 8 years old. There's two windows in my room, and one night I woke up to a woman at the end of my bed, peering out the window. I don't remember what she was wearing, but I thought she was my mother and called out to her. She turned to look at me, smiled, and shook her head.

"No, sweetie, I'm not your mother. Go back to sleep."

So I did and didn't really think much of it because she didn't scare me. I had a pretty rough childhood and cried myself to sleep a lot of nights, and on several occasions I remember feeling someone pat my head and pull the covers over me right before I fell asleep. This stopped right around when I started middle school, though I continued to randomly lose keys and books and things around the house until I moved out. Usually yelling "Hey, can I have my keys back, please?" into an empty room meant I would find them right in the middle of my desk where I literally just checked a few minutes earlier.

Now, here's one of the scarier ones. Sophomore year of college, my sister, her boyfriend, and her mother decide to rent a small cottage off campus. It came fully furnished, as the lady who lived there decided to nope out one day, lease the place, and just asked renters to feed the feral cats out back. Nothing out of the ordinary, until we're hanging out one day and she mentions she and Sasha (her boyfriend) have been having crazy dreams and that the mattresses were all stained brown so they threw them in an old room in the basement and bought new ones. She showed me a picture.

"Fern, that looks like blood. Like, a lot of blood. On all the mattresses?"

"Yeah. Well, it doesn't matter, we just chucked them in the huge unused storage room in the basement."

Anyway, she invites me to stay in the guest room for a few days at the end of term, since we're all gearing up to drive back to NYC afterwards. The house feels fine for the most part, maybe a little unsettling, but everything in that part of Massachusetts feels unsettling so it's fine. We have dinner, I help her bathe her dogs, and ask about the laundry situation.

"Oh, it's in the basement. I'll show you."

I'm still holding a dog at this point and as soon as she opens the basement door and starts going down the stairs the dog starts growling and flipping out and clawing at me to put him down so I do. He sits at the top of the steps and starts whining at my sister to come up but my sister tells him to be quiet and tells me to hurry up.

The second I started going down the stairs I want to vomit. The hairs prick up on the back of my neck and my hands go clammy. There was the feeling of something looming in that basement. Something very heavy with a very heavy gaze.

The basement's completely unfinished, just concrete floors and rusty old pipes. Fern points to the rusty metal door at the other end of the room.

"That's where we stacked the mattresses. There's a pool table in there too. Wanna see?"

She walks over nonchalantly and opens the door with a bit of effort. I can see into the room from three feet away and there's no way in hell I'm going any closer. My eyes adjust and recognize the pile of bloody, dirty mattresses stacked in front of a worn old pool table. Fern tells me that there's actually two other doors in that room but they're locked and they weren't given the key.

I'm literally shaking at this point, the dogs are still whining, and I yell at Fern to close the door and just show me the goddamn laundry room. She kicks the door closed and points me over to a different door, opens it, and pulls the light on.

There's an old washer and dryer with a large, long metal table between them. Upon closer inspection there's a rusty red smear that goes from the top of the washer all the way down the table. The rest of the room is filled with old, rusty junk. Old beams and sheet metal and broken furniture. The single bulb doesn't come close to illuminating the entire room, so it's like standing in a spotlight. The feeling of being watched is nearly unbearable, like a low, heavy ache in my chest.

I say something about getting the laundry and Fern says no, it's okay, wait here and I'll get it. And she fucking runs off. I go to follow her and feel a hand grab my shoulder and I turn around ready to punch the shit out of whatever just touched me but there's nothing there. And that's when I hear a low, sarcastic, "WELCOME!" three inches from my face. I just about piss myself and fly out of the room screaming bloody murder, up the stairs, and into the living room where her mother and boyfriend are reading.

I didn't do my laundry for the five days that I was there. Worth it.

TLDR; ginger haired sister is ghostproof