'Ello. I'm Re, and I just joined this community.... I love to listen to and share ghost stories, so this looked like the place for me. I've lived in the Dayton area all my life, and there are a lot of very haunted places around here. I also live in a very old house, and I think it's a little haunted.
The first time I ever had what I'd call a paranormal experience was when I was in a play at Blair Hall, the theater at my local community college, Sinclair. I was twelve years old. Sinclair is quite the haunted place, and Blair Hall is one of the most "active" places there as far as paranormal activity goes (there's even an article about it in one of the "Haunted Ohio" books). Anyway, I was standing backstage. I was completely alone, and I was leaning against a collapsible table, which was against a concrete wall, so I knew that there was nobody else anywhere near me.
All of a sudden, very subtly, I began to hear the sound of someone breathing heavily. It was RIGHT next to my ear, and sort of circling around my face - very heavy, very human breath. It sounded like someone had just run offstage after doing something very physically exerting, and they were standing there, trying to take a breath. Once I noticed it, the sound was unmistakable. Then, it faded out. It didn't scare me; I just kind of shrugged and walked away. But it was definitely noticeable.
There were other places in Sinclair that were also pretty haunted. There was one building there - building 13 - that had once been some sort of factory or cannery. In the flood of 1913, a man had died in the basement of it alongside his donkey. They say that the man and his donkey still roam the halls there, and some people have claimed to have seen them. I've never had any weird experiences in that building, though, although it was there that I took most of my classes.
I worked at a Thai restaurant in Huber for a while that was apparently EXTREMELY haunted. I didn't see much of it for myself, as apparently the owners of the business had actually had a priest come and exorcise it. But there was still a pretty big problem of slamming doors. Sometimes the doors to the dining room would spontaneously swish open, even when the place was closed down and no one was going through them. The first time I saw it happened I looked at my boss in astonishment and asked him what had caused it. He looked at his son somewhat sheepishly (it was a family-owned business), and then back at me, and explained about the hauntings.
My dad has also had a lot of paranormal experiences. He's a heating and air-conditioning guy, and he sometimes does work on the air conditioners in people's houses. At one point, he was called to do some work on an abandoned house somewhere downtown. The entire time he was there, he kept on having all sorts of strange experiences - he would feel hands trying to push him down the stairs, he would hear footsteps on other floors when he knew for a fact that there was no one else in the house with him, mirrors would spontaneously break, and doors would slam. To top it all off, at one point, he was in the back yard, and he found a newspaper clipping. He picked it up and read it. It was an article about someone who had been murdered. He read the article, and then he saw that the person had been murdered in the very same house that he was working on. A short while later, he finally went back to the shop and told his boss that he wasn't working at that house anymore - it was too haunted. His boss laughed his head off about it, but apparently, afterwards, they had quite a bit of trouble getting other workers to stay there.
Then, there's my house. We moved here last October. I love it - it's a beautiful cape cod style house, built in 1934 by a man named Duke. It has a huge yard (at least, compared to the city house where we used to live), and wooden floors, and a basement with a fruit cellar. It also has a ghost. See, Duke, the guy who built the house, dug out the foundation with a pick and a shovel. He poured the foundation and smoothed it over with a trowel, all by himself. When he'd finished building it, he lived in it until the day he died. He was killed by lightning walking to someone else's house (I think it was a son or daughter, not sure). He was completely fried - all that was left of him was one of his feet.
The house is a good house, full of positive energy, but I do think it has a ghost. Possibly Duke, possibly one of the other numerous people who've lived here over the years - you can't really tell from the way it appears in this photo:
dorky
working
bored
awake