9 Scary Stories to Prepare for Halloween – Press Enterprise

Do you believe in ghosts?

Some of your Inland Empire neighbors do.

We asked for your creepy stories this Halloween. You delivered.

So whether you consider these stories as cause for concern or simply entertainment, here are some of the best we’ve received.

Miner’s ghost roams the Perris Freeway

A late drive home to Perris made Stephanie and Victor Bustamante believers.

It was about a year and a half ago. The northbound 215 Freeway was dark and nearly empty as the couple approached the Ramona Expressway exit in her Mercedes Benz.

“While driving with my husband next to me on the passenger side while I slept, I saw an old male figure with a white beard appear in the middle of the highway,” Stephanie Bustamante wrote. “He was dressed in an old hat and old-looking clothes and was holding a pickaxe.”

She drove right through the ghost and remembered thinking, “Did I just see what I saw?” The man had disappeared, she said.

Victor Bustamante woke up. His wife told him what had happened.

She explained that the man looked like a gold digger. Her husband, a longtime resident of Perris, said there was once mining in the area.

“I was then completely shocked that I had just seen a ghost from that period,” she wrote. “I now officially believe in ghosts.”

Children receive a message from beyond the grave

When Kim Bradford was young, her aunt and uncle came to visit from England.

But a week after the visit, Uncle Charles died in her home.

Fast forward about two years. Bradford, who lives in Temecula, and her sister were playing with a Ouija board they received for Christmas.

“We decided to see if we could talk to our Uncle Charles,” she wrote. “We asked him where he was. We could not have anticipated or come up with the answer we got.”

The Ouija board ‘spelled LIMBO’.

“We panicked and never touched a Ouija board again.”

School is still in session for student minds

Steve Weller’s job as an electrician in the late 1980s took him to an old abandoned school.

Lights were spotted in this kindergarten classroom in the Whittier-based Lowell Joint School District. But electricity had long since been cut off, recalls Weller, who lives in Rialto.

He removed the fuses and light bulbs. Later, a neighbor called to report that children were running through the building with flashlights. Weller returned, flashlight in hand, to investigate the dark building.

“I saw small footprints mixed with mine in the dust on the floor,” he wrote. “Then I heard the sounds of children playing and saw five children running in the corridor outside the building. I bent down to pick up my lamp and when I looked back, the children I had seen were gone.”

He searched building after building for the children, but found no one.

“I heard laughter as if they were challenging me,” Weller wrote.

Later, an old co-worker told him that students died there in an earthquake in the early 20th century.

“I went back that night and saw little balls of light running around the kindergarten building,” he said.

“The school was razed and houses were built on the land,” Weller wrote. “I still wonder if the kids from Lowell School still play in the area.”

Haunted apartment scares summer intern

River resident Brandon Brown got a healthy dose of scares during a summer internship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

He lived alone in an apartment above a shed in a wooded area, but it wasn’t the animals outside that bothered him.

“I tried my best to sleep in the bedroom, but I knew it was haunted,” Brown wrote.

Even though it was on the second floor, he heard someone knocking on the window. He started sleeping on a living room chair — “only to have a child whisper to me all night,” he wrote. Brown could never figure out what the child said every night.

One night the power went out. He went outside and into the basement to look at the fuse box. It was pitch black outside when he opened the cellar door.

“I saw nothing but spiders with my flashlight,” Brown wrote. “The circuit breaker was open, I flipped the switch and then ran up the basement stairs and then upstairs to the haunted apartment. Ghosts seemed safer than people and wild animals.”

All was not well with these ghost children

Steve Jacobs has haunting childhood memories of growing up in a Whittier apartment in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“My brother, sister and I saw these little child figures at night,” wrote Jacobs, who lives in Moreno Valley.

“They were flat like a paper cutout and had no discernible features. Sometimes they were all white and sometimes all black. They usually ran away as soon as you saw them.”

One night, Jacobs remembered waking up and seeing one standing across from him. He chased him down the hall to the living room, where his mother was sleeping on the couch.

“When the child reached the living room, he jumped into the air and sat behind the couch. I ran so fast that I fell on the couch and woke my mother from a deep sleep. I told her what happened, but she just sent me back to bed.

Eventually the sightings stopped.

A few months ago, a childhood friend who knew about the ghost stories emailed Jacobs a news article from 2017. The headline? “The murders at Death House are attracting attention.“

“When I read the article and saw the address, I couldn’t believe it,” he wrote.

In 1916, “a man had murdered his common wife and her three young children and buried them under the rear garage,” Jacobs said. “Really creepy!”

Friends perform a ghost prank…. or did they?

When Winchester resident Norbert Onaitis served in the U.S. Air Force, some friends thought it would be fun to scare him. Or at least he thought so.

The scene was Portugal, in 1968. According to local legend, a Spanish treasure ship had been captured by the Portuguese in the Azores in the 16th century, he wrote. The treasure was removed and hidden in a cave near the city. Years later, the Spanish invaded, conquered the islands and wanted their loot back.

During their search, the Spanish tortured and killed a Portuguese commander – giving rise to stories that his “ghost still walks the slopes of Monte Brasil, overlooking the town of Angra do Heroísmo,” as Onaitis put it.

His Air Force friends invited Onaitis on a trip to dispel the myth of the ghost.

“I agreed knowing I was being framed,” he wrote.

The soldiers drank rum and watched the moon rise. Onaitis’ friends left and he was left curious as to what they would come up with.

“As if on cue, I saw a figure coming up the slope below me,” he wrote. “As he got closer I could see he was wearing a helmet and armor. I thought to myself, ‘You guys did everything you could… tin foil and all!’”

The figure passed between Onaitis and the moon – but he could ‘see through the figure the full moon’.

“Ran like a terrified rabbit, I did!”

Stranger and stranger things seen in farm

Jana Cheney is convinced her Victorian farmhouse in Riverside is haunted.

“What started as the occasional sound of someone walking up the stairs quickly turned into shadows darting around, toilet lids mysteriously lifting, and strange food-related ‘gifts’ found under the covers of an (unrusted) made-up bed,” she wrote.

One night, as she lay in bed and used her laptop, Cheney heard something moving under the bed.

“Within 60 seconds or less, my mattress was lifted up,” she wrote, adding that the house was built for and lived in by a Riverside pioneer.

“Everything seemed to move in slow motion as I looked at the side of the bed, and as my head and shoulders hung over the side, a white ball of light emerged from under the bed. In an otherwise dark room with 10-foot ceilings and no source for the light to come from, was it, shall we say, a little alarming?

The plum-sized ‘ball’ moved slowly along the skirting board and disappeared behind her dresser.

“As crazy as it sounds, I stayed in the room that night and every night since!”

Unexplained fog scares the car’s passengers

There’s an old horror movie called “The Fog.”

But what happened one December evening in 2022 was very real for Mary Snowball of Riverside.

Snowball and her daughter were driving after visiting Snowball’s sister in town.

“We had driven halfway down the block when we noticed a patch of fog a few feet in front of our car,” Snowball wrote. “The fog came towards us. It seemed so strange to have this random cloud of mist. There was no fog anywhere else.”

They drove through the fog, which was concentrated on the passenger side. As they did so, her daughter felt a cold sensation.

“That same evening, someone had posted on social media about driving through a strange, rolling fog along Victoria Avenue. They also said it felt cold as they drove through,” Snowball wrote. “This was maybe a few miles from our fog encounter.”

“It gave me chills when I read it, and to this day I’m convinced it wasn’t just fog!”

Singing ghost appears in bed-and-breakfast

Carol Scott of Upland woke up with a start while staying at the Tombstone Bordello Bed & Breakfast in Tombstone, Arizona.

The building was once a brothel, where women were abused and many died of overdoses, she said. Rumor has it that it is haunted.

“In the middle of our last night there, I woke up to what I thought were coyotes howling,” Scott wrote. “It turned out not to be coyotes, but music with someone singing.”

She thought the clock radio went off accidentally and fell back asleep when the music stopped.

“Suddenly I felt someone touch me on my left side – like a finger swiping upwards. And I woke up wide awake!”

Heart pounding, Scott knew it wasn’t her husband; he was sleeping on her right.

“In the morning I mentioned this experience to our hosts and was told that the spirit associated with our room liked to sing at the door!”