Haunted Antiques Stories

We asked for your “haunted antiques” stories to help celebrate Halloween. Here’s a sampling from our readers:

M.W. wrote about the antique wall clock her parents gave her in 1973: “The gong didn’t work for years, but on the day my father died in 1982 the gong rang once, and it rang again, once, on the day of his funeral. We all heard it.”

Clocks are often the “medium” in ghost stories. B.M. wrote about a Seth Thomas mantel clock she bought for $10 at her neighbor’s garage sale: “I took it to a clock repairer to get it running, but $85 later he couldn’t guarantee it would ever keep time correctly. We later moved away and hung the clock as a decoration in our bedroom. It wasn’t running, but one night at 2:30 a.m. it started to chime. We later learned that our old neighbor had died at exactly that moment. My husband banished the clock to the living room and I wound it up the next morning. It has kept perfect time ever since.”

Here’s a story about separated pieces that wanted to get back together. M.J. and her husband were on their way to an advertised estate sale when they noticed a makeshift sign for a garage sale. They stopped at the sale, dug through piles of boxes and found five glass corn-on-the-cob dishes they bought on the spot. “We headed to the estate sale 15 miles away and there on the buffet was ONE dish that matched the five we had just bought. We have since learned that the dishes are Pebble Leaf corn servers made as early as 1929 by the Indiana Glass Co.” Maybe the ghost of the original owner wanted the dishes back together.

One more story, this one about disappearing damage. J.M. wrote that she owns a silver-plated bread tray made by James W. Tufts of Boston in about 1880. It has shells and scrolls around the border and a sheaf of wheat in the center. “To my disbelief, someone used a sharp knife to slice a piece of bread and left two deep cuts in the wheat design. I showed the damaged plate to my mother, so she saw the cuts too. But then awhile later I looked at the tray—and the cuts were gone. My mom and I think the tray was magically repaired.