Gravitational wave bursters are sources which emit repeatedly bursts of gravitational waves, and have been recently suggested as potentially interesting candidates for gravitational wave (GW) detectors. Mechanisms that could give rise to a GW burster can be found for instance in highly magnetized neutron stars (the “magnetars” which explain the phenomenon of soft gamma repeaters), in accreting neutron stars and in hybrid stars with a quark core. We point out that these sources have very distinctive experimental signatures. In particular, as already observed in the -ray bursts from soft gamma repeaters, the energy spectrum of the events is a power-law, dN ∼ E− dE with ≃ 1.6, and they have a distribution of waiting times (the times between one outburst and the next) significantly different from the distribution of uncorrelated events. We discuss possible detection strategies that could be used to search for these events in existing gravitational wave detectors.