Paranormal encounters

[redzinger]

As mentioned on the other thread, scary or otherwise?

I've had some pretty weird sleep paralysis attacks which got so freaky, I was beginning to think there was more to them.

I've had some pretty strong instincts to do things, or not do things. (One recently was to not go on a certain ride - I heard later there was a big crash with two guys going to hospital.)

But apart from that, nothing's gone bump in the night for me.

 

[Asbel]

When I was a child, toys would go missing and show up in bizarre places that I would have never left them in. My favorite book disappeared one day and a month later, I found it underneath of a toy I'd been playing with just the previous day. My family found out later that the apartment we were living in caught fire a long time ago, and a fireman died in it. We suspected he had children, because he never hurt anything but rather just kept messing with my stuff in what we thought of as an almost playful way.

My only other experience with so-called "spirits" was a hatred I seemed to incur from a ghost my friend believed lived in her house. If I ever hung out at her place, I would break out in strange, unexplainable and uncontrollable chills to the point that my teeth would chatter, no matter how warm it was. This ghost also supposedly melted the edges of a video game cartridge I let her borrow. She said the ghost was protective and just hated me. I still can't explain that, except that maybe she left my video game somewhere and it got burnt, and she just wanted to make up an excuse for it.
Still doesn't explain the shivering. That was just weird.

On that note, anyone ever write ghost sex stories? Phantom, invisible lovers?

 

[J_R_Ashunwhy]

***deleted***

 

[NotWise]

On that note, anyone ever write ghost sex stories? Phantom, invisible lovers?

I wrote two, and I'm going to try to resurrect at least one of those stories for Lit. Five years ago I thought it was the best thing I'd written. Originally it was in the context of a novel and I would need to rewrite it as a short.

 

[Ewobbit]

Paranormal? Good Lord, I don't even know where to begin! Certain friends that believe in that sort of stuff tease me about being a magnet for weird shit.

Um... Ok. How about the apartment I lived in for six months? I don't sleepwalk. Never have. But, yet, somehow every night I would fall asleep in dark silence and every morning I would wake up to the television on the news and this playing from a VINYL ALBUM on my stereo. An album that was carefully put away each morning and not pulled out by me.

For the first time in almost a decade, I started having nocturnal emissions. It didn't matter how many times I jacked off before I went to sleep, I would wake up to soiled sheets.

I got really sick and the doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong. They thought maybe allergies, but the blood test didn't tick.

After I moved out, I got better.

I was the first to live there after a young woman had killed herself.

There have been others, but that was far and away the weirdest and most difficult to explain. I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with the strange unidentified metal object that squeezed it's way out of my sinus cavity during a college lecture one day and the doctor I took it to couldn't identify before it disappeared from the lab he sent it to.

 

[Asbel]

Good lord, what Indian burial ground did you defile?

 

[JKendallDane]

My first one hit when my father was dying of cancer. It was down to the final days and he had slipped into a coma. I had been home every weekend for a month and just couldn't take another, so I didn't make the two-plus hour trip that weekend. On Saturday night, I ended up playing poker and partying with a friend from college. All night. I finally crashed hard about 5am and expected to sleep most of the day.

But, at 9:15am I was suddenly wide awake as if someone had shaken me and said, "Get up now." I did and was surprisingly alert and clearheaded. By the time I had the first cup of coffee going down, the phone rang. It was my Mom calling to tell me Dad had finally passed away a few minutes earlier...at 9:15. I always assumed he made a visit to wake me up so I could deal with my mother.

Then there was the ten-and-a-half years I spent with my partner who was quarter Cherokee and not only a Two-Spirit but also had the gift of Second Sight. More than a few times I saw him go into trances and say things that only made sense later when they came true.

Then on a trip to my hometown, where he had never been and had no knowledge of its history, I watched him tell me things he had absolutely no way of knowing. It became truly intense when we visited two cemeteries, one where the most Revolutionary War officers are buried than any other in the country, and has a 2,000-year-old conical Indian burial mound at its center. He went into another trance just before we entered the cemetery and pretty much stayed in it until we were at the top of the mound. There he began shaking violently and screamed "Yes, Cheif. I understand. Forgive me." Suddenly he was back and in no uncertain terms, told me, "Get the fuck off this thing. We are treading on my ancestors and they do NOT like it!"

The other cemetery was where my brother that was stillborn was buried in an unmarked grave. After more than forty years of not knowing exactly where his grave was, the cemetery manager found the right record book and offered to take me there. As we drove to the backside of the graveyard my partner suddenly went into another trance and pointed through the windshield. His voice changed dramatically to something I'd never heard before and he stated, "Your brother is buried next to that big tree on the hillside." Sure enough, when we got out of the cars, the cemetery manager took me straight to a grassy area right next to that tree and told me Tommy was in the first grave to the east of it. This was a cemetery dating back 250 years with thousands of burial sites. No one had known for certain until that moment which grave was his...but somehow Cochise did.

Oh yeah, I'm a big believer in paranormal activity.

.
.

 

[NotWise]

But, at 9:15am I was suddenly wide awake as if someone had shaken me and said, "Get up now." I did and was surprisingly alert and clearheaded. By the time I had the first cup of coffee going down, the phone rang. It was my Mom calling to tell me Dad had finally passed away a few minutes earlier...at 9:15. I always assumed he made a visit to wake me up so I could deal with my mother..

You have such a pleasant way of interpreting that experience.

 

[lemonbread]

I normally don't post in this section of the forum, but I saw this thread and decided to contribute, since I've had paranormal experiences since childhood.

My mother claims the devil was fighting for my soul, but being mostly atheist, I'm not convinced that was the case.

When I was a young child I saw creatures that no one else could see. Sometimes humanoid, sometimes more like giant insects. Also, objects would go flying. Something on top of the refrigerator would fly across the room, things like that.

When I was 17, I woke up one morning and saw a girl sitting at the end of my bed. At first I thought maybe my half-sister had come to visit. But this girl looked 12-14 and my sister was only 8. I didn't recognize her and she just stared at me. I closed my eyes, looked again, and she was still there. I closed my eyes again, and then when I opened them, she was gone.

It didn't really start picking up until after I had a baby when I was 18. I lived with my mother, and I could not go into my bedroom to change her diaper without being touched. I started sleeping on the couch, where I would hear breathing behind me. It seemed like whatever was going on lived off of negative energy. Whenever my mother and I would fight things would go haywire. Once when we were arguing a very heavy lamp flew across the room, from an end table with such force it broke the prongs on the plug, and landed several feet away. We would find things in strange places. Once I left while my mother was at work, and I left her a note saying where we had gone, on the kitchen table under a paper weight, but when she got home she could not find a note and panicked. We found the note several weeks later hidden in a drawer. My mom would wake me up in the night, angry, because she thought I kept calling her. It seemed to pit us against each other, and have an obvious interest in my daughter.

When my daughter was about one and a half, maybe almost two years old, she had a toy rocking giraffe to ride on. She had her giraffe in the kitchen and was playing on it, and I was watching her from the living room. Suddenly, I saw her lifted into the air by something unseen. It didn't pick her up nicely. Her foot caught on the handle of the giraffe, and it appeared the giraffe was kicked across the room. It went spinning across the floor. I decided then it was best for us to leave.

I haven't experienced much since then. Some strange powdery footprints in the hallway. Like elongated cat footprints, except huge and bipedal.

My middle daughter, now four, woke up screaming one night not long ago saying there was a dragon on her bedroom wall. She pointed at it like it was still there, but I saw nothing.

I definitely believe something is out there, and I may have a natural ability to attract things. I have some sort of high electrical energy, where lightbulbs very frequently go dead when I am in the room, and I cannot operate my mother's electric oven without it spitting errors at me. Anyone else can use it fine. In elementary school I had to use a separate entrance because I would set off the fire alarm when I walked past it. So I think perhaps I'm some sort of beacon in the darkness for some of this stuff.

 

[Asbel]

When my daughter was about one and a half, maybe almost two years old, she had a toy rocking giraffe to ride on. She had her giraffe in the kitchen and was playing on it, and I was watching her from the living room. Suddenly, I saw her lifted into the air by something unseen. It didn't pick her up nicely. Her foot caught on the handle of the giraffe, and it appeared the giraffe was kicked across the room. It went spinning across the floor. I decided then it was best for us to leave.

About a million things in your post set off this little alert in the back of my head, and I'm not normally the kind of person to call bullshit on anything, but my friend and I used to tell stories like this to each other all the time, trying to one-up each other with the more crazy happenings in our home. I think it ended with her telling me she was literally transported to an alternate dimension through a mirror on the back of a giant cat made of shadows.

I'm not a huge skeptic. I believe in the possibility of paranormal shit. But... I really have a hard time believing a single thing you wrote just now. Juuuuuust saying.

 

[lemonbread]

About a million things in your post set off this little alert in the back of my head, and I'm not normally the kind of person to call bullshit on anything, but my friend and I used to tell stories like this to each other all the time, trying to one-up each other with the more crazy happenings in our home. I think it ended with her telling me she was literally transported to an alternate dimension through a mirror on the back of a giant cat made of shadows.

I'm not a huge skeptic. I believe in the possibility of paranormal shit. But... I really have a hard time believing a single thing you wrote just now. Juuuuuust saying.

Oh no. A random person on the internet thinks I might not be telling the truth? What ever will I do?

How old do you think I am, 12? I never asked you to believe it. There's no way for me to prove it to anyone. I was simply sharing my experiences. Take from it what you will. But I'm not a silly teenie bopper trying to one-up anyone.

 

[Asbel]

Oh no. A random person on the internet thinks I might not be telling the truth? What ever will I do?

How old do you think I am, 12? I never asked you to believe it. There's no way for me to prove it to anyone. I was simply sharing my experiences. Take from it what you will. But I'm not a silly teenie bopper trying to one-up anyone.

You just informed us that you had to take a different route into your school building than everyone else because your mere presence would set off the fire alarm. If that were true for me, I'd be contacting NASA or MIT right now for scientific research into my own body. And wouldn't a computer malfunction around you, too? They're much more delicate instruments.

 

[lemonbread]

You just informed us that you had to take a different route into your school building than everyone else because your mere presence would set off the fire alarm. If that were true for me, I'd be contacting NASA or MIT right now for scientific research into my own body. And wouldn't a computer malfunction around you, too? They're much more delicate instruments.

I live in a small town where nobody gives a crap. A 7 year old can't contact NASA. I was a kid. Maybe they thought I was pulling it. Maybe it wasn't even me after all. All I can give you is what I know, the fire alarm went off when I went past if. Just that one, none of the others. Someone told me to use the other door with the big kids. Problem solved. If I had explanations for all of it I would have much better stories to tell, and probably a much higher paying job.

 

[Ewobbit]

Good lord, what Indian burial ground did you defile?

Who, me?

None that I'm aware of. Although, considering the area I grew up in, if I had it would have been Comanche.

As far as the gal, I can't really tell you anything more than she was considered "the town tramp" and "more than a little weird". Which, considering the area, could have just meant she didn't wear jeans and "shitkickers" or go to church on Sundays. She was about six months gone (give or take) before I moved out to the area.

Or if you mean that metal sphere... All I know is that it was about the size of a kid's marble, hurt like a bitch coming out my right nostril, and when Doc Gregory cut into the orangish, rather gross, sphere, he said he thought it was metal but didn't recognize it before sending it off to the lab which lost it. Buddy of mine swore it was alien and covered up by Project Bluebook, but he took his pizza with extra mushrooms, if you see what I mean.

 

[lovecraft68]

Sleep paralysis is something I have experience with and the superstitious refer to them as witch rides. If you have ever suffered from one, you would think it can't just be scientific, its far to freaky and creepy.

Many years ago I was delving far to deep into the occult, hanging with a much older crowd who had been into it for decades. I was way out of my league and they brought me along for a seance in an old mill on breakneck hill rd(which has since been restored and considered historical) and I've never gone into detail about that night nor will I here, but the gist is I met something face to face that night and it was darkness incarnate

I spent two weeks doing everything I could to not sleep and heard whispering in my mind the entire time, every room I went into I swore something was there. over twenty five years later I still have nightmares of it and still can feel it on occasions.

Shit's real and sadly far more prominent and real than the 'other side' which never seems to show itself in any form.

 

[beachbum1958]

My wife died in childbirth, along with my daughter's twin sister, so I brought up my daughter alone. One afternoon, when she was about four, I was watching TV and she was lying on the floor playing with her Duplo blocks and singing, when I realised she was counting in Cumbrian dialect, something called the Yaan Tyaan Taed'ere. I'm originally from the West Country, from Wellington, and we lived in London, but my wife was from Cumbria, near Kendal, which is how I recognised it - she used to use it to count stitches when she was knitting or if she thought I wasn't around (I used to play-up to the North-South divide thing and wind her up by telling her everything North of Watford was just a howling wilderness full of people like her). Until she went to school, she never spoke English at all, only the Brythonic/Celtic dialect from her part of Cumbria.

I asked my daughter if she knew what she was saying, and she just giggled and said 'yes, silly daddy; mummy told me!', then she carried on playing and counting like it was nothing out of the ordinary. A few days later she asked me if she had a sister. As she couldn't possibly have known about her mother and sister, I'd never told her, my parents and I thought she was too young to understand, I asked her why she was asking, and she said that the little girl who plays with her looks just like her, and she lives in Heaven with her mummy, so was she her sister? I didn't know what to answer, especially when she told me the little girl's name - I'd never told her what her sister's name was, it wasn't something I knew how to discuss with a four year-old, but she knew her sister's name.

All through her childhood she played with the little girl; I'd hear her laughing and talking in the middle of the night over the baby monitor, and whenever I bought her anything, I had to buy a duplicate in pink; clothes, shoes, Barbie dolls, anything. My daughter always had the blue set, she never touched the pink stuff, it wasn't 'her' stuff to touch, and even now, when she's married with a baby of her own, she still never refers to herself as 'me' or 'I', it's always 'we'; 'we don't like it', can we have another, please', 'we're hungry', 'we're tired', and so on.

My wife Lori says referring to herself in that way is generally the sign of the subordinate twin; the girls were monozygotic, if my daughter had lived she and her sister would have been identical twins, and they're almost always in a sometimes quite subtle subordinate/dominant relationship; she's a paediatric psychotherapist, so she should know.

 

[oggbashan]

Where do you think I get some of my stories from?

My Muses have ways of communicating with me.

 

[ishtat]

Nonsense.

I think that the entire idea of paranormal encounters is 100% drivel. An Australian business man I know quite well offered $100,000 to anyone who could provide proof of any 'paranormal' event. No one has collected after 20 years.

However, there are stacks of people who do believe - because they want to - and nothing will convince them they are wrong. And good luck to them - but they're still wrong.

 

[Carnal_Flower]

I agree with you and I dont. Its drivel, yet weird things happen.

After my died dad, the TV came on at odd hours for a week. You'd just be sitting there and whoop. It would come on in the middle of the night. Happened for a week and stopped.

I think that the entire idea of paranormal encounters is 100% drivel. An Australian business man I know quite well offered $100,000 to anyone who could provide proof of any 'paranormal' event. No one has collected after 20 years.

However, there are stacks of people who do believe - because they want to - and nothing will convince them they are wrong. And good luck to them - but they're still wrong.

 

[beachbum1958]

I agree with you and I dont. Its drivel, yet weird things happen.

After my died dad, the TV came on at odd hours for a week. You'd just be sitting there and whoop. It would come on in the middle of the night. Happened for a week and stopped.

I agree; weird things happen, but just because I don't have an explanation it doesn't mean there isn't a real one, one not involving dead people. The people who assert they've had paranormal experiences are not to be mocked simply because one hasn't experienced the same thing oneself; those experiences did happen to those people, they're real to them, and they have every right to feel they've been somehow touched by the 'other'. Because it's not real to you or I doesn't make them any less real to the person who experienced them.

I've seen some pretty weird stuff myself, but the closest, most rational explanation for me is that these experiences have come at times of intense emotional stress, physical exhaustion, and great fear, therefore they're most likely a product of that set of circumstances; it's telling that the only real 'spook' experience I've ever had was in the trauma unit at Camp Bastion following a 100-hour waking shift, surrounded by young men, boys, really, for whom I could do nothing for except wait for them to die. My serotonin levels were probably through the roof, I was clinically depressed after five years in first Iraq then Afghanistan, I had no real prospect of returning home, and hanging over all of us was the fear that one day very soon one of the locals brought in for surgery would detonate a bomb vest or grenade and kill us all, as had already happened to some friends in the Dutch contingent.

It's no real surprise to me that I saw what I saw; we were working under conditions of extreme and unrelenting stress, and the brain is capable of throwing up some extremely plausible and realistic situations that are nevertheless entirely subjective, maybe as some kind of screen against reality, something to block out the stress that reality is imposing, so I believe if I really try I can dredge up a rational explanation without invoking the afterlife, if there is one, which I doubt.

(The thing about ghosts that I find most implausible, and indicates to me the viewer is seeing what they want to see, or expect to see, is the constantly repeated thing about how they're dressed in the way they did when they were alive; does this mean their clothes have died and gone to Heaven with them? And trying to prove the existence of ghosts is a non-starter; if ghosts are non-material entities, then their existence is unprovable, because it's logically not possible to prove the existence of immaterial beings with material data).

What happened with my daughter is her experience, not mine; I never saw or heard anything, and other than things she'd said that she shouldn't have known about, there's no physical evidence that anything happened. I only have what she said, and what she thought at the time. She believed it, it was real to her, and I accepted that. Twenty years later she has no memory of the entire experience.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

This is a true story and can be verified.

I AM the 'man in black.'

Although this supposedly literary figure was around in fiction a long time ago, it became popularised by a very well known present-era sci-fi identity who goes by the name of Stan Deyo (which is not his real birth name, as far as I know).

During the Seventies I worked in a reference library, usually on weekends or late nights. And Stan would come in looking for some obscure book or text that had to be brought out from the archives in the rear of the building.

As a young University student I didn't have a lot of money and because I could get cheap black slacks and black T-shirts I wore these pretty much all the time - I absolutely hated denim jeans in those days.

This old library had very large dumb-waiters built into the walls in odd places behind bookshelves that some lighter-framed librarians occasionally used as lifts. These implacements were completely obscure to the public and it was not generally known they even existed.

Well anyway Stan would come in and I could guess what kind of time he would come in, and would actually look out the window for him and as soon as he came in I would make sure I was on the front desk on the top floor where he usually went. Because I basically listened to the same radio programs during the week that he did I kind of mostly had a good feel for what subjects he would be chasing and would absolutely make sure those subjects were represented right there on the front desk for him when he came in.

Next, he would always ask for some pages to be copied which we did in those days in the back rooms using this great huge, and old argon tube photocopier. After about fifty pages of copying, if you stood with your hands on the machine, there would be what I have only ever been able to 'gather' was some kind of static electricity charge but the overall effect was that you could 'see' through walls using your outstretched hands...! That's just a fact - I don't have any particular technical scientific explanation.

I could therefore, 'see' where Stan was in the large main library hall, and would go to the side where he was and use the dumb-waiter and come out from, apparently, nowhere (in fact, from behind a moveable shelf hiding the section of the wall where the transport system was) right in front of him.

Anyway, he'd go back onto National Radio that week (he was even then a well-known public personality who talked about science and space and related stuff) and swear black and blue about the reality of 'the men in black!' In those days I had this incredible poker face ability and never ever ever let on what I was doing. And made a kind of 'Spock' face as I pre-empted whatever book or section he thought he wanted... And just spontaneously handed over these amazing latest research books the library bought and hadn't mostly even been catalogued yet.

It was great. And hugely funny. I could 'see' where he was in the hall, and would go around and
meet him - often making damn sure he SAW ME go out from a completely different part in the first place, and then I would run like crazy and 'appear' in the complete opposite spot. And yep, I have always been incredibly athletic and never raised a sweat or a stiff breath.

You should have seen his face. Today I don't think I could carry off the same straight faced look if I did this kind of thing.

I think it's affected his life.

Apart from the strange static charge thing with your hands - which I think is some kind of explainable real phenomenon - the whole thing was a stunt I played on him and he's been convinced ever since there really ARE 'men in black' and aliens and all of this!!!

Hehehe.

Oh. I am an alien though.

'Men in black?' For me it was just a co-incidence. Stan is right though about aliens meeting him although I have no particular 'agenda' against him or anyone except pulling a stunt for my own laughs. I certainly couldn't stop anyone from setting off a nuclear bomb and I have no influence over anyone in public office or even, anywhere!

As far as being an alien, I live like any ordinary human being and manage to fit in very well. My life is not itself 'paranormal.' The 'paranormal' thing for me has to do with the odd phenomenon about the static field. I have asked a lot of scientists over the years and no one has ever expressed any serious interest to go into it much at all. Even I can't quite tell what would be the point of being able to 'see' through walls with your fingertips other than to pull Stan Deyo's leg.

The women librarians at this place all refused to go into the photocopy room after dark because they reckoned it was haunted. I don't think it was actually haunted but the copying machine certainly produced some sort of definite static field that you could really feel. I mean, just cutting up tiny bits of paper would demonstrate that you could get them to 'fly' off onto something and be magnetically attracted and so on.

 

[Hypoxia]

I claim no mystical encounters. Spirits of deceased forebears and friends do not visit me. (Death-messages come by phone or email.) Dreams impart no prophesies nor messages. Should I resent the spirits for neglecting me?

My 'paranormal' experiences are (so far) explicable. A flashing light filling Anza-Borrego's desert sky? A helicopter strobe from the Salton Sea naval base on an overcast night. A crashed flying saucer in a canyon? A cement-mixer truck that missed a curve. All those faceless ghosts trooping through my doorway? Well, I'd been experimenting with Jimson weed, Datura meteloides, and determined that Carlos Casteñada was full of shit except for it feeling like an "alternate reality".

We interpret our experiences via our expectations. We see and hear what we expect. We may, depending on the current paradigms, think we experience angels, demons, ghosts, aliens, robots, agents, mindwarps, mages, mirages, whatever the flavor of the day.

Keep in mind that human brains and consciousness are more complex than anything else we know -- but we're built for quick evaluations, not precise understandings. We only need comprehend and survive long enough to reproduce. Our fantasies merely frost the cake.

True, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But it's a clue.

 

[Ewobbit]

Actually, what Desiremakesmeweak said reminded me of something.

In a ragtag bag of checkered experiences, I had occasion to teach some students how to use the old CR Oscilloscopes (Goldstar if I remember right). (FYI, the old analogs work better than the digitals if anyone is of a mind to try.)

One of the things we did right at the beginning was to have the students take the probes in their own hands (not THAT kind of probe, Hypoxia) and get a reading of their own electromagnetic field. Partially to illustrate why it is not a good idea to handle electronics components with your bare hands ungrounded.

And different people get different readings. There are also slight differences in the readings an individual will get at different times.

With very few exeptions, mine was just about the craziest, until this one guy (old navy submariner there for the piece of paper saying he knew his shit) made that thing go absolutely apeshit. He could, I shit you not, hold a lightbulb and make the filament glow enough to notice in particularly dark room, although not enough to tell if other lights were on.

 

[49greg]

Sleep paralysis is something I have experience with and the superstitious refer to them as witch rides. If you have ever suffered from one, you would think it can't just be scientific, its far to freaky and creepy.

....

If the sleep paralysis you're talking about is when you wake up, or semi wake up, but your muscles are still semi paralyzed, then I've had two episodes. Years later I learned that the body is paralyzed during sleep, so our distant ancestors wouldn't fall out of trees as they dreamed, presumably.

But sometimes, you sort of wake up, but are still dreaming, in a sort of semi sleep semi awake yet still dreaming. And your body is still paralyzed.

It's horrible. The first time I was only ten or eleven. I still, every three or four years, have nightmares about that episode.

The term witch ride is interesting. In my family we called a normal nightmare, 'riding the night mare,' as if this terrifying mare - female horse - took one on a ride to a horrible place.

The description of the horses in the song 'Ghost Riders in the Sky' is pretty close to how I used to imagine the night mare as a kid.

 

[Asbel]

The description of the horses in the song 'Ghost Riders in the Sky' is pretty close to how I used to imagine the night mare as a kid.

Four Horsemen, bitches.


The Horsemen are drawing nearer
On leather steeds they ride
They've come to take your life
On through the dead of night
With the Four Horsemen ride
Or choose your fate and die