We had this thread on CL and I wanted to bring it back because we have some new members we didn't have on CL, and because I just love talking about this stuff and reading people's stories. I've had a really memerable experience myself that I've recounted a few times, but if anyone hasn't heard it and is interested, just let me know and I'll retell it again here. I remember @therealdeal had some fantastic stories about the old house he lived in as a kid as well Anyone else want to share any experiences, even if you don't nessisarily know that it had anything to do with ghosts, if it's weird or paranormal, share it with us.
Hey! I was just having these conversations with my family at one my relative's birthdays. If there's some interest, I'd be glad to share some of my stories again. I know there's still a strong stigma against the paranormal community and sometimes for good reason, but when you've lived with it there's just no denying it. I totally understand people who are skeptical, I would be if I didn't see it all the time.
I may or may not believe in the paranormal but I love reading these stories before bed.... yes yes, I know that's strange.
That's how I feel. I get it.. If you haven't experienced anything yourself, it's hard to imagine, but if you've had some things happen, it opens your mind. In my case I don't necessarily believe in UFO's or Bigfoot or anything else paranormal, but I sure as hell won't say anything absolutely DOESN'T exist, unless I have direct personal experience leading me to a conclusion. When you get a chance, I'd like to read about some of your experiances in that house again
I was talking to my mother tonight, and asked her if she remembered me telling her about seeing a ghost when I was a kid around 8 or so, and she did remember me telling her about it the next day. She said she never saw anything in the house though. I just wanted to check
I don't have a ton of time tonight, so I'll start with the easy stuff. Ever since I was young I interacted with a spirit in my house. I use the term spirit loosely as some sort of entity that I cannot understand. I believe it to be an older gentleman that lived in the house at one point. Anyway, the earliest I can remember something happening was when I was around 5 or 6, but I've been told I interacted with something before that. My parent's house had three bedrooms off of a hallway that lead away from the family room area. My bedroom was at the very end. It started with me when I could hear boot steps in the hallway. I know most people's first thought: it's someone else in the family. I thought this too even at that young age, but it would happen at odd times and always at night. I shared a room with my brother and he remembers hearing it too. We would test it some nights by waiting until our parents were asleep. We always knew they were asleep because they snored famously. My dad sounded like a bull in a pen and my mom sounded like a dripping sink somehow. Once we heard the snores, we knew no one else was awake and yet we'd hear the boot steps down the hall. At one point it happened basically 5-6 times a week. It was almost expected. It was never really threatening and we figured out later how to make it stop. One night I made the mistake of shouting for my dad to come out because he didn't believe me. Of course he woke up and came out and saw and heard nothing, but once my dad went back to bed there were no more boot steps. But a feeling of deep foreboding and like someone was watching us from the doorway persisted the rest of the night. It was eerie. It was even eerier when I heard my parents snoring again, knowing no one was standing there yet it felt like our doorway was darker than usual and it felt like someone was staring right at us. At that stage there was no light in the house at night, but after the feeling of dread hit that night I demanded my parents get a nightlight for the hallway. I also started closing the bedroom door. It ended up being a mistake. The boot steps still happened, but now I could see shadows under the door. I could actually see something walking up and down the hallway at night. With the door closed, that was sort of the extent of the experiences for a few years until my brother moved out of my room and into the second bedroom in the hallway. He too slept with the door closed, but his door didn't have a crack under it and he started listening to music while he fell asleep. I was now alone and almost every night I was seeing and hearing those boot steps. I started sleeping with the covers over my head. That was really the start of everything. It got much weirder and more personal as time went on. What I learned by the way when I shouted was that whatever this entity was, it wanted to be left alone. As i got older and older I realized things only happened at night because that was "his" time to have the house to himself. We got the house for a few hours after work or school, but after everyone went to bed, or even during the day when no one else was there, that was when the house was "his" and whenever we disturbed that time weird and threatening stuff would happen. I'll write more tomorrow. This is just the easy stuff from when I was really young. It got much worse.
I've been listening to this podcast called "Where Did the Road Go" for a couple years now, the host has on authors he interviews in all the paranormal fields (as well as scientific fields), and he and some regular guests have roundtable discussions on the paranormal. I started off as a kid believing in Bigfoot from the Patterson/Gimlin film, and I grew to believe that it was posssible we were being visited by someone from somewhere in UFOs. I also believed there was something to ghosts, too many stories of encounters and such, and that there is something to NDEs, psychic activity, stuff like that. Now as I've read so much on these topics and listened to that show quite a bit I'm starting to lean toward all this paranormal phenomenon being connected somehow. I don't really think ghosts are dead people, I think the possibilities for what they are could be much bigger and more interesting. I also don't think lights in the sky, missing time, and the abduction scenario people seem to experience is "aliens". I think a lot of this has to do with consciousness, how we perceive reality, and the paranormal actually being a normal part of reality and our lives that we simply can't scientifically explain yet, because we aren't asking the right questions and science isn't advanced or open minded enough to fully study and understand these things. Do I think ghosts could be dead people in some instances? Yes, but maybe not in the way most think, though I think anything is possible and we can't be so arrogant as to say these things can't be.
Love that story @therealdeal I think it's significant to realize how little we know about pretty much everything. Just in the past what, 10-15 years, we found out only about 4% of what this existence is constructed is matter. The remaining 96%, as far as they know right now is dark matter, which is poorly named because it isn't matter at all, and is closer to gravity of some kind, but really, they don't have much of a clue as to what dark matter is. Our understanding of existence is still essentially in its infancy.
You all know I'm a diehard skeptic. But i'm trying to think outside of the box here. If ghosts are souls in any way, I'm 99.99999% convinced that's bogus. The concept of a soul as separate and enduring from the physical brain and as anything more than an emergent property is something I just can't rationally accept. But, if ghosts are some sort of enduring remnant of physical forms in some quantum multiverse alternative matter sort of way that I can't grasp, I'll leave room for that...hypothetically. For now, to me, the null hypothesis is that paranormal experiences probably can be explained by natural means if we were able to objectively test them and take out errors in our own faulty sensory perceptions and memories. That being said. I won't try to debunk your experiences because I do enjoy reading them and thinking to myself ways to explain them naturally.
Oh don't get me going on the multiverse and how it might correspond to the paranormal. Considering that scientist are now pretty convinced that a multiverse is more likely than a universe, I think we have to reconsider a lot of what we think we know.
Part 2: As I got older, I had a harder and harder time sleeping with the door closed seeing the shadows under the door. I started to really get anxious at night. My dad was, and really still is somehow, a massive skeptic, so he told me, "Son when you see think you see the shadows, just get up and go look. You'll see there's nothing there or it's just me or your mom or your brother and you can go back to sleep." Well that was wrong. One night after I saw the shadows go past, I got up and opened my door. I had no reason to doubt my dad, so I figured, "oh he'll just be standing there having messed with the air conditioning and he'll tell me to go to sleep." Instead what I found was a blank hallway. I looked up and down and there was no one there. As I stood there the nightlight in the hall fell out of the wall and everything went pitch black. I literally screamed out loud, ran, and dove under my covers. This woke up my dad who angrily told me to keep it down. I told him what happened, he said I was imagining it, and he made me get up to go put the light back in the socket. Now to this day I cannot say the light was a paranormal activity. I don't know that. It is entirely within reason that one of us accidentally bumped into the light earlier and it coincidentally fell out of the socket at just that moment which created a dramatic (traumatic) event. However, from that moment on things changed at night. When I would go to bed, things in my room would move. I had a chest of toys in the middle of my room and two cabinets against the wall with some games and my jackets and things like that. The one that always moved though was this little dolphin magnet toy. It was one of those things that if you swung it, it'd swing until someone stopped it because of the magnets in it. It looked sort of like this and it would start swinging by itself at night. I would get up and stop it and it'd start again. It was about this time I started asking the entity (whatever it was, a ghost, spirit, whatever you want to call it) to stop. Usually when I asked the dolphin would stop, but something else would happen. I had a few of those toys where if you squeezed them, they'd say something and vibrate or dance around. Those toys would go off 2-3 times a week at around 3 am and wake me up. I positioned them differently every time trying to figure out if something was causing it. I'd put it on top of the toys, at the bottom of the pile, in the cabinet and it would still happen every night at around 3 am. Finally I took the batteries out and threw it away, but other things would still move. I'd find toys on the floor that I'd put away during the night. My cabinet doors would open and close in front of me. My parents never believed me and told me I was nuts, so I started testing the theories more. I'd put things in front of the closet that would get moved so the doors could open. I'd purposely swing the dolphin magnet toy to see if it'd stop by itself and it would. Looking back this was a pretty weird precedent to set, but it was easier for me to be experimental than to be scared all the time. I was still terrified, but at least curious. It's sort of funny, but I didn't outgrow sleeping with the covers over my head until college. It was just more comforting that way. Anyway, once I'd established a sort of give and take, stuff got more open. Things started happening in the day time and in front of other family members.
I just talked to a close friend of mine named Chris, I knew had a few weird experiences, and asked him to recount a few. The first I've told you all before in the last ghost threat on CL, but this time I kind of interviewed him to check for accuracy. I got a bunch of facts wrong, so I want to retell it. The story involves Chris and another friend named Joe. Both are like family to me. Close as can be, we've been best friends the majority of our lives, so believe me when I say I know neither of them are making things up. Joe is a super skeptic. He calls anything and everything paranormal BS, or at least he did. Then one day, maybe 10 years ago, Chris and I were talking and got on the subject of Ghosts. We were telling each other our own experiences. Then Joe chimed in saying something like "yeah, well we just don't know much about ghosts" and I thought to myself, this didn't sound like the skeptical Joe I know at all. Later I asked Chris what was up with Joe, and he knew exactly what I was talking about and told me this story. Joe and Chris were at Rosemead Shopping Square in Rosemead CA around mid day. It was an Asian market place with a bunch of small shops. Chris saw a stationary store and told Joe he wanted to go in and see what they had. As he and Joe were walking through the door entrance for the shop Chris saw out of the corner of his eye something move. He said it looked like a shadow on the wall. Like light passing through a plastic bag. Chris said it walked straight through Joe and moved towards the back of the store into what Chris assumed to be an inventory room. Just then Joe said to Chris "We have to Go! We have to Go Now!!" Sounding terrified. And Joe repeated it a few times as they started walking away. Chris has brought up the experience to Joe a few times, and Joe doesn't want to talk about it. We're all supposed to play our weekly online RPG together tomorrow, so I'm going to grill Joe to see if I can get him to open up and talk about it a little more lol. The other story Chris told me isn't nessisarily about ghosts, but it's paranormal as f***. He, his wife, brother and sister in law were all at Chris's house in San Dimas CA. They were all hanging out talking and having fun. Chris had a box of powdered donughts we wanted to eat, so he opened the box in the kitchen over the counter. He pouring the donughts onto a small plate he was holding, so everyone could share, and one fell off of the plate. The donught fell onto the kitchen counter, and as it landed, started to sink/phase straight through the counter and disappear. Chris said it wasn't like he looked away, or took his eyes off of the donut as it fell, he watched it fall and said it didn't bounce or anything, it took a good second or two and just sunk THROUGH the counter. When he saw this, he immediately screamed out loud "Did You See That?!!!" His wife was doing something else, and his brother's back was turned when it happened, but his sister in law was looking directly at him when it happened and her jaw was on the floor. She said she saw the whole thing, and just like Chris described, the donut fell on the counter and immediately just sunk straight through the counter. Chris couldn't believe it, so he and his sister in law searched the counter. Underneath it. On the sides of the counter. He opened up the drawers underneath. Checked to see if it could have rolled somewhere. He looked everywhere he could think of, and that donut was gone. He and his wife never found it.
I find these stories fascinating, probably more so even than ghost stories. Glitch in the matrix type of stories just boggle my mind.
BTW, my girlfriend spent the night at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum to do an investigation. Its supposed to be one of the most haunted places in the US. She said she heard some weird sounds, but didn't see anything haha
