One never remembers the numerous times something happens and there is no eerie coincidence, only the time when there is that eerie coincidence. You don't consider all the times your friend calls and there is no thought of him, only the time he calls and you were thinking about him.

Another story (similar to Ozone's): One of the residents in my building was freaked out and called the police saying there was a pair of eerie yellow eyes staring at him form outside his window. Being the security guard on duty I escorted the cops up to the room and the man who had some prior problems with delusions was taken to the hospital for observation.

Except this time I ascertained he really had seen something. The lighting in his living room had been reflecting the eyes of his cat onto his picture window.

Most full body manifistations are tricks of light and shadow that are uncommon enough that they don't register as things we see normally. Our minds are also hardwired to discern human features in random shapes and any criminal lawyer will tell you just how undependable and subject to misinterpretation and reinterpretation eyewitness testimony is. The memory plays tricks and you remember seeing things that were never there.

I know all this, but I still love reading the stories. :)

bravo1102
I know all this, but I still love reading the stories. :)

I know the feeling. Despite my skepticism and attempts to explain away most supernatural occurences, I still love hearing about them.

I've had a few experiences myself.

in no real order, here they are:

I was living at this boarding school at the time.
It has those creepy underground tunnels and such that's been there for a very long time… supposedly was built a little bit before (or during the same time as) WWII started. those tunnels also has those “secret” rooms, etc. Some are hidden but easily accessed by that cliche bookcase-door thing, and other more creative means such as a illusion wall (a fake wall that's not really there). Those rooms used to be things like kitchens (now abandoned and dusty), some actual living quarters (also abandoned)… and other tunnels that just connects with other buildings such as the school garages, the farmhouse, etc. there's actually animals on the school premises. it's basically a creepy old-school looking boarding school in the middle of nowhere, with underground tunnels/secret rooms that was apparently built for no good reason. totally the perfect setting for any supernatural occurrences, right?

Anyway, there's a few ‘special’ rooms underground there that's been the source of a number of rumors… like how there used to be some sort of religious cult that supposedly committed suicide together there in those rooms, etc. you know how it is…teenagers love all sorts of outrageous rumors like that, even if it's not true. Anything to ease the boredom of living in the middle of nowhere.
Anyway, there's this weird room that when the light's turned on, is completely BRIGHT white all over the whole room. It's a white, blank space save for a mysterious black iron door on the other side of the room opposite the door you just come in. It's a door that's actually been wielded shut to the point where it's completely impossible to open it, or even remove it.

That room's been very popular amongst all the teenagers… we all often visited that room in the tunnels, just to speculate about why that door was wielded shut. some would imagine gruesome things happening, like some murderer doing that in order to hide the corpses that way. Others would just imagine that it was some great ominous secret that The school was guarding, etc… although nothing to do with corpses as seeing that was too gruesome for some to think about. It's also supposedly the most haunted room in the whole underground labyrinth of tunnels and “secret” rooms. (I put quotes around secret, because honestly everyone knows about all of those rooms. and if everyone knows, then they're not really secret are they?)
It's been the source of a many reoccurring dreams, some of which I still have to this very day.

Getting to the point of this ghost story… my best friends and I were walking down to the tunnels when school was out for the day, and we wanted to have some fun just wandering around in the maze of tunnels just before dinner time.
(yes, we pretty much lived at the Boarding school). Anyway, all three of us could had sworn that after a few minutes we saw somebody else walking like 19 feet in front of us. We didn't know if the person was a female or a male, what with the school being coed. But the person appeared to have this glowing outline or something which I thought to be slightly werid.
It's hard to explain… but at the time I figured that maybe that the person just had an electric lantern or a flashlight in front of himself/herself and that light was just showing up as an “body outline” from the back. If that makes sense to you?
Anyway, all three of us wound up following “that person” as seeing the tunnels could still creep out even a group of three… and the more people we were with, the better.
We tried to catch up to that person so that we could take a better look at who that person was, and maybe even start up some conversation. But when we tried that, we couldn't catch up no matter how fast we ran for some reason. We actually wound up in that weird white room with the black door! and at this point the person completely vanished. There was no other way that the person could had gone, as seeing it was a compete dead-end.

my best friends wound up being so creeped out by this that they wanted to go back up to the school buildings right away, despite my protests. I wanted to find out how this phenomena could had occurred and if there was some way to debunk it. but my friends would have none of it.

one theory I first thought of to explain this was that it could had been some sort of “reflection” of our shadows, etc. But the thing is…we could sort of see in detail what the person had been wearing, etc. And it wasn't certainly the same school uniforms we had on. the person had appeared to to be wearing those dated-looking clothes… something you'd see from the 40's or something like that. At least, it was what it had looked like from the back.
———————–

in one of the other ‘special’ rooms, there was a bunch more of girls and guys this time besides just me and my best friends. We were holding a ghost-hunting party… Ouijas weren't allowed on school grounds, so we tried the next best thing… provoking the spirits. Apparently if you cussed, and called the ghosts cowards, etc in an highly haunted area… then that was just as likely to cause an reaction from the “other side”.
We were walking into one of the abandoned kitchen rooms while making an spectacle of ourselves like that… when all of a sudden something flew up at the group and then crashed against a wall!
Nobody was in the room, and the thing that had apparently flown at us on it's own was a metal pitcher. half of the group took this to be proof that ghosts existed, and that this was their way of telling us to shut the f**K up.
the other half tried to debunk it, saying that somebody in the group had to be playing a joke.

Ghost or joke? you decide.

That was my supernatural experiences in school.

Outside of it… well, my experiences there was a little bit more personal. It had to do with my grandmother dying and everything.

Needless to say, I had a few dreams in which she spoke to me… and she told me things that she wanted me to pass on to other family members. I'm not going to say what she told me here, as seeing it was highly personal. I'm sure you'll understand.
Anyway, even though I knew that it was most likely just a dream that meant nothing, I choose to follow the wishes of my grandmother in my dreams. So I conveyed the messages to some of the family members. Anyway… they were completely shocked, because it had been things that only they and my grandmother had known about. It was things between the two of them… and certainly not something that the rest of the family knew. I had apparently recalled events that happened before I was even born… things that only my grandmother could had known about because she was there with them.
Anyway, we all took this to mean that my grandma was telling us all not to mourn, etc.. and that we'd eventually meet again one day.

personally… I'd like to believe that. I'd love to believe that those dreams were more than just dreams of pure coincidence. of course, I do have my doubts like everyone else.

Just because you can explain a lot of incidents (8 out of 10 times), doesn't mean you can simply dismiss the rest.

“Logically can't be” something isn't a logical conclusion. “There must be an explanation” is. Remember, take away all the conjecture, theory, and disbelief and what you have left with, no matter how strange, is the truth.

I find the paranormal stories to be HIGH-larious.

Reminds me of the witch burnings and stuff when people were eating wet rye, were hallucinating and ended up thinking they were seeing witches.

If they put more people on the whole paranormal business, then maybe we'd be able to explain these things.

They didn't think they saw witches, they just didn't know what was going on. So, at the time, it was something paranormal (above the normal) going on to them.

In the future if we learn exactly what is going on with the hauntings which cannot be explained now, it will become the norm when something happens. Even if we learn that it is unseen energy by beings on another level of existence.

Puff_Of_Smoke
I find the paranormal stories to be HIGH-larious.

Reminds me of the witch burnings and stuff when people were eating wet rye, were hallucinating and ended up thinking they were seeing witches.

If they put more people on the whole paranormal business, then maybe we'd be able to explain these things.

I'd heard that the whole “poisoned Bread” theory has been largely dismissed by serious studiers of the event. The more likely explanation given is that people were just being jerks.

Did you ever see that Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”? Basically, people are given reason to believe that aliens have attacked their street, and as accusations fly they find that the best way to get someone to keep from blaming them is to shift blame to someone else. Old jealousies manifest, with people blaming anything one person has “better” than the others being reason to accuse them of being the cause of everyone else's problems, since they're clearly “exempt”. That's pretty much what the Salem witch trials were.

Ink's right. All it takes is hysteria and a mob. Mobs tend to be stupid, evil and vindictive.
There have been other cases: not log ago in India there was mass hysteria over some murder and attacks, there were rumours going around that the attacker was a cyborg American agent with superhuman strength. lol!
People were actually believing that… This is urban, big city India too, not rural, crazy religious India.

Similar stuff in Africa- when murders and attacks happened people believed it was witchcraft and set upon and killed various people believing they were the witches that caused it. This was only about two yeas ago.
————–

So, while it IS fun to believe in the supernatural, people should NOT take it too far. And they also don't have any excuses for doing that either, like drugs, or poison bread etc. They're thinking, sane people, perfectly able to use their own judgement and work things out sensibly from what they KNOW of reality. There's no excuse for idiot mob violence.[

I remember a similar discussion. You can see it here. It's pretty old so posting in that one would be some serious necroposting.

Anyways I remember being very active in that one and I told few stories I've heard and experienced. Well since this is a new discussion and there are allot of people here who never read the old discussion, I've decided to retell one personal experience that I posted before. Now don't hate me but I'm gonna copy/paste this:

Product Placement
I was working at a service gas station for few years as a petrol attendant(the guy who pumps the gas in your car so you don't have to).

Anyways the most troubling thing that happened to me was that one day a car drives to a service pump. As I walked towards the car I noticed two people siting in it: a man in the drivers seat and a woman on the passenger side. The man was busy removing his belt and putting the handbrake on and various things like that while the woman just sat there, looking right at me.

I made eye contact with the woman for about a second as I walked up to the car and she looked sad to me, maybe depressed. I didn't think about that much back then so I kept walking around the car towards the fuel intake which was on the passenger side. I opened it up, looked for the petrol brand label and opened the front passenger door to ask if they wanted me to fill up the car.

That's when I noticed that the passenger side was empty and that the man was alone in the car.

I'm taken back by this realization and I immediately start scanning the parking lot and the store to see if maybe she had left the car without me noticing and had run in to pay. So there I stand in my confusion and I look back in the car. This time I notice that the driver is looking at me funny. I decide to lean in and ask him:
“Did.. was there someone siting here?”
Him:“No?”
Me:“Oh….”
Him:“……?”
Me:“Do you want me to fill it up with unleaded?”
Him:“… Yes.”
Me:“Ok then.”
So I filled up the car, the driver payed for it and happily, but slightly confused, drove away.

To this day, I can't explain it.

I've been told that when I was a child there was a spirit of an old lady in the house we had just moved into that didn't like that we had moved in. She talked to me alot and my mom and my sister sometimes found me in the basement playing with her. Eventually she accepted that we were the new homeowners and moved on. I have no recollection of this since I was only around three.

I never wanted to admit that I saw a ghost both then and now and as an excuse for the old lady I always stated that she must have been an imaginary friend. Why an old lady but not a magic dragon I don't know. I guess I would have to ask three year old me. Unfortunately for the skeptic in me, I'm unable to use the same reasoning on the gas station event.

Inkmonkey

Puff_Of_Smoke
I find the paranormal stories to be HIGH-larious.

Reminds me of the witch burnings and stuff when people were eating wet rye, were hallucinating and ended up thinking they were seeing witches.

If they put more people on the whole paranormal business, then maybe we'd be able to explain these things.

I'd heard that the whole “poisoned Bread” theory has been largely dismissed by serious studiers of the event. The more likely explanation given is that people were just being jerks.

Actually there's a case of witch hunting which is considered a text book case of this “poisoned bread” theory.

It happened in 1655 when this bishop called Sire Jon Magnusson and his family became seriously ill. No one knew what was causing the illness and since it wasn't spreading, people started to assume witchcraft. The bishop accused this farmer and his son who were known for their dabbling in alternative/holistic forms of medicine, a.k.a. witchcraft. The bishop and the farmer newer saw each other eye to eye and the farmer actually admitted his involvement in witchcraft. They were burned for their crimes in 1656.

Now here's were the story gets interesting.

The illness still lingered and thus the bishop looked around for other culprits. The next victim in his holy crusade was the daughter of said farmer but he lacked the necessary evidence and actually lost. The daughter then proceeded to counter sue the bishop for false accusation and slander. That may not sound like a “gasp” worthy thing but back than that was a serious accusation against people in high positions.

Anyways the conclusion of this tale was that one of the things that the bishop did while defending himself against that accusation was to write a book called “pislarsaga” (the martyrs tale) where he explained in great detail the horrors that he and his family went through. Not known then, the descriptions of the symptoms almost perfectly match those that people get who are regularly consuming food infected with a particular fungus. Fungus that grows on for example Oh-I-don't-know-maybe-wheat-that-lies-for-a-month-in-a-damp-cargo-hold-of-ship perhaps? It was not a well hidden secret that the quality of food that was shipped around that time was abysmal by the time it reached the destination with the exception of spices maybe.

The running theory is that the bishops entire years supply of wheat was tainted by this fungus and that the family was simply suffering from the toxic effects that caused the hallucinations and pains they experienced.

Inkmonkey
Y'know, I've been living in a funeral home for the past 3 and a half years and nothing even remotely supernatural has happened. It's actually kind of disappointing. I mean, sure, there's some creepy stuff around (like the red “EXIT” light at the bottom of the stairs that makes it look like a gateway to some Halloween Theme Park Hell from the hallway), but no sounds or sights that couldn't be explained through very mundane means.

Haha, that light at the end of the hallway does sound creepy.
But no, just because a building may be a funeral home or once was doesn't mean weird things are automatically going to happen (unless one scares themselves up to it). The example I gave isn't the only funeral home I've investigated, it was the only one that something happened in. To be very honest, it is the only location I ever investigated that something DID happen in that could not be explained. :/


Personally, I love true account ghost stories and urban legends because they make life a tab bit more interesting.

My father did a phone interview once for a book called Haunted America. The house is the only house listed for Massachusetts. After that my family has found a number of websites with some pretty specific info about the history of our house although we have never talked to anyone since the book and that was over 10 years ago.

http://www.strangeusa.com/ViewLocation.aspx?locationid=5095

http://www.newenglandparanormal.com/stories/story_9.htm


DM Jim