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People's paranormal experiences

13:52 / 13.09.02

Has anyone here ever seen/experienced a ghost?

The closest I can come is one night when I was alseep I felt a cat jump onto the bed and start to walk up the covers toward my head. Given that I was a student living in a rented flat in Birmingham at the time and we definitely didn't have a cat this fair put the willies up me!

Now, being the incredibly brave type that I am (and remembering from childhood that duvets *can* stop anything from psychic attack to chainsaws) I ducked under the covers, and never actually saw the phantom cat, so I still have a lingering doubt as to it's authenticity.

solid~liquid onwards

15:38 / 13.09.02

i was in a tunnel that used to be an escape tunnel for a ruined mansion house, when i saw some weirdy face thing. needless to say i didnt go back down threre in a hurry... but i got a thing about facing fears (even with small stupid things) and i went back down there eventually...though no scary faces.

you puss! you were a student! at least 18!...the *ghost* crept into your room late at night and "put the wllies up you"! l0lbl3 ^_^

19:29 / 13.09.02

When I was about 9 or 10 I woke up in the middle of the night to find a man walking around my room. He seemed to be inspecting all my things and my first thought was that he was a burglar. At first I lay completely still, absolutely terrified, hoping he wouldn't hurt me. Then I started noticing things that were a bit odd. He seemed illuminated from within - it was just the faintest greenish glow, but it meant I could see him in complete detail, independent of any light (or lack of light) in the room. He didn't make any noise while walking around. And he ignored me completely.

I was at a complete loss as to what to do. My brain couldn't compute exactly what it was I was seeing. Eventually he came close to my bed and I sat up and lashed out with my arm. It went right through him. I panicked and ran to my parents room where I ended up sleeping on the floor next to their bed for the rest of the night.

I've only ever told a few people about this. All, with the exception of my Grandma, either assume I'm joking or try to explain it away as an hallucination or a trick of the light. Nothing, however, will convince me that it was anything other than a ghost. It's an almost impossible thing to explain to anyone who wasn't there, and you can't see what I saw and then be appeased by 'trick of the light' suggestions.

23:44 / 13.09.02

When I was young, I often felt "something" jump and land on the end of my bed. It usually happened late when the lights were off but I vividly remember one time it happened I was wide awake, reading a comic and I felt this thump on my bed. I put the comic down and looked at the bed. There was nothing there but a large, perfectly smooth area of the duvet, like something big, circular and heavy had been placed there. Very odd.

Also, my sister when sleeping in the same room once awoke in the night to find a deathly-pale woman's face looming towards her.

It was years after these events that I found out my Aunt died in that room when she was only 14.

Tryphena Absent

00:46 / 14.09.02

At the age of eight I woke up in the middle of the night to see a boy in my room. He was running towards the area where the fireplace would have been though it was knocked out by this time. I got this weird sense of urgency but it was like looking at a hologram, he wasn't moving but paused mid-run, as I watched the figure faded away. The oddest thing was that although he looked male I got a strong sense of the feminine from him... after a while I decided maybe it was a girl dressed as a boy. I guess I'll never know.

After we moved house to the one I live in now my brother woke one night to find an old woman sitting in the corner of his room watching him. Apparently she seemed terribly confused and sat frowning in his direction. Both of us describe our experiences as the most frightening of our lives, certainly for me there was something terribly intense about the whole thing, the atmosphere paralysed me where I lay.
I hope it never happens again.

01:11 / 14.09.02

There's pet ghosts all over my parents' house, I think. I started seeing my dog out of the corner of my eye; we had to give him away to someone who had more space for him to run around in, he was a very weird dog. I don't know when he died, I don't think it's plausible that he's still alive, he'd be ancient. There's also my ferrets that I sometimes see frisk by my periphery, and a cat that haunted the other too for a while.

XXII:X:II = XXX

02:55 / 14.09.02

Yes.

It was 1990 and I was 14, in my last summer at the summer camp in the Berkshires of MA that I went to for four years. It was the second night of the summer, and my friend Mikey and I were in the theater. Just the stage lights were on, though that was enough to illuminate to the back of the theater. I was leaning against a column on the stage while Mikey played the piano. Lazily I swung my eyes towards the stone fireplace, and that's when I saw it. I saw "it" because although it was shaped like a human, there were no discernible features, just as though someone had carved the shape of a person out of fog. Its arms were slightly outstretched, travelling slowly from left to right, directly through the benches. This lasted perhaps all of five seconds. I turned to Mikey to tell him, but when I looked back it was gone.

I wrote a memoir of this some years ago, where I linked that event with when I went back as a counselor at the same camp and got fired for a completely bullshit reason, and "hypothesized" that the ghost I'd seen at 14 was my frustration at age 20 travelling back 6 years. But at any rate, I know nothing more about the ghost, though of course after I saw it every other kid that summer claimed to see ghosts, too. Fucking trend-whores.

08:02 / 14.09.02

The house I spent most of my childhood in was haunted. It was a terribly unhappy place and for a long time I thought it was just me projecting my own miserable bastardness (I was not a happy child) - I often lay awake hearing footsteps coming up the stairs when there was no one there and whispering outside my window.... my brother and sister insist the place was haunted, too. We all remember sitting in the lounge and hearing the sound of someone running down the stairs, again when everyone who lived there was accounted for. I hated the place and wouldn't go back there if you paid me; it felt extremely malevolent. I argued this with a ghost hunter I met in Cornwall, who during a talk was saying how ghosts were not to be afraid of. He usually knew they were around by an unusual scent, and had been terrified when he first saw a ghost, but had got used to it. It would be good to experience something strange and try not to be scared, but I suppose most people are caught off-guard.

The other experience that springs to mind was when I was laying on a mattress on the floor of a squat, and a corner of it began thumping up and down. There was a stereo playing nearby so I turned it off, in case it was a vibration from the music making it happen, but it didn't stop. I wasn't too scared, just watched it for a while. Odd.

10:02 / 14.09.02

I've been scared away by a house.
Can't remember the place's exact address - London, on the border of Kilburn and West Hampstead.
I used to share an apartment with some other guys there, and my practicing jazz flute after dinner caused some problem - not that I play that bad, simply one of the guys was the sort that has to give you directions and "good advice" even if he admittedly has no experience in the field.
So I played for one hour every night, and then to unwind (= not to punch the guy in the face) I went for a walk in the neighborhood.
I like walking by night, and I've never had problems with roaming the city streets after sunfall.
Anyway, one night - this was march 1992 - I stopped in front of a semi-detached house, just because.
The place was pretty silent, and the house was completely dark.
I stood there like a booby for five minutes solid.
Then ran all the way home, carefully avoiding to look back, like my life was depending on it.
I was scared as hell.
In the morning I kicked myself for a self-suggestionating fool and dismissed the thing.

One week later a friend was driving me home after a night out and we passed the place again.
She mentioned someone had told her the place was haunted - suicide/homicide sort of thing, and something still hanging in there.
I had no trouble believing her.

04:39 / 28.06.03

It was early in the morning. I was wrapped up in a duvet, lying on my side, on the sofa watching TV. I felt my housemate come and sit beside me on the sofa. I had to get up for some reason, so I got up and turned to say hi to my roomate, who wasn't there. EEEEEEK!

I've also seen a ghost cat at the bottom of the stairs leading up to my apartment.

Spyder Todd 2008

17:25 / 28.06.03

Someone died in my house years before I lived there. I can hear noises that had no origin sometimes. And I've heard my dead cat in the same room as me, even meowing once.
I've been to other peoples houses who have confided in me that they felt there house or a room in it was haunted. There are certain places I go to usually that at times I just feel uneasy about for no logical reason. Weird stuff.

trouser the trouserian

09:49 / 30.06.03

At the age of 12, I awoke in the night and saw my grandmother outside her bedroom door (she used to open bottles of stout with the door jamb). Thought nothing of it until I remembered the next day that she'd died 2 days previously.

In my late 20's, I worked for a while in a large psychiatric hospital in Nottingham. One night in the nurses' home, I woke with the distinct sense of a 'presence' in my room, hovering over the bed. I 'projected' a pentagram at it and the 'presence' receded and went away. Next morning, I was sitting with the other nurses having a coffee when another student piped up "there was an evil spirit in my room last night". I asked her what time she thought that was and she replied that it was around 2.00am-ish, which was around the time that I had my visition. I said that it wasn't an 'evil spirit', just some poor wandering shade of a patient. The ward sister, who just been 'born again' a few weeks ago, looked up and enthusiastically agreed with me, which I thought was the really weird thing.

This hospital (Mapperley) incidently, was so 'haunted' that on one ward, there was a 'ghost book' where staff could report sightings - what time, what they saw, and where. It's long been turned into yuppie flats. Working night shifts there was definitely eerie at times. There was one corridor where staff would hear doors banging - only to find that they were securely locked by the time they reached them.

10:25 / 30.06.03

Ooof, that is scary. A mental hospital where the staff actually believe in ghosts and 'evil spirits', hear voices and are 'reborn'. That really makes one think about the validity of such hospitals. Having spent a week once in a mental ward as a sentence for receiving VALIS-like transmissions and holding conspiranoid beliefs concerning certain secret societies and the secret occult history of the world, I got the same feeling that the staff, especially the head psychiatrist, was a lot crazier than some of the patients. I don't even believe in ghosts or spirits or any of this!

21:21 / 30.06.03

oh dear, most of you guys have seen/met frightening beings. I never have and never want to because I've seen the shits they put into some of my friends. But in my old house when I was around 13 or 14 there was a girl around the same age as me who sometimes appeared in my room. Usually I'd be sitting in bed reading, the light fixture on the ceiling would start spinning like crazy and I'd see and feel her for a moment, she'd be standing by my door. She was lovely, she never frightened me, only gave me the impression that she was looking out for me. Man, I used to be sceptical about ghosts and their ilk but I've had a few experiences and feelings that felt very true to me. After the ill-advised ouija board phase of teendom my friend and I realised that if you invite spirits into your space like that sometimes they come back (AGAIN!!!) unbidden. We'd know they were around, we used to tell them to fuck off if we could sense them but now I'm far more polite. She had more experiences than me vis-a-vis the ouija spirits including one that got attached to her, resulting in the depression-in-the-bed-made-by-invisible-ass thing (alarming) and a floating pencil incident (no writing, I don't think, "he" wasn't strong enough for that). I don't particularly like talking about it actually but my girl was great. I'd really get a sense of security when she made her short visits. She never showed up after I got older than her though.

Anyone have any theories on this because although I've had enough experiences not to discount ghosts I'm really stumped as to how they fit into my belief framework. But I believe in them. Hard not to.

Spyder Todd 2008

00:16 / 01.07.03

I don't know, Slinky. I've always just assumed they were just dead people/animals. It doesn't make sense, but what ever does?