ok maybe it was something else and all, hypnogogic sleep paralysis, or just in yr head, but...

actually, it once slammed my head in a door (no shit!)

also, there is a door in the house that is the FUNERAL DOOR (the house is over 200 years old), which was only used to take corpses out of the house. and if you walk out of it and are not carrying a corpse you will be CURSED. (my sister walked out of it the first day in the house.)

Strangely, I have no crystal clear pictures of this event in my mind -I sort of have to remember what I remembered happening, so I'm not sure how accurate it is. but my friend's story, last time I checked, was essentially the same as mine.

If someone were to ask me if I believe in ghosts, I would probably say no because I'm a skeptical bastard. Obviously this doesn't stop me from telling people I've seen one.

We could make out the shape of a 1940s-style car (I later saw a picture of a Morris Cambridge and was staggered by the similarity), with two figures gesticulating in the front seats. However, the car was *inside* the fenced off area, where there wasn't even room for a person to stand, let alone fit an automobile. And there was a fence round it!

The people in the car might have been heatedly arguing or fighting.

After about 10 seconds of us both looking at it in wonder and increasing fear, I drove off very quickly. We've been back there many times, but have never seen it again.

If someone were to ask me if I believe in ghosts, I would probably say no because I'm a skeptical bastard. Obviously this doesn't stop me from telling people I've seen one.

This is exactly how I feel too.

Today we went to a pub in the country that's supposed to be haunted. We went out on the balcony (from where one can see the hotel rooms that appaz have resident ghosts) and some random 3yo kid grabbed my hand and went bonkers pointing at something we couldn't see. His mum said he does that when he sees dogs. She asked him 'can you see woof-woof?' and he was all 'no no no no' and kept pointing at this thing that wasn't there. This went on for a few minutes.

In 3+ decades no child has EVER grabbed my hand, much less drag me away to show me something that wasn't there.

So we went back inside the pub and ANOTHER random kid grabbed me and tried to follow me in. Her mum pulled her away.

You can make what you like of that obv but children never interact with me ever so this is all a big giant bag of wtf.

(snoball starts writing a movie pitch for an ILX remake of The Sixth Sense)

i am 100% skeptic re: this stuff, and also a non-soul believer and atheist and all that crap but i have a dead serious documented childhood experience that contradicts that entire world view unless you get into some hippie energy release crapola which uh id rather believe in ghosts frankly. its kind of infuriating.

detailz plz

hrrrm

ah hell its late and i have beerz in me so why not. so key aspect here is that i am from deadset athiest non-spiritual parents, raised not to believe in any of this sort of stuff. still dont. anyway, the house we lived in at the time (ages 3-8 or so) was this insane creeeeepy old farmhouse and i had some sort of weird full on night terror thing that developed with the hallway between my room and my parents room, like several times a week. Still have distinct memories of a person shaped black mass, and a night where i stayed awake straight through because of a face (not pleasant) staring directly into mine, totally paralyzed and fucking terrified. before this gets all polterghoostie, i am still convinced this was some sort of hyper-imagination and whatever, because eh malevolent spirits seem like a stupid concept because A) dont believe in this whole spirit thing anyway B) i have no historical knowledge of any reason for old farmer dudes wanting to haunt some dumb kid living in their house C) even if dead peeps are against all rational and scientific thought hanging about they have better things to do than fuck with some uninvolved kid so whatever.

anyway, this was kind of an issue because i was not sleeping much and my mom was kinda worried about what was going on. however, she is also dealing w/ the fact her dad/my grandfather is in late stage leukemia, which (for the purposes of my own debunking attempts) i am also aware of, but being 8 dont really get. so she and my dad do what they can, but she is def distracted and dad is (fair enough) way more into taking care of her than my weirdo imaginary ghosts.

so anyway (fuck sorry about the run on but whatever) one night i go to sleep, probably expecting to get a dose of terrifying bullshit because thats kinda par for the course at this point but instead the hallway flickers and then sorta illuminates. i still have some sort of intense visual memory of this that i cant really describe, it was super fucking bright and kind of expanded physically from some sort of central point to fill the entire hallway and the room i was in to the point where it was kind of a negative image level of bright if that makes any sense, but not scary or painful or anything.

anyway, my mom wakes up and also sees this same shit happen and then subside, which since she is an adult and rational, she assumes is headlights or some freak in our house w/a flashlight. so she wakes up my dad, kinda freaked out. at which point i walk into their room (this i do not remember at all, but ive never said anything about what i do remember about the whole thing to either of my parents so) and say "Grandpa says its ok". At which point (like less than a minute srsly) the phone rings to let my mom know that her father has just passed away. The fucked up thing is that all the terrifying shit that was going on appears to have stopped that night. According to my mom I slept like a normal kid from there on out, and I have no memory of anything weird whatsoever.

This shit bugs me because i do not buy into it AT ALL, but its been nearly 30 years and i still cant figure out why i was so scared in that house, how that shared light deal lined up w/ the phone call (which i refuse to tell my mom about because i still feel like there is some sort of explanation, and why make her feel weird about her ghosty dad). ehhhhhhh. i still think its fucking bullshit but it fucking bugs me.

^ how did i miss this?

that is amazing!!!

idk what atheism or whatever has to do with ghosts, pretty sure the bible is silent on the subject

I was raised Catholic and there was very little said about ghosts other than the occasional reminder that attempting to communicate with the dead was a Very Bad Thing (something to do with the "dead" possibly being agents of the Devil iirc).

It's kind of hard to tell people they go to Bad Place, Good Place or Waiting Room when they die then tell them some people don't seem to bother and just fuck around in old houses scaring 8-year-olds.

Yeah, talking to the dead a no-no. Demons involved. Catholic Encyclopedia:

The mediumistic faculty, if it be the exercise of genuine power of communication with souls passed out of this life, must, according to Catholic theology, be effected not by use of a merely supernormal personal aptitude, but by a preternatural agency. It is the teaching of the Church that no good, but serious moral evil will be the ultimate result of invoking the intervention of such an agency in human affairs.

Suspect teaching on ghosts would be similar, but supernatural anecdotes told by priests at my school were generally about the dangers of demons and possession. Ghosts and hauntings more part of child-to-child folklore.

idk what atheism or whatever has to do with ghosts, pretty sure the bible is silent on the subject

belief in supernatural entities and the paranormal is the essential catholic experience.

jjj the confluence of events is fn weird to say the least. You can talk away all possibility of supernatural omgzs but when things like happen together obv something additional is going on.

My wife has had some freaky experiences ranging from one like jjj's to full-on séàncy stuff that cannot be explained. My freaky history is far less impressive but a few v odd things have happened (faces in photos, warning wind gusts in an old cemetery &c). When I was a kid I once woke up to see all my teddies holding hands in a circle, but that was just my father fucking with me.

I shouldnt laugh at that last sentence, but bwahahah what!

yeah I lol'd at that too.

I kinda do believe in ghosts or at least the possibility of ghosts but it kinda depresses me because I wonder if they have know the answer to why we exist or if they are just as clueless as we are and that would suck, to be clueless for eternity

I also frequently wonder if the ghosts of your dead relatives or ancestors just hang out in your room and watch you masturbate or have sex, that would be kind of weird

it'd be even more depressing if consciousness survived the death of the body, but only temporarily. after you died, your ghost/spirit would be overjoyed at the prospect of eternal existence, but an hour or a month or a million years later, it would just cease to exist. somehow a finite afterlife seems much bleaker and scarier to me than no afterlife at all.

it would be pretty awesome though if you could live in a bottle after death and chill out with link, tthat would be rad

or if you could live in a helmet and hang out with rogue trooper. oh wait that would be terrible.

Unregistered, traditionally ghosts tended to fade away after a few centuries.

idk what atheism or whatever has to do with ghosts

personally my atheism encompasses the idea that there is no afterlife or spiritual plane/world/whatev

Im not religious either but the thought that you just die suddenly and then ... nothing, freaks me out more than anything else. Not Existing is just incomprehensibly unpleasant to me.

it's kinda what happens when you fall into a deep sleep amirite

the thought of dying not suddenly and then nothing is much freakier imo, and probably makes for more unpleasant ghosts as well

I find the theories of TC Lethbridge which have come to be known as "stone tape" theory helpful in explaining many kinds of ghosts or hauntings.

That it doesn't actually have to be the spirit or soul, or a "part of that person" which does the haunting, but it's more like some kind of residue of emotional traces which have been captured or recorded by certain locations. Like you're viewing a slowly degrading tape recording of an event - because these kinds of hauntings often don't interact with others at all, they just carry on doing their ghostly business like an old subroutine.

daemons!

Mrs. Kkvgz had this childhood phenomena occur to her and her siblings which was characterized by a creeped out feeling that something invisible was weighing down on their chests while they were lying in bed. Now, this experience squares pretty well with the effects of infrasound on humans. However, she insists on referring to the experience by the name she gave it in childhood - "The Wr3stl3r" - which really creeps me out.

No ghost expereinces for me, although I keep an open mind about it.

Im not religious either but the thought that you just die suddenly and then ... nothing, freaks me out more than anything else. Not Existing is just incomprehensibly unpleasant to me.

The idea of continued existence is the most depressing thing I could possibly conceive of. Jesus, just let me STOP already.

I find the theories of TC Lethbridge which have come to be known as "stone tape" theory helpful in explaining many kinds of ghosts or hauntings.

Aiiii, but that's even scarier than the normal theory. [I'm guessing you must have seen the film The Stone Tape, right?]

The weight on the chest thing is ridiculously common - I knew that infrasound produced feelings of unease/fright etc, but thought that the weight-on-chest (often manifested in folk tales as a witch or goblin who sits on your chest to try to steal your soul) was more a product of sleep paralysis?

Mrs. Kkvgz had this childhood phenomena occur to her and her siblings which was characterized by a creeped out feeling that something invisible was weighing down on their chests while they were lying in bed.

Thats sleep paralysis. Its very common, and explains a lot of night terrors/seeing dark figures/beng unable to move or weighed down/sensations of prescences.

oop I didnt see the last bit of emily's post haha sorry.

Oh, I didn't read enough of this thread to get into the sleep paralysis thingy.

I've had that "weigh on my chest while lying in my bed" happen to me too as a kid, and it's definitely sleep paralysis. I remember the experience being very otherwordly and terrifying, no wonder it's the source of so many ghost stories and folklore.

I went through a phase of this a few years back for reasons I'm not sure of. I even went and had an OOBE once too, which was awesome. The sleep terrors, not so much tho.

I find the theories of TC Lethbridge which have come to be known as "stone tape" theory helpful in explaining many kinds of ghosts or hauntings.

That it doesn't actually have to be the spirit or soul, or a "part of that person" which does the haunting, but it's more like some kind of residue of emotional traces which have been captured or recorded by certain locations. Like you're viewing a slowly degrading tape recording of an event - because these kinds of hauntings often don't interact with others at all, they just carry on doing their ghostly business like an old subroutine.

I'm not sure how this is a better theory than ghosts being souls of dead people, as they both rely on a supernatural explanation. From a scientific point of view, locations can't capture "emotional traces" any more than "souls" can exist after someone dies.

This is a shame. I love trotting out my infrasound theory. "Perhaps it was some underground geologic event near your homestead, my dear. That could certainly have produced such low-frequency tones as to affect you physiologically." I think I'll keep the sleep paralysis thing under wraps for a little while longer.

i think 'ghosts' is a vastly misunderstood/misconceptualized arena, just as death is. there's so much we don't know about how the universe works and we're constantly creating new tools to allow us to perceive more of it. perception is one of the biggest issues re 'believing' or not, obv. i'm sure there's a scientific explanation for ghosts that is actually just a part of the bigger picture re matter and space/time.

the last time i experienced a ghost was in late april at a motel in eureka california, while on a road trip up the coast with a friend of mine, who is more sensitive to these things than i am but not a flake abt it or anything. after bringing our stuff into the room, on the second floor of this unremarkable two-storey motel, we started talking about how at home we felt there, how it felt like someone's house, which was weird b/c srsly this was a hotel in between two main roads, with pretty much no view, no-frills; we just needed a place to stay. we turned on the radio and started getting dinner together. the radio kept tuning in and out of the station it was on, but i thought nothing of it. then the toilet started running, on and off, randomly, even though we fixed it so it wouldn't. i hardly noticed tbh, and certainly didn't think about it being haunted, lol. we were just talking, as girls do, and it felt like a slumber-party, though it was just the two of us. got tired, turned off the lights, the toilet stopped doing the on-off running thing. fell asleep. the next morning, the radio stayed in tune, toilet didn't run at all, and the room felt like just any old room. once we're in the car, my friend says to me 'so, i didn't want to say anything last night, because i didn't want to scare you, but our room was totally haunted.' and i'm like, what? and she says, 'oh for sure, it was a young girl, about 11, she just wanted to hang out with us and went away when we started going to sleep.' then she talks about the radio and the toilet and how the person who checked us in put us in that room not just because it was available but because people had complained before about how they could hear the people upstairs walking around all night and it disturbed their sleep. i said, well, that's natural. she said there was something about the way the attendant said it. i said, okay then. shudder.

my mom used to live in an abandoned copper mining town in bc. haunted all over the place, apparently before the mining operation too (according to native community anyway). a woman once came into my brother's basement bedroom in the middle of the night and sat on his bed. she only vanished when he told her really loudly to get the f out.

a large transparent cube of air once took away my migraine

Interesting link re infrasonics, kkvgz. Reminds me of the work of Michael Persinger: he applied electromagnetic fields to the temporal lobes of test subjects, and many of them said they felt a "presence". He visited a young girl who was getting nightly visitations and found that the clock radio by her bed was emitting interference on almost the same frequency; took it away and supposedly they stopped.

Can't find a better link, but http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbraintrans.shtml and ctrl-F "Persinger", seems to be a slightly garbled transcript of the TV programme I first heard about this on

ps definitely not trying to say that this is the one cause of ghost sightings etc, just a link that I found interesting - please carry on with the personal experiences, sadly/thankfully I pretty much have none

a large transparent cube of air once took away my migraine

― titchyschneiderhouserules (s1ocki), Sunday, 1 August 2010 14:55 (3 minutes ago)

a friend of mine (who, incidentally, also has wacky sleep paralysis experiences) has a couple of times had migraines accompanied by, if I'm remembering correctly, some kind of infinitely repeating series of cubes flying towards her head. Which bring with them a horrifying sense of staring into some sort of metaphysical void. Which is kinda neat although apparently not much fun to experience.

I, on the other hand, have nothing 'paranormal' to share. Other than my encounters with vampires when I was in hospital aged 3.

wow that's nuts.

I just remembered something from not long ago I'd forgot all about.

A friend of me and R's came to visit, dude is reasonably into metaphysics and dreamtime stuff and shit (he is Nguyngar (sp?) tribe), but I dont think I knew that then.

Anyway Luke walks into my flat, and almost right away, nods casually into a corner of the hallway and goes "oh hey. Who's she?". No one was there. My other friend Dan who is also into this kind of stuff - but hadnt met Luke before - stared at him bog-eyed and said "I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST ME"

They both told me and R in bafflement about this teenage girl's presence in the hallway, as if it was no big thing. WTH.

a friend of mine (who, incidentally, also has wacky sleep paralysis experiences) has a couple of times had migraines accompanied by, if I'm remembering correctly, some kind of infinitely repeating series of cubes flying towards her head.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTkxmE2AAoo

This happened while I was lying in bed last night, my brain whirring erratically, having trouble falling asleep. Without really looking at anything, I was staring up at the ceiling fan and at the looping curlicue/vine patterns painted in the corners of the ceiling by the room's last occupant, a teenage girl. All was peaceful, when I suddenly noticed this twisting, flapping, batlike shadow-shape. It leapt out from the massed shadows around the base of the ceiling fan and sort of flared or danced across the ceiling to engage with the tips of the viney paint patterns.

At first I was sort of panic-shocked, unaware of what exactly I was seeing, knowing only that something was moving up there. Same sort of startled response I get when something moves unexpectedly in my peripheral vision, or when I momentarily mistake a coatrack for a person in a darkened room. But it kept going. The panic subsided, but the apparition didn't go away. It just kept flickering around up there, swooping out across the ceiling to the edge of the patterned area and then contracting back to the base of the fan. It looked mostly like a shadow, all curves and points like a bat's wing, but it also seemed perhaps to have a slight depth, like a thin, translucent patch of dense fog, but it was hard to tell.

This went on for at least a minute, maybe two. I didn't know what to do. I wondered about my mental health, but didn't feel crazy. I wasn't abnormally agitated and had no sense that the vision was important, that it was divine or evil or whatever. I wasn't asleep or even half asleep. I could move around, sit up, check the cat to see how she was reacting (she didn't seem to notice, which I found reassuring). It was just this, i don't know, this ghost. A gray, batty shadow-thing flapping around on the ceiling, sometimes indiscernible, sometimes several feet across. After a minute or two, it faded away entirely, and try as I might, I couldn't reconjure the vision. But WTF, ceiling? I am not ordinarily one to be seeing mystery things...

That sounds scary as hell!

it was blood-chilling, but only for the first 15 seconds, half a minute. after that, it was just sort of there, you know? it clearly wasn't hurting me or doing anything but flitting around. i was kind of scared, but more confused and amazed. i've always wanted to see something truly inexplicable, a UFO or a ghost or w/e, and now i have. in retrospect, it's easy to minimize or explain away as just some kind of weird brain/vision thing, like my eyes playing tricks on me, but at the time it was kind of mind-blowing.

i had an hallucination, i guess. from all the misspent youth. that's the nonbeliever in me talking, anyway, and the nonbeliever part = like 99%.

^ this was actually a good deal of what i was thinking abt at the time, once i got over the scared out of my mind part. "wow, so i'm hallucinating now. i'm a hallucinator. i hope this doesn't mean i'm about to go running out in the street naked with a butcher knife."

wish me luck tonight...

Hallucinations are actually pretty normal, particularly when going into/coming out of sleep. I've seen normal-looking spiders on my ceiling that weren't there, for relatively prolonged periods of time - not moving crazily, though...
Interestingly it's thought that it's the interpretation/your response to 'normal' events like visual/auditory hallucinations that would make you prone to developing psychotic symptoms or not. Er, so rest assured, it's fine! Or a genuine ghost...

moo hoo ha, ha

I wonder if staring at the fan sort of... hynotized you into a hypnagogic state? (or is it hypnopompic or whatever the other one is). I know how it feels to feel quite awake and see something that isnt there that then disappears: I think Ive mentioned the cat i hallucinated once on waking (that turned out to be my modem, but I swear, it was a big, black cat staring at me with glowing eyes...)

okay guys it's halloween time so share with the ilx family your scariest ghost story or hallucination or weird phenomenon you've experienced

sadly nothing like this ever happened to me unless i was partaking

i only have one, and i don't think it was real, but i have no other explanation

when i was a kid i used to have a tv in my bedroom. old school, 19" CRT style, with only a few network channels. only NBC, CBS, PBS, WB, and FOX came in clearly. ABC was fuzzy but still watchable. the others were just noise.

several different nights, something would appear on one of the noisy channels as i flipped through to the watchable ones. it was the silhouette of two hands, darker against the noisy background. think of a hand moving over a surface, from bird's eye view, top-down, like an instructional video. the hands would steadily move around the screen, with the fingers wiggling, like a magic trick. kind of a "aaaah ha!" motion, after a card trick had been performed. or something. it was very, very strange. and it happened on more than one night, just these hands moving on the fuzzy channel that normally had nothing on it.

and of course the best explanation was that somehow the tv was picking up a channel and i could barely see it. but what would the tv show be? a top-down view of hands performing tricks, without a cut to any other view, for minutes on end? wtf

so imo, satan

Maybe it was a number station for deaf spies

I had something like this happen when I was 8 years old. We were living overseas, and my grandmother and aunt came over to visit; while they were there, my sister and I had to share a bedroom so they could have my room. My sister slept i her bed and I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor for a few days. At the time I slept with a night light (yes at age 8, shut up) and so there was one on in the room. At one point -- and I still remember this vividly to this day, 40 years later! -- I awoke and looked over at the wall by my sister's bed and saw two shadowy, human-shaped figures, about a foot high. They proceeded to chase each other around and up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the other wall. I watched in absolute terror, unable to move or say anything, until I finally managed to pull the sleeping bag over my head and hide until I thought they might disappear. I'm pretty sure now it was sleep hypnosis, but it scared the living shit out of me at the time.

and of course the best explanation was that somehow the tv was picking up a channel and i could barely see it. but what would the tv show be? a top-down view of hands performing tricks, without a cut to any other view, for minutes on end? wtf

videodrome imo

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_Your_Skinny_Fists_Like_Antennas_to_Heaven#/media/File%3ALiftyrskinnyfists.jpg

http://cstrecords.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/cst012hires.jpg