I got LJ'ers to tell me about supernatural experiences they themselves had seen/heard/felt. My friends list must have had a lot of turnover since then, so in the spirit of Halloween, I shall ask it again:
Do you have any ghostly encounters? Will you tell us about them? I want only first-hand ghost stories, stuff you personally experienced, not a tale handed down from your grandfather or your mother-in-law (even though those may be cool). Also, feel free to do your best at explaining it - e.g., "But then, I was looking through a pane of glass, so I suppose it could have been a reflection..." - just to make this as scientific as possible.
Banshees, poltergeist, telekinesis, and other strange earthly phenomena are fair game, too; it doesn't have to be an actual visible "ghost."
As to whether I believe in ghosts: my answer basically is that I haven't ever seen one, but some part of my mind thinks they're possible. Or, rather, hopes they're possible, because it would suggest life after death and all kinds of interesting physics-related things.
Let's have 'em!
*switches on a flashlight for the spooky-up-the-face-lighting-effect and hands it to whoever is first*
Way back in May '03
Do you have any ghostly encounters? Will you tell us about them? I want only first-hand ghost stories, stuff you personally experienced, not a tale handed down from your grandfather or your mother-in-law (even though those may be cool). Also, feel free to do your best at explaining it - e.g., "But then, I was looking through a pane of glass, so I suppose it could have been a reflection..." - just to make this as scientific as possible.
Banshees, poltergeist, telekinesis, and other strange earthly phenomena are fair game, too; it doesn't have to be an actual visible "ghost."
As to whether I believe in ghosts: my answer basically is that I haven't ever seen one, but some part of my mind thinks they're possible. Or, rather, hopes they're possible, because it would suggest life after death and all kinds of interesting physics-related things.
Let's have 'em!
*switches on a flashlight for the spooky-up-the-face-lighting-effect and hands it to whoever is first*
Comments
And I see shit fly around in my room all the time. I'm told that could be hypnogogic sleep disorder. I may have spelled that wrong, but it is when your body wakes up and you are "awake" but your brain is still in something near REM sleep.
(Also, I would like to point out that LJ's spell-checker recommends "spongecake" as an alternative to "hypnagogic. Hm.)
The jury's still out as far as I'm concerned. There's no way for me to say for certain that it wasn't just a cat fight or some other animal making noise that happened to stop making the noise at the right moment. To be honest, I can no longer remember exactly what the wailing sounded like, only that I was convinced at the time that it sounded nothing like a house cat. I do remember very clearly that the wailing went silent the instant I thought "In the name of Christ, please go away and leave me alone." (Okay, so I could have been addressing an evil demon. You still say "please" because you never know.) At the time, this seemed to me proof that it had been some kind of malicious spirit. Who knows.
That's it for me. Other than that, I'm pretty darn boring.
One time when I was maybe 19, in the middle of the night, in a hotel on the wild and windy Oregon coast, I was convinced I heard chanting of some kind, fast and sort of pagan-sounding. It didn't help that I had recently heard there were actually human-sacrificial-type cults active in the region. (Oregon is great that way...) Everyone else in my room was asleep and I didn't dare wake them up just yet. But I was sure some people with torches and black robes were going to bust through the sliding glass door (we were on the ground floor, right on the beach), drag me outside at knifepoint, and throw me in the middle of a strange symbol traced in the sand.
Then I figured out it was just the humming of the refrigerator in the unit, mingling rhythmically with the wind from outside. Heh. Ah well. The point is, I know how spooky it can be when you hear (or seem to hear) nighttime chanting/wailing! Yeah...
Re. human sacrifices: the one year that I attended Christian school, they showed us this video that was supposed to educate us about how eeeevil Halloween was and how dangerous it was to go out at night on Halloween, etc. They had interviews with surviving the victims of cults that did commit human sacrifices (not sure if there were any from OR or not...) and several of them described having not only their wrists cut but the soles of their feet as well. I had nightmares about having my feet cut open for weeks after that.
Now my college has been around since the Civil War and back then it was an all girl's seminary. And the dorm I happen to be in has been around for a very long time. So the possibility that it might be haunted isn't new to me. Was the figure a ghost or just my imagination? I like to think it was the spirit of one of the old students here from back in the day. But then, I believe in everything from the Abominable Snowman to zombies (just call me Mulder ^^).