Halloween, as I've said, is one of my favorite holidays. They run all kinds of great horror movies and spooky "documentaries" on the edutainment channels all month. However, in our lives, many of us have things that - no matter how skeptical we are - can never be fully explained. This is the thread for those stories. I am a skeptic, an atheist, and a scientist. I believe, like Carl Sagan, that the cosmos is all that is, or was, or ever will be. However, I will always have a single nagging experience. About 10 or 15 years ago now, my dad had cancer. He had a fairly nasty surgery and went through a really long recovery process, and was getting back on his feet about 6 months later. This is the point where they go do some biopsies of lymph nodes and see if the cancer has come back yet. They take the biopsies and they do a frozen section on a few of them, which tells you if you have obvious cancer within a few hours. If not, then they send them off to the lab, and 6-7 days later, you get the REAL results. These are the longest 6-7 days of your life, and every time the phone rings on day 6 or day 7, you have a small arrhythmia. I woke up in the middle of the night on day 7 in a cold sweat. I said, to nobody in particular, "I need a sign that this is going to be OK." I fell back asleep and had a vivid dream about talking to a friend from grade school that I had not seen in about 12 years, Joe Velasquez. I had not thought about Joe in, well, 12 years. I woke up thinking that was a pretty shitty sign. I am driving to work that morning, distracted as all hell. I'm following a truck. I look up, and painted on the back of the truck - "Joe Velasquez Construction." It's the guy's dad's one-truck company (he was Joe Jr.) The results came back negative. Sadly they would not come back negative a couple years later and that was that. But this one time, they did. And thanks to Joe, I will always wonder... FOCUS: What unexplained, unexplainable, or paranormal phenomena have you personally experienced? What's your best guess as to an explanation?
focus: Not a damn thing. Confirmation Bias? Crazy talk. An invisible, undead benefactor however seems entirely plausible.
Where's ToyToy and his ghost telephone when you need him? There is one thing that I've never been able to explain that I used to hear all the time when I still lived at home. My room was above the kitchen/dining room and I used to wake up hearing sounds coming from downstairs--like someone was closing a cabinet door or was moving the chairs around the table. There were multiple times when it sounded like people were down there and I'd go to investigate and find nothing, only to hear them again once I got back up into bed. About a year ago, I was talking to my mom and sister and told them about it. My sister (her room also above the kitchen) said that she had heard the same things and didn't know what was causing them. My mother then informed us that she had woken up one night nose to nose with the ghostly face of a young girl staring right back at her. Thinking it was my sister, she simply asked "What?" and the face disappeared. Now, I don't believe in ghosts, and I'm convinced that my mother's experience was a result of a dream blending with reality (the same reason I woke up to a fucking tarantula on my pillow a couple times) and that our house wasn't haunted by little girls. The kitchen noises...well, like I said, I have no idea what caused them. It wasn't the furnace making noises, because I heard it in the summer as well, and I know for a fact that the two cats weren't to blame because there were multiple times when both would be in my room and I'd still hear the sounds. In retrospect, I could've put a camera down there to see if anything was going on. But then spending the money on a night vision camera set-up to solve such a stupid mystery would've been a horrible waste of money.
You know how, on first glance, a trash bag on the side of a street looks like a homeless person until you get a better view of it? The same thing exists with noise. Like how when someone doesn't speak clearly, you think they said something entirely differently? Things like wind drafts or other household noises can make it sound like people are talking. It's not an usual experience. Focus: Women. Somehow, the menstrual cycle is actually extremely easily understood and is under well-defined control of the endocrine system. But women on their menstrual cycles? Holy fuck.
We live on a ranch basically out in the middle of nowhere. From my house I cannot see a single light, and only occasionally do I hear a car passing a mile away or an airplane overhead. So when I go to bed clearly hearing carnival music or sometimes old country to the point where it keeps me awake, I get quite freaked. I have a baseball bat by the bed and several loaded guns throughout the house. I have been known to prowl our yard with one or more of these weapons on multiple occasions. I don't believe in ghosts, but when the house you live in is over 100 years old and the property on which you live was a known Jesse James hideout and has several springs on it named after dead Indians, you don't want to take any fucking chances.
One time after pooping I wiped my butt, and there was no poop to be found on the toilet paper! What the fuck kind of sick ghost hangs out in toilets eating the leftover poop off someone's bung hole? It makes sense why a fuck like that would be stuck in limbo.
I've had dreams with dead people in them... They're not extremely often, but usually it's my dead grandpa giving me advice. He was basically like a father to me and died of cancer when I was 13. Anyways, I had a long night of partying in college and passed out in my bed by some small miracle. I never have dreams when I'm drunk, but it was so lucid, I remember every detail of what happened. To keep it short, I was at my grandparents house and walked into my deceased grandfather's den, where he watched TV all the time. As I walked down the stairs, he stood up... looked at me and said, "They're gonna need you right now." Then he looked back up towards the stairs and my youngest uncle (about 38 at the time) walked in and gave his dad a huge hug. My grandpa told him how much he'd missed him, etc. I walked back up the stairs and heard my cellphone go off... which woke me up. It was my mom. My uncle died of natural causes in his sleep that night. It was shocking and completely unexpected. There's absolutely no reason why I would've had some preconceived notion of him dying. I lived two hours away, but a few blocks away from an aunt that didn't take it very well, so the grandfather's advice, once again, was completely relevant.
And yet you seem more than willing to take the chance that your mortal weapons will work on supernatural, unphysical, undead beings. Geez, wouldn't it be more likely that they could take those loaded weapons and turn them on you?
It's all I know. Everything I've ever learned in life has brought me to the conclusion that if you shoot something enough and in the right places it will die and leave you the fuck alone. I mean, yeah, guns may not work on ghosts, but they should.
About a year ago, people in the eastern part of the Denver-Metro area were stunned by a silver flying saucer hurling toward DIA. I hear it crashed in a field & was summarily confiscated by the local authorities. Rumor has it there's actual footage of this incident. Spooky!
I absolutely believe in ghosts, but more on a spirit/energy level than something from a horror movie. I'm really sensitive, as in I seem to feel all of my senses a lot more strongly than everyone else, and as silly as it may sound to a lot of people, I do think that I'm in tune with things that people generally don't bother noticing, like the energies of people and places. I've had a handful of people in my family die, and there are times when I can just tell that they're with me. I haven't had a ton of spooky stories; it's usually just little things that anyone who didn't want to believe it could probably write off as coincidences, but I like the idea that they're still watching out so I believe it. The best story to tell was when I was really young, I woke up to hear my mom playing the piano in the living room. I went out to go watch her. When I got to the living room, the music stopped, I looked over to the piano, and no one was there. And it was only then that I remembered my mom had died a couple weeks ago. I told my dad about it years later, who is usually very skeptical about all this stuff, and he said it happened to him one night too. Ooooo.
This doesn't fit the focus exactly but fucking WHOA: I don't......I can't......people are fucked in the head.
I don't know if this explains it, but I've seen similar things and I'm pretty damn sure they were satellites. Not all that spooky. I might be wrong though. On the subject of 'crazy shit in the sky' I was once driving to a bar with a friend and we saw a splash of green and orange light burst through the clouds. It then landed in a blast of bright colors. We had just been talking about alien sightings five minutes ago. Naturally we drove around for a couple hours trying to find the crash site, but with no success. The next day I found out a meteor was reported hitting a couple hundred miles away. It looked a lot closer and sure as hell didn't look like a meteor, but sadly, that's probably all it was.
As an insurance agent...Do you feel this would raise her insurance rates? Or does the fact she went so long without getting caught make her a safe driver?
I most defiantly believe in ghosts. One, because of the state of New York ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stambovsky_v._Ackley ) But also because the office where I work is haunted. Before the doctor bought it, the office used to be a funeral home. The basement (where I spend 90% of my work day) used to be where they did the embalming. I'm not sure if it's a man or a woman, but everyone in the office calls it "Sidoney" and it likes to play tricks on me with the files. I used to spend a few hours each month on reorganizing the filing cabinets, but I would come back the next day and they would be scrambled up all over again. Not so much that I can't get work done, but enough for me to occasionally lose files. Everyone accepts this as an inevitability and don't expect me to find most files. I eventually gave up on organizing the drawers all together. I just search harder for files. I know this seems like normal human error, but Sidoney also occasionally throws stacks of old files onto the ground. They've never hit me, but they've come close.
So you are more willing to believe that there is a supernatural force at work that physically defy the laws of nature; rather than to realize that someone in your office is a dick because they realize you are obviously gullible, or that someone just doesn't put things back in the right place? I find most sightings of ghosts and UFOs and all that other shit is just mistaken identity, and a lack of curiosity to actually try to explain what they saw. People want to believe in things that aren't there. Most ghost experiences occur when someone is in a darkened place where the body is hyper sensitive thanks to evolution, and ascribe noises that they don't hear in the day as spooky beings. Or, when someone is just waking up in the middle of the night, and the mind has just been woken from a dream, and they are in a middle state, between consciousness and unconsciousness. They will see all sorts of things, and where as most people would ignore this, some people will take what they see not as a trick of the mind, and rather something supernatural. UFOs are almost always something that can be explained easily, airplane, ducks, balloons, the moon, Jupiter, Venus, and not aliens. Any object that is in the air and can't be explained immediately is not an alien ship, as UFO has become synonymous with. The one time that I saw something that I considered a UFO was two years ago while stargazing, I saw what looked like a satellite moving slowly across the sky, and then it started to grow a faint tail, like a comet. Then the tail dissipated, but the light was still there. Then the tail grew again, and dissipated yet again. I couldn't figure out what it could have been. Most people would think, oh I saw a UFO and tell people about how they saw a UFO. Others would see this as proof of aliens, and then write up a long conspiracy post on the internet. Then there are people like me who actually are curious. A couple of days later, I realized what I had seen. A satellite was ejecting propellant, which reflected the light of the sun. See, easy, natural explanation.
I've always wanted to experience something paranormal or unexplainable, but that's yet to come my way. Most people assume it doesn't happen to me because I unlike some people WANT it to happen. I would have to say it's other peoples stories that encourage me to go out there and stand around waiting for Casper to show his fag ass. Hell, I've even gone to a few cemeteries at midnight/11:10 or whatever suspicious times and days have been thrown my way. Any of you have friends like this? Or are this person? Always wanting see a ghost or something weird move? And just so you all know (because I know you don't care) the day I do run into something unexplainable or mysterious and it freaks me out or whatever the fuck happens, I will explain it to the best of my ability on here. That is all.
The easiest example is that for the last two weeks or so, I've been pulling a lot of late nights. I prefer to get a room in the Health Science Library until they close, and grind it out, but for some reason, the library has been packed this semester and they've been running out of rooms. My department's building is open 24 hours a day, even though no one is in there. They simply don't lock the main doors, and prefer to lock the doors to offices and whatnot. Not the smartest idea, but I digress. I've been working in the lounge of my department's building and I hear some unnerving shit from time to time. Noises, footsteps, music, at times. It's a bit unnerving, but I know that if I stay in my room and try to do work, I'll fuck off and spend time on other shit (like I'm doing right now.) I would normally try to attribute the noises to mental fatigue and the late hours, but the fact that my department's building is the old Freedman's Hospital that treated black folk prior to the end of segregation doesn't help my imagination. The basement is especially creepy, especially since the lab space seems to be converted from an old operation room or morgue or something. I've always believed in ghosts. When I was twelve years old, I swore my house was haunted. Watching shadows dance around on the ceiling, watching the shadows take shape and form and then slowly melt back into the darkness creeped my 12 year old self out. I would freak out, and the hair on the back of my neck would stand up. It bothered me so much at one point that I refused to sleep in my room, camping out in the living room instead, which was only slightly better. My bedroom was adjacent to the living room, but the figures I thought I saw and the swirling shadows that I perceived in the darkness seemed to stop at the entrance of the living room, but never entered. I would also feel someone's eyes on me when I would be on the computer doing schoolwork or playing computer games late at night. It felt like someone was hovering behind me, watching me, and my 12 year old self would say a prayer, turn around, only to be freaked out over nothing. Or at least I didn't ever see anything when I turned around. My mother also believed my grandmother could put hexes on people who wronged her. I never got a chance to ask her myself before she passed back in 2008, but I do know both my mother and grandmother told me that they had experiences with ghosts as well. My mother swears that before I was born, she'd see a small child that was pretty close to myself running around the house, and that it used to scare her so much she'd have my father come home from work. My grandmother told me about two experiences, once, back in the day, she was walking home at night, she felt something lift her up and carry her several feet and then drop her. The other experience was when she was a little girl, she was in bed and she heard her bedroom door open, footsteps leading to the foot of her bed, and then pressure on the bed and on her feet, as if someone was sitting there. When she looked to see who was sitting on her feet, there was no one there.
I was hammered drunk one time and saw the stars spinning. No way, I thought. So I closed my eyes and counted to three. One, two, three. Holy fucking shit...the stars kept spinning. Then I puked on my unicorn T-shirt. Aliens?