If you don't believe in anything "woo"......

[GameOfJones]

What do you tell yourself when something weird happens?

I think I need talking down as I categorically do not believe in anything supernatural and genuinely think the brain is an amazing thing that we don't fully understand. So I think most "paranormal" events are psychological.

But yesterday, I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth and I genuinely felt like someone brushed past behind me. So much so that I turned round as I wondered whether the door had blown open or something. It hadn't.

Just now, I was loading the dishwasher and thought I could hear one of the DC humming a tune upstairs. Thought that would be weird as they should be asleep so poked my head round the door and absolute silence. Both DC fast asleep.

I'm the only adult in the house, DH is away with work so please do talk some sense into me before I freak myself out!

Dh is away - you are probably feeling a little nervous, your senses are heightened, thus you think you feel or hear things that aren't there?

Just now, I was loading the dishwasher and thought I could hear one of the DC humming a tune upstairs. Thought that would be weird as they should be asleep so poked my head round the door and absolute silence. Both DC fast asleep

That's like something from a horror film.

I'd be sleeping with the lights on tonight.

I was once washing dishes at the sink one afternoon, middle of the day and DH and Dd both upstairs. I vividly and absolutely felt someone lightly blow gently into my ear.

I wasn't scared but definitely felt it.

I’ve twice felt like someone very clearly touched my shoulder, years apart and in different countries (so not a ghost in same house). I can’t explain it either. Could a neighbour have been humming outside in their garden near your kitchen window?

Have heard loud footsteps upstairs above the kitchen in my DF’s house when I was in the kitchen, and I went to the door to call up the stairs to him and out of the corner of my eye I saw DF sitting at the dining table reading a newspaper in the next room. No one else home at the time but step-DM always felt there was something weird in that house.

I just assume my senses are doing something weird. I can be going about my day and suddenly taste a random food I never think about, so I think the random brushing or pressing feelings people get are the same kind of thing?

I don't believe in anything woo, but have had a couple of odd things.

For example, one day I heard my daughter's horse CLEARLY, as if he was right outside my bedroom, making his 'apple noise' (he used to get very excited when he saw a human with a bag which, he predicted, had a treat for him inside.) It went like this 'hrumphy hrumpfy hrumpf!' - absolutely unmistakeable.

The horse wasn't even dead yet! (so no good thinking 'ah his ghost had come back with a message'. )

But it was really clear! I think sometimes our brains scrabble to interpret a sound, or a half-seen sight, and just put in their 'best guess'.

There's lots of examples of things where our brain interprets things that aren't actually there. The optical illusions that looks like they are moving, the music where you can "hear" the lyrics but no one is actually singing, the coloured picture that is actually black and white etc

Our brain learns things that we experience and then sometimes slots those things in incorrectly. That's all it is. A car radio half heard, brain processes and suggests child humming.

No weird things happen.

I had a really odd thing happen. I was in my daughter’s room and saw a glimpse of my husband walking into our room really fast, I heard him too. I was wondering what he was up to as no hello and looked quite furtive. I went in there to see what he was up to and nobody was there. Looked outside, no car, looked on findmyiphone to see he was at work ten miles away. Really, really odd, not frightening as just thought it was him. Expected to have a police car call to say he’d been killed as people see ghosts when their loved ones die, but he came back two hours later totally fine.

He's a medic so totally non woo, I told him and he didn’t say much, probably just thinks I’ve got something wrong with me, that’d be his favoured explanation!

Can’t explain that one. Might be me having some kind of psychotic event but given I was calmly doing housework it’d be unusual.

If it is a spirit around you it’s not going to hurt you. I saw DH months after he died, he was leaning against a tree in the garden. ( I’m hoping he was impressed by my handling of the ride on mower) I felt my cat jump onto my bed days after he was pts. I’ve seen “ people” in various places who weren’t physically there, never been bothered. What’s to be scared of?

I would assume it was just my skin tingling, like a nerve thing. Sometimes I can feel the skin 'crawling' on my back. It's my nervous system.
Wouldn't give it a second thought

Just now, I was loading the dishwasher and thought I could hear one of the DC humming a tune upstairs. Thought that would be weird as they should be asleep so poked my head round the door and absolute silence. Both DC fast asleep

Well the key phrase here is 'thought I could hear', isn't it? Imagining things or being mistaken about hearing something are both pretty common things to do, and about twelvety billion times more likely than it being something 'woo'!

Minor processing glitches. Honest. Fascinating stuff.

We are creatures of habit and don't consciously process input from our senses. It's interesting both the things you experienced happened when you were engaged in highly routine procedures you perform on auto-pilot,probably when you were tired.

Phantom Sensation - this really is a thing. There's been research in this field due to the misery caused to amputees who suffer pain in missing limbs. The conclusion to date is that we know very little about how our sense of touch operates. It turns out that we are not infallible in identifying touch and where it is occurring. We may be more likely to misidentify if we are out of routine. You may have been leaning at a slightly different angle or holding your arm at a different angle. This caused a pressure on your back that you identified as being unusual. Our brain likes to identify things and come to the explanation that someone brushed past us.

Identifying noise - we tend to be bad at this. It's possible there was some slight noise that had a note,tone,or frequency,your brain associated with your child humming. Alternatively it was uncannily quiet,at which point we do sometimes "hear " silence as a sort of buzzing/humming. Is DH usually in another room watching TV while you load the dishwasher or are the children usually there?

Hope this helps.

I often feel a cat walking across the foot of our bed at night. As anyone with cats will know, it is an unmistakable sensation. We have cats, but this frequently happens when I know that they are definitely not in the bedroom and the door is closed. I've got used to it now.

I didn’t believe in ghost until i saw it myself. I was in my early 20’s and in Indonesia. Me and my boyfriend back then was lost while driving through woods and there was so many bamboo trees. Its a bamboo woods. We are young and stupid we got horny suddenly and had sex in the car. Maybe the ghost in the woods didnt like it. The ghost is a she decided to show herself from outside the car window. Its sooo damn clear. Both me and my boyfriend saw it. And its a long time. We had sex in the backseat and we have to move to the front seat to drive the car and the ghost still there. It was so clear and we both saw it. Its clearly not human. Have very long hair until her feet, white long dress and i cant describe the face, she got face but its like smushed. Very scary and very traumatic. So traumatic that i decided to broke up with my boyfriend back then.

My dad is the least woo person ever
We lived in a pub that used to be a courthouse, they would also hang people there and there was a massive amount of history including a tunnel and a priest hiding hole

One night he put the candles out (one on every table) and locked up. Walked back through the pub and candle was lit again. He said "FFS Matthew" (guy who was killed by the landlord of the pub) and took the candle out the holder. After cashing up he walked back through the room with the candle to find it back in its holder and lit again

There was a hallway with a door and frosted window, he stood back to let someone through (you could always see the shape of someone through the window) before realising the pub was locked up, it was 2am and he was alone

I've never had anything that seemed "woo" happen to me. I assume I just go straight to a more mundane explanation.

Me too! Sometimes I feel a cat's fur against my feet, when I'm sitting up reading, so not half-asleep. I have no explanation but I like it.

I think of it like this:

We don't really experience the world directly. It's more like we experience a representation of the world that we create inside our heads in real time, using a combination of sensory input, existing knowledge, useful shortcuts, and guesses, to produce a model that's manageable, useful and meaningful.

People pull out of side roads, and then a car comes "out of nowhere" and hits them. It's possible that they looked at the road, and in the model of the world their brain created, the road was empty. The car that hit them truly didn't exist in the version of the world they were experiencing when they decided to drive forward.

There's a lot of ways for the representation of the world that our brain creates, the one we consciously experience, to be different from the actual objective reality. So when something like your examples happens to me, I tend to assume that it was probably one of those times when my brain tried too hard to create meaning, or didn't include some important detail in the model, or something like that.

I've had this a few times when I'm alone. You are just on high alert. I wouldn't read too much into it. When I first moved in with my now husband I heard weird things all the time when he wasn't around. Was just loud pipes or neighbour sounds. I was convinced at the time though that we were haunted!

Our brains make things up all the time. There is an optic nerve bang in the back of your eye that means we all have a huge blind spot, but our brain fills in the blanks.

It's brain glitches, isn't it? When we see something it's not just our eyes that see it but our brain which then interprets it.

I once looked down at our living room carpet and saw a small pile of wriggling worms I looked away to tell DH but when I looked back it was actually a small pile of string. It's probably similar for other senses. We hear something and our brain interprets it as something we already know.

I'm not sure. I've seen things and know I saw them but it doesn't mean I believe in ghosts. It's weird. I find it very interesting to read.

I would crack open the woo jar because it was defo a ghost OP

I think it is your brain attributing meaning to a random, unrelated input from one of your senses.

I always can "hear" the cats when I'm on holiday or away. I think it's to do with the way the brain categorises information subconsciously to save energy, so you don't have to consciously reassess background info. So random background noises get translated in my brain as "cats, knocking about downstairs".