I love these threads. I don't know where I stand on this woo stuff but I have had one experience I could never explain.
I was about 11 years old and some friends of my brother and I - a pair of siblings - had come to our house to play after school. We lived in a long narrow house, one room wide, with a door at each end (one we never used; the main door was on an enclosed porch at the opposite end) and a paved walkway running along the length of it. The house was in a very rural area and we had no close neighbours.
It was pitch dark but not late (it was winter), and my mother was getting ready to drive the visiting kids home to the next village - my dad didn't live with us so my brother and I had to come along for the ride. My brother and the girl were still getting ready, but the little boy and I had our coats on and were sitting in the porch waiting to go. Then we heard loud footsteps on the path that ran along the front of the house, coming towards the porch. Sometimes people stopped at the house for directions, and went to knock on the far door before making their way along to the door we used, so I was not frightened or surprised. The porch had a motion-activated light outside, which clicked on, and I jumped to my feet in expectation of a knock on the door.
At that moment, the shadow of a hooded figure swept across the porch: the footsteps reached the front door, and just stopped. Not stopped like a person stopping; stopped dead like a tape had been paused. The little boy and I just knew immediately that it wasn't right - we stared at one another in total fear. We got torches and went outside, searching both ways on the path and down onto the drive, but nobody was there and in our hearts we knew they wouldn't be.
The footnote to this story is that a few years later, after we moved from the house, I mentioned to my mother how comforting I'd always found it to hear my parent's footsteps on the path underneath my bedroom window every night, walking away from the porch. I felt so safe knowing that she and my dad were out there last thing at night locking up. She looked confused and told me they absolutely never did this. Reiterating that we had no neighbours and our home was pretty remote, I have absolutely no idea whose footsteps I heard for years and years, walking in the opposite direction from the ones that approached the porch that scary night.
We moved away from the area not long after (unrelated reasons!). I'm still facebook friends with the girl of those visiting siblings, but I've never had the balls to contact her brother and ask him whether his memory matches mine. It's honestly inexplicable to me.