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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Do you believe in 'ghosts'?

492 replies

Bump2021 · 11/01/2021 18:27

I'm not a woo person by nature, I'm more of a sceptic but there has been two or three occasions where I've encountered something unexplainable.

Do you believe in the paranormal?

YANBU - yes (please explain why)
YABU - no, it's a load of bollocks

OP posts:
picklemewalnuts · 22/01/2021 19:10

I don't have citations, it was from a course for foster carers on managing loss. It was aimed at understanding bereavement, whether it's the children who had lost their previous families or ourselves as carers when children leave. It's not something I dreamed up, it's to do with brain plasticity. It references trauma recovery as well.

Obviously it's a process, a gradual reshaping of the brain to the new reality of life after that person/pet has gone. It tends to fill in the spaces of what is sensed with what it expects to see/feel/hear- the familiar pet or person.

everythingbackbutyou · 22/01/2021 20:31

@Jaypreen, it's not often I watch a documentary on the supernatural and walk away believing in it LESS, but the mediums were just taking the piss.
Medium - 'Has your father passed?'
Me, screaming - 'Of COURSE they have. The person you are currently talking to cannot be a day under 80'
And the ectoplasm. Destroyed by light, is it? How convenient. Bloody hell. I came away absolutely furious on behalf of all the bereaved people being taken advantage of.

VeryQuaintIrene · 22/01/2021 20:55

My dad was another one who normally used King's Cross station the day of the fire but a feeling kept him from going that day and he's the least woo person ever.

My great aunt Philomena was supposedly a mystic. Her husband Frank was a sailor and had been out of work for ages until he came home one day to announce he'd just got a job on an amazing new ship. She told him on no account to take it and he didn't, much against his will. Of course, it was the Titanic.

onemorecupofcoffeefortheroad · 22/01/2021 21:02

I would love to see a ghost and have done everything I can to summon them up - my lovely sister died, my lovely mum died, I've done all I can to summon them up from the dead and get them to talk to me, I've spoken to various experienced spiritualists who say there's noone coming through, I've stomped through fields and woods in the dark trying to summon up the spirits of my dead relatives .. nothing remotely ghost-like has ever happened to me. I want to believe but I'm losing the will...

CroutonsAvatar · 22/01/2021 21:56

@onemorecupofcoffeefortheroad bless you. I’ve experienced a few things I can’t explain, but never my Dad who I lost in my teens (and who had an open mind in regards to a potential spiritual afterlife) I always thought I’d get some kind of sign from him. But nothing. It feels almost like the more you want something the less likely you are to see it. Flowers

ChristmasSexyTime · 22/01/2021 22:31

@everythingbackbutyou

I was so excited to see the physical seance but I was shrieking with disbelief about how shoddy it was. I mean, they built it up to holy hell!

I also wonder how much the family in Massachusetts paid to get her to visit, only for her to bring up a bunch of stuff she'd obviously found on the Internet.

I've never seen anything quite like it. Astonishing bravado on her part to put on that much of a show and not feel any guilt.

Beansprout30 · 24/01/2021 00:31

Something odd happened tonight. I’d finished watching the episode the couple who lost their young son and fell asleep during the next, but when I woke up dh and I were discussing it, and I said to him I really would like to try and make contact with my dad who passed away in the summer. Dh told me not to encourage anything as it spooks him, I said I’d only like dad to show a sign that he’s still around. Anyway on that note I walk up the stairs to bed and stick my head into 4 year old dd’s room and her bloody Elsa clock which is sat next to my dads picture is on, projecting the time onto her ceiling! I know this was not switched on at bedtime because I always go up once she’s asleep to turn her lamp off! I’m convinced that was my dad!

On two occasions DM and I have been together and out of nowhere we’ve both smelt the scent of a match being blown out, it has come over very strong and then instantly gone. Again we think this was my dad, he always smoked cigars. The first time we smelt it, it was only a few days after his death and dm and I were sat outside in my garden in the evening remembering him and the smell just came from nowhere. The second time we were on our way to Cornwall the day after his funeral, dad was supposed to be coming on the holiday with us, randomly in the car on the way down the same smell caught us and vanished again! My DB has smelt the same thing in his house. Also in my drawer I have kept my dads Bosen’s pipe from when he was in the navy, my dd found it the other day and asked what it was, before I could answer she said mummy I can smell bampy. I really do feel dad is never far away whether these smells are something different or not, I believe it’s him

WeatherwaxOn · 25/01/2021 13:51

I have another odd incident to share, although I am not sure it's quite ghostly - just unexplained.
Some years ago I had a bad headache and had gone to lie down. I fell asleep and woke suddenly (so I thought) to see a male figure standing at the foot of the bed. He looked as though he was dresses in lots of tiny, flickering flames in red and orange. I asked who he was and he said, "Lou". As I looked, the flames became birch leaves and he faded away. I didn't feel afraid at any point.
When I got up, I looked up "Lou" and Birch trees. He's Lugh, the bringer of light and is associated in Celtic mythology with the birch tree.
I honestly had never heard of him until that dream/vision.

MagentaDoesNotExist · 26/01/2021 02:05

I'm a scientist. A realist. But I know it would be utterly ignorant and arrogant to believe that what we know of science so far explains everything that is real qnd anything we cannot yet measure or explain is not real.

As for personal experiences that cannot be explained, I have a few.

A holiday cottage we stayed in as children. Huge crash in the night that woke everyone up. Like a large piece of furniture falling over. All lights on, everyone awake, nothing had moved.

When I was a child my mother worked in a stately home and took me there and let me roam sometimes in school holidays, in private parts of the building that were normally closed off. There was a corridor on the top floor with rooms off it. If you were up there alone you would often find the doors out of the corridor all slammed and you'd not be able to open any of them or get out again for some time.

There was a house my mother almost bought, for us to move to, and when we were looking around it and she said a certain room would be my bedroom I got chills down my spine and begged her not to move us there. That room was freezing cold and I felt pure dread being in there. We discovered later that two children had been murdered in that room.

Another house that we actually lived in, I would lie in bed and hear footsteps up and down the corridor outside. I was terrified to go down the stairs at night. My brother later told me he heard the same footsteps. One evening I had been out and when I got in late my parents asked me why I had been stamping around in my room all night, when nobody but them had been in the house. Things in that house also used to vanish permanently or disappear for a while and then randomly appear in another room. It was very unwelcoming,

I have a close friend who would never make something up and when a family member had been out, they came home, chatted to her, hugged her, then all went to bed. Then an hour or so later police came to the house and told her this family member had died two hours earlier, at the time she had seen him at home.

When a family member was very young she saw a man being crushed against a wall in the alley next to her house, by horses. Decades later she discovered that long before she was born a man had been killed there by two cart horses that went mad.

One of my earliest memories is of a kind elderly woman and her smiling face. And the dappled light of leaves moving behind her. It turns out that mother often put my pram in the garden under a tree as a tiny baby (in a previous house) with leaves just like that, where a kind elderly lady who loved children had lived before my family moved there. When I started to talk apparently i often asked where "the lady" was.

There is just too much to dismiss, even from personal anecdote. One of my main criteria for choosing a house is that there's no "feeling" of anyone else around!! But most of it is, I expect, just a type of energy that we can't yet measure or detect. Just the same as once infrared or xrays would have seemed "woo" to us. I mean, anyone want to explain what dark matter is? Cern is discovering new particicles! Saying we cannot explain something yet doesn't make it untrue or "paranormal", science has paradigms and I very much doubt what we know right now is the whole of it.

MagentaDoesNotExist · 26/01/2021 03:23

[quote happywifi99]**@MagentaIsDoesNotExist

I agree with your post about science not being able to explain things yet. You sound much more educated on the matter than me, but my twopence as a historian would be that in at least several older cultures science and religion/magic/woo were not incompatible at all so it's surely possible that one day science in our culture will be able to explain these phenomena. At least, I hope so.

I find your points about time particularly interesting, I have often wondered if some of the things I've seen (some bloody weird things considering I don't drink or experiment with drugs) are more time related than woo.[/quote]
Yes, I agree. Science and philosophy were once one subject and having studied both I think they will be again at some point!

As for the point on time, I think based on what I understand of physics it's almost an illusion? It's just another dimension of space. So it bends just like space does (the way matter bends space: we call gravity a "force", but it isn't really. It's just matter bending both time and space). So our experience of any of either as something linear seems to be subjective, rather than factual. Mindblowing.

lynsey91 · 26/01/2021 12:15

I posted about my clock a little while ago. My dad had died 2 days before that happened.

Yesterday me and DH were indoors. We are isolating as dad died from covid and mum now has it.

We were upstairs and I came down to make a cup of tea. I got to the living room about 6 steps from the kitchen and heard a thud. It sounded like it came from the kitchen. There was no one else in the house and our back gate and side gate were both padlocked - the gates and fence are 6ft high.

I went in the kitchen and could not see anything so didn't really think any more about it. Made the tea and then went outside to get something from the freezer in our garage. I immediately saw our meter cupboard which has our electric meter in was wide open with the door touching the wall. It is on an outside wall of our kitchen.

We have lived in our house 3 years this week. I have never opened that cupboard and DH only opened it once when we first moved in. We have a smart meter so our actual meter never has to be read. The cupboard has to be opened with a round key thing. I didn't even know what key opened it or where it was. The key was in the drawer where DH had put it 3 years ago.

Both me and DH had been in and out of the garden several times before that and would have noticed if the cupboard was open especially as it was open as wide as it would go and not just slightly.

I think the thump I heard was the door hitting the wall. So very strange but then DH looks and the lock on the door is still on so in order to close it he has to actually unlock it!

Ifonly86 · 26/01/2021 13:14

I grew up seeing two relatives who were always visiting, I found it odd they never spoke to us just sat there watching. I asked my parents why and they were confused. I described who they were to find they were relatives who passed away before I was born and I had no idea of their existence. I stopped seeing them shortly after (I was 11 by then) but it still creeps me out.

HeraInTheHereAndNow · 21/06/2021 14:19

I’m not sure I’m in the right place but searched “auras” and this thread came up.

I’m not a “believer”. Don’t see ghosts. Non religious. Non superstitious. Something odd is going on.

My sister and I FaceTime each other because we live at some distance from each other and of course, Covid restrictions. She’s quite spiritual and sees “things” and I tease her and say she needs her eyes testing etc etc. Recently, maybe the last month or so, shes said “oooh, I can see lovely colourful orbs floating all around you!” on screen. She says the colours are sparkly and amazing. I said she needed to see a dr, maybe there was something wrong with her. Then, last week, a friend of mine and I were talking on Zoom and she all of a sudden said…”Wow! You’ve got floaty sparkly balls all around you, Hera! What is it?” Ive no idea what they’re on about. It’s never happened before. The lighting in our home is the same. I just laughed and said “perhaps you need a blood pressure check, if you’re seeing floating things?” But, it’s weird isn’t it?

Anyone have anything they can offer me on this strange occurrence?

Dwrcegin · 21/06/2021 14:23

I have seen/heard some things which I can't explain.

Can't be ghosts though because I definitely know they don't/can't exist.

RedRec · 21/06/2021 14:35

No

OrangeRug · 21/06/2021 14:40

I believe in reincarnation. I think ghosts are just residual energy from past events. Or maybe they are actually just spirits who haven't moved on yet? There's so much we don't understand.

Fluffycloudland77 · 21/06/2021 15:06

When our cat was alive we had the little black ghost cat that walked by our bed. You only saw ear tips and tail. When the cat died the ghost went but it’s back now in the kitchen.

I still hear my cat & so does dh.

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