To think ghost stories are BS, but my experience was a bit odd?

[BigMoan]

I moved into a 1950’s house previously occupied by a couple. They were the sole occupants since it was built. The husband died, and a few years later the wife moved to a care home. The house was then put on the market.

Our first night in the house, we’d put a car seat centrally on a table. It fell off.
Few days later, I heard our piano being played - I went in the room and no one was there.
Then a week or so later - daughter went to the bathroom, froze and said there’s someone in there. She described the person as a male, like a shadow and wearing a suit. I hadn’t mentioned anything about ghosts to her, and told her it was just a shadow - perhaps Daddy had walked past when she was about to go in. For a few weeks after she was scared of the bathroom, wanted an adult with her. And now - if ghosts come up in a book/on TV - she always refers back to this experience.

A few other weird things happened. And then nothing else. The house felt ‘creepy’ for a while. Absolutely nothing creepy about it now.

If course it’s ridiculous to think it was a ghost, but what was I experiencing? Was it just the strangeness of moving somewhere new? Just wondered if anyone else had had a similar experience?

Okay. I mean you’ve called me thick and you sound super aggravated that I’m simply saying there isn’t evidence (actual scientifically accepted evidence) of any of the stuff people are insisting.

But if you need to stoop to calling people thick just because they’ve pointed out that the evidence you’ve said exists doesn’t exist then that’s on your lack of personal control. I don’t think I’m thick as far as it goes. I just strongly don’t believe in ‘haunted houses.’ Or unicorns/mermaids etc.

Why do people feel the need to come on these threads determined to dismiss and debunk ?

Many of these stories are about people feeling comforted by their experiences in times of immense stress and loss. Let them have that, for heavens sake.

There are more things in heaven and earth and all that.

I’d never try to dismiss or debunk someone’s experience of seeing a departed loved one, even if I privately didn’t believe it. But it annoys me when people present other kinds of woo experience as “can’t be explained” when they actually can.

@Kanaloa

Also think it’s a bit ironic that all these ghosts are someone’s great granny who they’ve never met who comes back from the other world to speak to their three year old child. Why do no unsolved murder victims ever come back and say ‘this is who killed me. Please go and catch them.’

Why doesn’t Percy Fawcett rock up at his ancestors bed and explain what happened to him?

@Kanaloa - funny you should sag that about murder victims and murderers. DM had an experience in a house and a year or so before or after her experience a friend of a friend saw a ghost, they asked a local young policeman friend to investigate and apparently there had been a murder there but presumably the murderer had been caught. If it was unsolved though what is the ghost meant to do?! Find the murderer and get them brought to justice?!

There's tonnes of footage. Even the US gov has released videos of UFOs.

I think the problem is conflating UFOs with 'evidence of alien lifeforms.' We know there are unidentified flying objects out there, we just don't know if they are flown by lifeforms from another solar system or if it's the Russians trying out their latest widget. At this stage, the Russians seem more likely. I suspect there is life on other planets, given the billions of planets out there it's a distinct possibility. I just doubt they're flying over Texas.

As for ghost sightings, I think there are some very interesting possible explanations that do not involve people from beyond the veil. Look up Gestalt drawings for things you can see as vases or two faces, rabbit or a duck, old woman or a young woman. Your brain plays an enormous role in interpreting information that comes via your eyes. It's the same with sounds you hear. Smells are very closely linked to memory, so it's curious that people here report smelling things associated with their loved ones. There is something curious going on, but I just doubt it's dead people trying to contact us.

@WheelieBinPrincess

I saw my friend before she died. She was standing in the park six foot away from me, and then she wasn’t.

She was gravely ill in hospital so there’s no way she’d have been in the park, and that afternoon she died.

Recently heard this exact story on a podcast- was it yours?

If it was unsolved though what is the ghost meant to do?! Find the murderer and get them brought to justice?!

Well, yeah? Like rather than rocking up to Susan who bought your old house and chucking her car seat off the table maybe show up in the local police station and sort of do the ‘be not afraid! It’s me x who was found murdered. It was John my ex boyfriend. I’ve just popped back to let you know.’

All other explanations aside, and mind playing tricks etc, I don't believe in ghosts but have personally had a couple of experiences that I put down to being tired etc.
However DH told me a story from shortly before he met me and I can't explain it.
DH and friend were running one evening during daylight through a large park. Both were competing in athletics at the time and don't drink. They were side by side and DH saw a lady coming towards them so they both stepped aside off the path to pass. However immediately as they passed they both stopped and turned round suddenly. There was no one there. DH's friend said "did you see her?". DH said he had and described her clothing but said he hadn't seen a face. Friend said same description and he too hadn't seen a face.
Both said they'd stopped as they'd realised something wasn't right and both hadn't seen a face but both could describe her in the same way to each other in terms of clothing.
There wasn't anywhere she could have gone. It was an open path in an empty park.
I don't know how to explain 2 athletes seeing the same thing at the same time, and it not being there.

Many of these stories are about people feeling comforted by their experiences in times of immense stress and loss. Let them have that, for heavens sake.

I agree @MistressoftheDarkSide

“Also if your bed was vibrating to the point that it was moving around surely you would be able to capture that on video? Personally I’d be worried I was developing psychotic delusions”

Assuming this one was aimed at me. Didn’t really occur to me to jump up and start videoing because I had no vested interest in proving or disproving anything tbh. There’s plenty of ‘ghost footage’ found on YouTube already, I never felt the need to add to it. The only person I told at the time was the other person that lived there, and they had their own experiences in the house.

No history of, or current, psychotic disorders.

@CounsellorTroi

I’d never try to dismiss or debunk someone’s experience of seeing a departed loved one, even if I privately didn’t believe it. But it annoys me when people present other kinds of woo experience as “can’t be explained” when they actually can.

I think that’s my position. I certainly don’t believe that the appearance of feathers, robins, rainbows, coincidences involving dates and songs on the radio are any more than entirely human attempts to find comfort in the face of bereavement, but equally I wouldn’t dream of challenging those beliefs any more than I’d bob up at a Christian funeral to say eternal life is a wish-fulfilment fiction. They’re very human. I’m glad those people can find any comfort.

I do get more impatient with people who resist obvious, entirely non-supernatural, alternative explanations for stuff they’re not hugely emotionally invested in. I reckon the vast majority of what gets posted on here is explainable as sleep paralysis, unusually vivid dreams, tiredness, small children and animals behaving like small children and animals, paroidelia, nerviness in a new or isolated place, being made more susceptible to a supernatural explanation because of being told where you are is ‘haunted’ etc (as well as wanting to believe loved ones survive death in some form.)

I think ghost stories and why we tell them are really interesting.

I do find ghost

Sorry, glitching (possessed?) iPad.

I never believed anyone’s stories until I moved into a ‘haunted’ flat. Lights being switched on/off, general odd stuff similar to many accounts on here. My boyfriend said he heard footsteps in the living room while I was in bed. Didn’t tell anyone until my mum came to stay and was on a makeshift bed in said living room and saw a figure walking across the room. After a while the occurrences stopped.

Sounds like you had a ghost, OP. Really!

My dmil and dfil slept in separate rooms,the dog always slept in mil room from the moment they had her.
Mil went into nursing home dog still slept in her room,the day mil died the dog would not even go in the room and never did again

I rented a house where an elderly woman had passed away. Had doors open and close on their own just a few times, and sometimes my dogs would act very strange, like they were seeing something I couldn't-one time my Rottweiler stopped at the entrance to the hallway and stared barking ferociously...then turned tail and ran downstairs whimpering as if something was moving towards her.

I took all that in stride and didn't consider it too big of a deal but when I was packing to move, the house was dead quiet. I was packing up the living room when it hit me just how quiet it was. The second that thought hit my brain, the TV switched on. All by itself. The TV and remote were across the room from me. The program that switched on? An American Haunting.

I truly think she did not want us to move, because she was very tame until that day.

I'm 50/50 on if I believe, but have heard of children 'seeing' people in houses, when the children knew no history of the house.
So i would say it was the old guy checking on his house, saw you were a lovely family and he is now at rest. Maybe find out his name and if something else happens, say 'Hi .......... all is good here, no need to worry, you can move on now'

I've worked at a Jacobean mansion House on a few occasions and have had a number of 'unexplained' experiences. There was one staffroom that they actually had to stop putting kettles in because if you forgot to physically unplug, they would switch on (kettle and wall socket) and be continuously boiled until the fuse popped.

@Roosk - so what about people’s kids sometimes here who say they’ve seen someone and in friend of mine the child was about 2.5/3 so verbal but certainly knowing nothing of ghosts?! Seeing a lady in old clothes, describing them but not huge detail then nothing else. And his DM was the most non woo person ever. They also moved to an old Georgian house after this by seaside and apparently no ghost sightings there. I definitely have had warnings/strange feelings in old places where there’s been history and though I’ve never seen a ghost (that I know of) I don’t discount others if they have seen/smelled etc anything.

Well here's what happened to me. I had 2 experiences in the same building a few weeks apart. I have told them before on MN.

I should say i don't believe in 'ghosts' and i really don't want to believe in anything else to be honest!

So the first thing was I had a tea cup fall onto the floor out of nowhere right behind me (it smashed). I was at work - a collection of buildings - some old, some not. The part of it i was in at the time was not.

I was the only person in that particular building at the time, i needed the loo and had walked down an empty corridor and had just arrived at the loo door, which stood open. I was perfectly happy, going home soon. Just before i stepped through the door into the loo cubicle the cup smashed right behind my feet in the corridor.

I looked around obvs. Corridor empty I had to pick up the bits, and put it in the bin. It was clean, a plain pale green old fashioned style tea cup. I'd never seen this cup in the staff room.

Weirdly in the moment i wasn't overly spooked by it. There was no feeling of malice or dread in the air. I mean it was sunny outside, ground floor, big windows and it was a bright clean modern building. I just thought it was bloody odd!

A few weeks later i was walking down the same corridor but a bit further along. Alone in the building again. Sunny again. About to go home again. I walked past an 'open to the corridor' carpeted area on my right, picked my phone up from a desk round the corner and walked back again. Didn't take much longer than it took you to read this paragraph.

As i had passed the carpeted bit the first time i had noticed some bits and pieces which had been kicked under a coat rack and made a mental note i'd pick them up the next morning. Walking back past the carpeted area i glanced to my left and there in the middle of the floor were all the bits that had been under the coat rack. They were balanced perfectly one on top of the other in a 'tower'. About 3 foot high i guess.

I have zero explanation. I didn't touch it, i stopped and looked and then carried on walking! I only started to freak out a bit after i'd left the building. Delayed reaction.

I didn't tell anyone at work for obvious reasons, but couple of days later someone who works in that carpeted room said a weird thing had happened to her - a clock had fallen off the wall above her desk and instead of landing on the desk had sort of shot into the middle of the carpet area about 10 feet away. Same spot where the tower had appeared. She said it didn't bounce off the desk - just flew off the wall!

I still never said anything about what had happened to me. I have in fact only told 3 or 4 people in my life because it's all just too - weird and unsettling :(

[quote Gonnagetgoing]@Roosk - so what about people’s kids sometimes here who say they’ve seen someone and in friend of mine the child was about 2.5/3 so verbal but certainly knowing nothing of ghosts?! Seeing a lady in old clothes, describing them but not huge detail then nothing else. And his DM was the most non woo person ever. They also moved to an old Georgian house after this by seaside and apparently no ghost sightings there. I definitely have had warnings/strange feelings in old places where there’s been history and though I’ve never seen a ghost (that I know of) I don’t discount others if they have seen/smelled etc anything.[/quote]
But it’s often adults who interpret things that small children say as evidence of supernatural activity. It’s often not the children making that claim — children are still at the stage of not making hard and fast distinctions between real and imaginary things, and are encouraged to believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.

The ‘witch’ in my childhood bedroom was a dressing gown hanging on a nail, but I described how she beckoned and spoke in such consistent detail that I think it slightly unnerved my mother.

Another longterm poster on here has said she’d been terrified of ‘the man’ in a specific room in her house as a small child, and it was only when moving house that her parents realised it was a face-shaped patch of varnish picked off the underside of a table, only visible from a small child’s height.

My toddler son had a rather sinister-sounding set of imaginary friends, including an old lady ‘who says this is her house’, but I’m pretty sure she was a combination of a couple of characters from books/fairytales and an elderly neighbour he found scary and who had once lived in our house.

This study linked found that children aged 4 to 6 who suffered nighttime fears (monsters under the bed, fear of the dark etc) were less likely to be able to distinguish between fantasy and reality than their peers:

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121113134926.htm

Basically, I wouldn’t be basing a belief in ghosts on what children say.

I'm just catching up with this thread but am taking a break to go tell my pet giant African land snails that they better enjoy this life because they don't get a ghostly comeback

My DH died at a young age when my DCS were 3 and 2. The day after his funeral I was putting my 3 yo DC to bed when he exclaimed “Night night Daddy”. And waved. I reminded him that Daddy was a “star in the sky” now but we could always say night night to him. He sat up and pointed “Daddy!”. I gently asked where. He replied “Daddy gone in wall now”. I was petrified but weirdly comforted (as well as you can be in immense grief).
About 30 mins later a good friend arrived in absolute hysterics. My late DH was her DDs godfather. My friend had gone up to her daughters room and heard her talking to someone. When she asked who she was talking to (she was 5) she simply replied “It’s a man he says his name is Uncle Boogaloo and he promises he’ll look after me”. We both slept with the light on for a few nights!
However after that night I heard nothing more. Maybe it was “goodbye”.

I have had loads of experiences.

The thing about only seeing ghosts in old fashioned clothes would be because they stand out.
Someone dressed like you in Tesco wont have the same impact.

Just to add to my experience - I don’t believe in ghosts and my friend doesn’t either (and is a forensic accountant! We’re quite dry people!). But we definitely heard what we did and were both embarrassed to admit what we’d heard, we didn’t know the other had experienced it. Someone definitely shouted in my ear at very very close range. A summers day, no tiredness on my part, no reason for it and never had it before or since. So make of that what you will! I can still hear the tone of voice now, it was weird as hell!