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?

I am pretty sure i've got a photo of a ghost.
It was taken on Blair street of a couple of my colleagues holding their entry tickets to a vault tour. Was a photo of two of them but there's a third figure behind ones shoulder, with a semi transparent face. Looked like a red headed girl.
There was nobody else on the street when it was taken. I know as id double checked because at the the time we were about to have a cigarette and I was making sure we weren't going to annoy anyone passing with the smell.

People know what they've seen and have not seen.

The thing is, I don't think they do. I think that as a pp said, we're poor witnesses, as witness statements surrounding crimes demonstrate.

Our senses trick us easily. I've certainly hallucinated from exhaustion when I had a newborn, ink-black shadows on the floor were moving around, reforming themselves and talking to me. A house I used to live in in England which had a frosted glass door between the kitchen and another living space had this odd trick of the light whereby at certain times of day and in certain weather conditions wind blowing clouds overhead rapidly on a bright day -- made it look as if a shadow moved fast across the frosted glass, as though someone was in the kitchen to someone seeing it out of the corner of their eye.

When I was a child, there was a spate of 'moving statues' in my country -- my mother and aunt took me and my sister to one, where huge crowds were gathering at night to pray, and people (including my mother and aunt) were 'seeing' movement, which was probably prompted by the contrast of the brightly-lit statue in a dark rocky niche on the opposite side of a road, and the effect of mass suggestion. If thousands of people are saying what you're all looking at is moving, you're more likely to 'see' it too. (And also a fair few sociological/cultural reasons).

People say that no birds sing near Auschwitz (substitute other concentration camp), but they do of course it doesn't stop people repeating the myth. It's not surprising we would like nature to be hushed by atrocity, even when it's demonstrably not true.

Likewise, it's absolutely not surprising how intense the desire is to have proof that your loved ones, human or animal, have survived death in some form and can make contact. It's why interest in mediums and séances spiralled after WWI.

I am the most rational person, don't believe in anything science can't explain etc. But I agree that some places carry a feeling of a life lived in the past. I lodged with a friend of a friend for a few months following a relationship break up and subsequent emotional turmoil. I felt there was a presence of something - not menacing at all, more a curious, benign observer - watching over me when I was in the house, especially in my bedroom. I've never felt this kind of thing before or since but it was a very strong sensation at the time.

@CounsellorTroi

So how on earth do people explain the cats (or dogs) on beds after they die? What is that?

Sleep paralysis hallucinations?

Or just what you’re used to. Your dog’s just passed away, you miss him terribly, he usually jumps up on the bed at about midnight. At about midnight you feel like he jumps up on the bed. Humans are terrible creatures of habit, if you’re used to something happening every night it’s easy for your mind to trick you into feeling it.

@CounsellorTroi

So how on earth do people explain the cats (or dogs) on beds after they die? What is that?

Sleep paralysis hallucinations?

@CounsellorTroi - my mum who had this on her bed knows it was definitely not a sleep paralysis hallucination.

She sleeps well, didn't expect to feel anything on her bed, is a bit woo but certainly didn't expect to feel the cat on her bed where he used to sleep.

I find it quite insulting actually that there are two camps of people on this thread here and also in real life - the 'believers' and the 'disbelievers'.

In fact I actually had a row and the relationship ended (not just because of this) because a man I was dating was so adamant that nothing could/would happen after you die. I've had my best friend commit suicide and if she were to appear as a ghost or something to me or her family they'd be happy and comforted. I don't think she has appeared to her family apart from maybe her perfume (Jean Paul Gaultier female) in her flat after she died and it had been cleared and hoovered etc.

@Kanaloa - in my mum's case - she was used to this but she'd got used to her cat not jumping on the bed.

When it did happen she was surprised and shocked, pleasantly so. But then it stopped.

@Poundlick

People know what they've seen and have not seen.

The thing is, I don't think they do. I think that as a pp said, we're poor witnesses, as witness statements surrounding crimes demonstrate.

Our senses trick us easily. I've certainly hallucinated from exhaustion when I had a newborn, ink-black shadows on the floor were moving around, reforming themselves and talking to me. A house I used to live in in England which had a frosted glass door between the kitchen and another living space had this odd trick of the light whereby at certain times of day and in certain weather conditions wind blowing clouds overhead rapidly on a bright day -- made it look as if a shadow moved fast across the frosted glass, as though someone was in the kitchen to someone seeing it out of the corner of their eye.

When I was a child, there was a spate of 'moving statues' in my country -- my mother and aunt took me and my sister to one, where huge crowds were gathering at night to pray, and people (including my mother and aunt) were 'seeing' movement, which was probably prompted by the contrast of the brightly-lit statue in a dark rocky niche on the opposite side of a road, and the effect of mass suggestion. If thousands of people are saying what you're all looking at is moving, you're more likely to 'see' it too. (And also a fair few sociological/cultural reasons).

People say that no birds sing near Auschwitz (substitute other concentration camp), but they do of course it doesn't stop people repeating the myth. It's not surprising we would like nature to be hushed by atrocity, even when it's demonstrably not true.

Likewise, it's absolutely not surprising how intense the desire is to have proof that your loved ones, human or animal, have survived death in some form and can make contact. It's why interest in mediums and séances spiralled after WWI.

@Poundlick - I think some people are poor witnesses - well this is subjective in my opinion.

This can be dependent on lifestyles, drugs/medication taken, alcohol, young babies etc.

The 'moving statues' - I agree maybe it's mass suggestion - but that's something that everyone wants to believe in - for whatever reason - mostly religious.

My grandfather saw a ghost before WW1 in a castle in Germany - he was a young boy about 4 at the time and no one mentioned ghosts ever to him. It wasn't a relative or loved one of his either.

The 'moving statues' - I agree maybe it's mass suggestion - but that's something that everyone wants to believe in - for whatever reason - mostly religious.

But don't you think that our loved ones surviving death is also 'something that everyone wants to believe in'? And hence that we can't rule out wish fulfilment contributing to what people, especially bereaved and grieving people, 'see'?

I had something very strange happen when I was a teenager.

Summer day, middle of June, doing my GCSEs so I was home early from school, it was about 2pm I think. Blazing hot sunshine.

I walked up my mums drive (it was a short drive but went at a right angle to the road and the wall was lined with Leylandis so you couldn't see the front door from the road) and as the front door came into view I saw my mum. Just stood there. Looking at me. I said "oh, you're home early" and she swung an arm up in a very overstated gesture to point at the tree behind me.

Obviously I turned around to look and said "what?" And when I turned back around she was gone. I thought "oh that's rude you've gone in the house without me" and unlocked the door (Yale lock) and... she wasn't there. It was only then that I realised the car wasn't in the drive either.

Funnily enough, it did not bother me at all, until my mum actually got home. Then it started bothering me.

This would make a much better story if that tree had come down in a storm and narrowly missed killing us all, but no, we lived there another 5 years then mum moved away and the new owners cut them down.

No idea what that was about.

My granny passed when I was younger years old and two nights in a row after she passed I saw her standing in the hallway of hours and once in my aunts house looking out the window towards us and we pulled up to the house. My grandfather her husband also saw her twice their house once she was crying and he reached out to comfort her and she disappeared.

I'm sceptical about ghosts. I've visited places that are supposed to be haunted and experienced absolutely nothing.
However, I have seen things I cannot explain (at the moment).

I think it's known that certain frequencies can cause hallucinations, both auditory and visual, so where and when people have had unexplained experiences, perhaps ruling out the presence of those frequencies could be helpful. That's not to negate anything any believes they have seen or heard, but, we do all experience things differently - in the way that our brain translates the input from our surroundings.

A random example is that a while ago a friend of mine had a psychotic episode whilst in my presence. They were 100% sure that what they were seeing/hearing/experiencing was real - and to them it was. But I was in the same room at the same time and had a different experience of things. I'm not suggesting that apparitions etc. are the product of psychosis, but that our experiences, views and interpretations of events can differ wildly.

I cannot explain "Lew/Lugh", nor can I explain a clip around the ear I experienced when there was nobody near me, and nothing falling on me. Doesn't mean I won't find an explanation at a point in the future, but so far, they remain unexplained.

@Poundlick

The 'moving statues' - I agree maybe it's mass suggestion - but that's something that everyone wants to believe in - for whatever reason - mostly religious.

But don't you think that our loved ones surviving death is also 'something that everyone wants to believe in'? And hence that we can't rule out wish fulfilment contributing to what people, especially bereaved and grieving people, 'see'?

@Poundlick - of course everyone or most people want to think that people survive death and wish fulfilment with bereaved and grieving people.

I do know a couple of people for various reasons they don't want to see ghosts or any proof that relatives have passed away. And they haven't seen any proof.

As I said though with other ghosts, the randoms as I like to call it - how on earth do you or the ghosts have any connection/know, I mean technically there's nothing to bind you to them apart from e.g. a house where you're both living. If a room in that house then is haunted by the spirit of someone who died a long time ago but there's no connection to you, the person who's moved on that what is being pointed out there?

So how on earth do people explain the cats (or dogs) on beds after they die? What is that?

I used to have two cats. Whilst they were still alive, I sometimes used to sense them walking on the bed during the night, except on occasion they couldn't have been, because they were shut outside with no access to the house. It was really odd. I'd feel pressure on the bed, just like a cat's paws, reach out, no cat, remember they were shut out. And this was when the cats were alive.

I wonder if one explanation is something like phantom limb syndrome - you feel sensation where there is none. Since the cats were in fact alive at the time, my senses being unreliable seems the more likely explanation than a ghost cat.

As I said though with other ghosts, the randoms as I like to call it - how on earth do you or the ghosts have any connection/know, I mean technically there's nothing to bind you to them apart from e.g. a house where you're both living. If a room in that house then is haunted by the spirit of someone who died a long time ago but there's no connection to you, the person who's moved on that what is being pointed out there?

I'm not sure I follow. Are you saying that you get that some people are desperate to be haunted by their dead loved ones and pets, but what about people who don't 'see' their beloved dead granny or Alsatian, but Anne Boleyn looking for her head at the Tower of London, or the inevitable legion of Roman soldiers' marching torsos trooping through the house because the street level used to be lower, or mysterious footsteps/apparitions in the stockrooms of their workplaces?

I suppose the logic for believers is that these things are somehow imprinted on the fabric of the place/building itself. Or just sleep paralysis, a trick of the light, a side-effect of medication/drugs/booze /tiredness, people being primed to see something because people have told them the place is haunted, or being nervy somewhere new or isolated etc.

(I'm easily frightened by sudden noises or jumpscares and made DH walk me ten feet to the loo at 3 am in our tiny flat after seeing The Woman in Black at the theatre! Which I get is very silly. )

Or just because it's more fun, for some people, to believe they've seen a ghost. I remember someone on another thread years ago on here saying they'd seen silent, misty ghost horsemen at dawn on Oxford Street before someone else pointed out one of the mounted regiments often goes that way on their way back from early exercise in Hyde Park, and the first poster kept insisting it couldn't have been that!

I get that the unexplained is interesting, if not too obviously frightening or intrusive, and I like a good spooky story as much as anyone.

A friend told me years ago (I think I mentioned it on here before under a different name) that an overseas friend from SA was visiting another expat friend of hers in the small town in Ireland they both lived in.

The visiting friend's young daughter pointed out a formally-dressed elderly man walking down the main street and said 'Why are all the funny people walking behind that man?' Neither of the women could see anyone with the man, who was alone, but the child was adamant that there was a long line of people walking silently behind him along the street.

The 'reveal' is that this elderly man was the town undertaker, who had been coffining and burying the people of the town for the last fifty years.

I think that's a great eerie story, but it doesn't 'prove' anything to me. It's hearsay of hearsay. The child and her mother didn't know he was an undertaker, but I suppose it's not outside the bounds of possibility the child noticed something unusual about him. I think longterm undertakers often have a distinct air.

Human night vision is very poor compared to other animals. I could look at my DH’s and my dressing gowns hanging on the back of my bedroom door and my imagination could easily turn them into a big black shape looming over the bed.

My grandmother died in my childhood home. My mother continued to live there for many years. There was never anything odd in the atmosphere of the room she died in and never any sightings of her.

@CounsellorTroi

Human night vision is very poor compared to other animals. I could look at my DH’s and my dressing gowns hanging on the back of my bedroom door and my imagination could easily turn them into a big black shape looming over the bed.

My grandmother died in my childhood home. My mother continued to live there for many years. There was never anything odd in the atmosphere of the room she died in and never any sightings of her.

@CounsellorTroi - I've seen you debunk lots of ghost stories here in the past so I'm not 100% convinced on your stories.

I know human night vision is very poor but me and my mum if we wake at night we have good bedside lights by the bed, so we switch them on if we need to see better. I hear what you say as well about clothes hanging on doors and imaginations running wild and seeing them as other things.

I agree with you in one sense, apparently my great grandmother who brought my mum up died not in their house but in hospital but her spirit could have been said to have been around the house, it wasn't though.

But certain things happened eg when my nana died, that couldn't be explained, not going into them now.

I personally have never seen or smelled or sensed anything at all in any family homes after people have died. Most family homes the people die and the homes are sold. In my family home I have seen evidence after nana died as we were all together. I think I smelled the perfume/flowers smell in the hall too. There are also some people who you wouldn't ask after a relative died, 'oh do you sense them, have you seen their ghost?' as that wouldn't be tactful.

CounsellorTroi - I've seen you debunk lots of ghost stories here in the past so I'm not 100% convinced on your stories.

Yeah, sorry CounsellorTroi. You’re a bit too rational, and that damages your credibility.

@LadyFlumpalot

I had something very strange happen when I was a teenager.

Summer day, middle of June, doing my GCSEs so I was home early from school, it was about 2pm I think. Blazing hot sunshine.

I walked up my mums drive (it was a short drive but went at a right angle to the road and the wall was lined with Leylandis so you couldn't see the front door from the road) and as the front door came into view I saw my mum. Just stood there. Looking at me. I said "oh, you're home early" and she swung an arm up in a very overstated gesture to point at the tree behind me.

Obviously I turned around to look and said "what?" And when I turned back around she was gone. I thought "oh that's rude you've gone in the house without me" and unlocked the door (Yale lock) and... she wasn't there. It was only then that I realised the car wasn't in the drive either.

Funnily enough, it did not bother me at all, until my mum actually got home. Then it started bothering me.

This would make a much better story if that tree had come down in a storm and narrowly missed killing us all, but no, we lived there another 5 years then mum moved away and the new owners cut them down.

No idea what that was about.

I think this is the ghost version of "What's that behind you???" You turn and then they run away.

@Iamthewombat

CounsellorTroi - I've seen you debunk lots of ghost stories here in the past so I'm not 100% convinced on your stories.

Yeah, sorry CounsellorTroi. You’re a bit too rational, and that damages your credibility.

But to the believers, would you not want someone to point out kindly that there was an obvious rational explanation for your ‘ghost’?

I don’t mean, obviously, something deeply personal and comforting like believing your dead grandmother appeared to you, but if you were dining out on the terrifying ghost regiment of Oxford St, wouldn’t you want a friend to quietly point out the existence of the Household Cavalry before people started laughing? Or if you were regularly terrified by the sensation of being petrified in your bed with a malevolent presence in the corner, wouldn’t you like to know that the paralysis and the sense of malice are both completely normal aspects of sleep paralysis when the body glitches when going into sleep mode?

@Iamthewombat

CounsellorTroi - I've seen you debunk lots of ghost stories here in the past so I'm not 100% convinced on your stories.

Yeah, sorry CounsellorTroi. You’re a bit too rational, and that damages your credibility.

It’s nonsensical. You don’t believe in ghosts and disagree with the idea that a shadowy figure seen as someone is waking from a deep sleep in a darkened bedroom is evidence of the existence of ghosts, therefore your opinion is a bit suspicious.

I can understand it though, because ‘sceptical’ or ‘not woo’ is basically only used on here as a precursor to AND THEN I AWOKE TO SEE A FALLEN ANGEL CALLED THE HAT MAN!!!

As if people think adding ‘I’m the biggest sceptic, BUT’ somehow makes their story about how they stayed in a haunted b&b (which they can’t share the location of) more realistic.

But as for the dead grandmother reappearing to loved ones - I would say that’s the only type of ‘life after death’ that there really is. A love for somebody and longing to see them again that stays with you even when they’ve passed, so strong that (the wonders of the human mind) your mind can even present them to you again.

@Pikaso

I’m not 100% certain that ghosts don’t exist but I don’t think it’s “ghosts” as such … just “time residue” if that makes sense. Presence from the past that lingers on for a while.

Thats a really interesting point. Never thought of it like that before

I love a ghost story!

Our old house was supposed to be haunted when I was growing up. Lots of noises, shadows, things going bump on the night. It was an old house and my grandmother refused to stay overnight (she saw nuns in the garden - it has been part of a convent).

I used to complain of the tall dark man with a hat standing by my bed when I was very little (in my cotbed) and much later when the room was someone else’s, they used to see a man standing in the same corner. There was also rasping breathing noises and doors that would bang open. Other things too.

One sister was scared witless by something she said was a ghost of a child who would pester her to ‘come with me’. Guests would ask who else was in the house as they would hear creaking floorboards and see shadows pass certain doorways on one corridor, or see a figure pass certain windows on the ground floor that went into a courtyard (but the person didn’t arrive on the yard or turn back to pass the window again).

Mum would tell each of us to keep quiet when we saw/heard something scary (the noises and shadows weren’t scary, just annoying as you would think someone was coming to look for you and there’s be no one there) in case we scared the others - but it all came out much later on when we had all left home at a family gathering when we all started talking about the ‘spookies’. We had mostly seen and heard the same things from different angles (depending on the configuration of the room and where we were at the time). It was mostly when there was an upheaval in the family - so as if high emotion would cause a ‘replay’ of events in the house. Neighbours told us that the people before us had lived there for about 60 years, and their only child - a daughter - had died as a child (must’ve been in the 1910s) and the doctor had been a frequent visitor - yes, her bedroom has been the front one where the man with the hat used to (apparently) stand over my bed. I hated that bloody room.

I was woken one night when I was home alone by music coming from downstairs. This was music we didnt have at home (jazz) and the room had an old record player but no radio or cd/tape player.

Oh and often the cats and dogs would freak out in the downstairs hall - either refuse to walk through or or run around yapping.

Normal stuff really…

@KittenKong You grew up in Hill House!

I’ve not seen that!

We went to see The Woman in Black - we were howling with laughter at it (as the school party in front of us screamed and peed their pants). We have a very dark sense of humour.

We’ve all been listening the the battersea poltergeist and uncanny (spooky stories) on radio 4 as a bit of light relief.