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?

Well there is definitely something that we can't explain isn't there. Some things just don't have another explanation, and no one knows for certain that ghosts don't exist.

I do believe in ghosts.
Ive had loads of experience of them, starting from when I was about 3.

You don't have to believe but you don't have to belittle people that do.

I've always found it interesting that children all over the world are scared of monsters underneath them when they sleep, no matter the culture. When you think about it, it seems odd. What's the mechanism for that? It seems to be something hardcoded, but how?

It is interesting. And also that many (all?) Cultures around the world have superstitions about humanoid creatures with pale skin and sharp teeth. I saw the below online once and it terrified me.

Many classic horror icons, such as Geger's xenomorphs, Silent Hill's Pyramid Head, and other disturbing creatures, share common characteristics. Pale skin, dark, sunken eyes, elongated faces, sharp teeth, and the like. These images inspire horror and revulsion in many, and with good reason. The characteristics shared by these faces are imprinted in the human mind.

Many things frighten humans instinctively. The fear is natural, and does not need to be reinforced in order to terrify. The fears are species-wide, stemming from dark times in the past when lightning could mean the burning of your tree home, thunder could be the approaching gallops of a stampede, predators could hide in darkness, and heights could make poor footing lethal.

The question you have to ask yourself is this:

What happened, deep in the hidden eras before history began, that could effect the entire human race so evenly as to give the entire species a deep, instinctual, and lasting fear of pale beings with dark, sunken eyes, razor sharp teeth, and elongated faces?

Sounds totally mad but we had several sprit energies in our previous home that seemed to be attached to old furniture, once the furniture was sold [prior to moving] the activity ceased and the atmosphere cleared so to speak.
We moved to our current home and within days became aware of an elderly lady in residence. Spoke with the neighbours about the previous occupant [didn't mention our experience] and they told us the previous occupant died in the lounge and was found after a fall !
We weren't really surprised, she makes herself known sometimes but she's not upsetting at all. We think she is checking on our decorating as we have had a big chance to her former home.

As kids we were all a bit jumpy about a certain place on the upstairs landing, used to rush by to get past it. We never talked about it til we were in our 20s/30s. When we were much older 50s/60s, it was exactly the spot where our dad died Haunting in advance?!
Apart from that, which of course could be a silly coincidence, I never believed in anything like ghosts then saw a little girl in an old house in France who looked just like my DSD at the time. Didn't say a word about it but she later said "I've seen a little girl who looks like me" about 2 feet above the floor just hovering there. Yikes! There's more I could say about that house in France (awful, frightening atmosphere even when the sun was shining & owner who lent it to us had various encounters) but I need to get on with some work!

@Dottybackorcid

Why do people always claim to see only ghosts of people? Thousands more pets, animals die.

Where are the a ghost of a hamster from my deceased pet sat on my table in the morning or a gist of a cow walked through my living room we live in an d converted barn 🤣

I thought I heard/felt my last dog come running into the bedroom, jumping on the bed and snuggling into my back. I’m sure it was a dream/sleep paralysis thing though.

@CounsellorTroi When I was little I though there was something under my bed, when I tried to turn over the sheets were being pulled off me, the harder I pulled the more they came off.
I was petrified, I found out my sheet had got caught on one of the bed springs of the bed and when I turned over the spring was pulling my sheet down .

I've always found it interesting that children all over the world are scared of monsters underneath them when they sleep, no matter the culture. When you think about it, it seems odd. What's the mechanism for that? It seems to be something hardcoded, but how?

I don’t find that any stranger than the fact that certain dreams seem to be common to all of us. Being naked in public, teeth falling out, dirty toilets, being chased.

I am a sceptic but I had an experience which made me question whether there is something beyond death and what form it takes.
I went to a ghost hunting organised by a group in one of the most haunted mansions - a plethora of spirits and ghosts, plus Satan himself are rumoured to have graced the visitors with their presence. A walled-in baby was found during reconstruction works and is purported to have belonged to the daughter of the family the house used to belong to who went mad and died, locked in a room.
It was said that the family dabbled in black magic and some funky stuff but in order to keep up the pretenses they locked the poor daughter once she found out herself pregnant with one of the visiting guests (and the legend later made Satan the father of the baby).

They were using all modern ghost hunting electronic gadgets and we went through the house in a complete dark. It was one of those so-called lockdown nights before lockdown took another meaning.
There were some moments which I can't really explain - while calling for spirits to show themselves, in a complete dark and circle, holding hands, the girl beside me suddenly flew forward and said something pushed her really hard. Nobody was behind her but at the time the temperature dropped rapidly and I was freezing all of a sudden.
In the room where the daughter of the family had died, we used Kinect to look for unknown presence and we saw three figures, one of them was a smaller child jumping up and down on the bed, the bigger ones were just hanging around, sometimes responding to us when we asked them to wave at us.
Then we went to the upper flour which used to house mentally ill patients and nun novices at different times as the house was changing owners. Lots of activity there, what really stays in my mind was standing in the dark and suddenly I felt a breeze and someone passed by me, I remember the stench, like an unwashed and mouldy coat. Nobody in the group was unwashed or stinky and the stench disappeared.
In the room where the family and guests used to play card with Satan, the door suddenly opened. There was nobody around as the rest of the group were upstairs and we were on our own and the door was too heavy to be opened by wind.

There were other things too, I didn't join the Ouija board session but apparently the discussion was very lively and interesting.
Once again, not sure but it certainly made me doubt my beliefs in no ghosts.

F

So basically all ghost stories are BS apart from yours which is absolutely true.

Regarding why people only see people not pets... I saw my dear dog running round the garden a few weeks after she died. As clear as anything.

[quote BigMoan]**@BobbieT1999* @Dottybackorcid*

I think a pet yes to dreaming, but also yes to potentially having a ‘ghost’.

Mammals -probably do dream. Possibly could be associated with a ghostly sighting.

A snail - no![/quote]
Oh surely snails can dream!

That's so sad if not.

@Ciaram55

Regarding why people only see people not pets... I saw my dear dog running round the garden a few weeks after she died. As clear as anything.

I truly hope my dogs haunt me when they die. I’m pretty sure my girl would, she sticks to me like Velcro and I doubt the small matter of death would break her habit 🥰

Pikaso I'm sure she will bless her.

[quote Blurp]@Packingsoapandwater I remember hearing about a study which said that memory has been found to be partly genetic, so you can sometimes "inherit" a memory from your parents. I guess it makes sense in a way when you look at how animals inherit instincts, it's not totally out of the question.[/quote]
I’ve often wondered how birds just know how to build a nest, even quite intricate ones, like weaver birds make. It’s not as if they go to classes or can ask YouTube.

IMO people who scoff that it’s all BS, because nothing has yet been proved, must have very closed minds. A few hundred years ago maybe they’d have been the same sort of people who thought it right and proper for someone to be branded a heretic, and very likely put to death, for saying that the earth moved around the sun.

Well, I thought I’d get roasted on here. Which is why I was a bit tentative with my title - but it seems lots of people have had experiences. I wasn’t expecting these kind of responses - thank you. It’s really made me think today!
@GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER
I remember reading a study about birdsong when I was younger. A baby bird had been deafened at birth (horrible I know) - but there was a recording of that birds song v’s an undeafened bird. So learned v’s innate. I remember something about the structure of the deafened birds song being all there, it was just lacking enhancement.

I’m just reading this:

For us 3rd Dimensional (3D) humans, what we remember of our nightly dreams are 4th Dimension (4D) experiences. Some say we experience many higher dimensions in our dreams, but we only remember the 4D experience because it is closest to our 3D experience.

With that in mind, his new theory suggests that dreams happen to make our understanding of the world less simplistic and more well-rounded -- because our brains, like deep neural networks, also become too familiar with the "training set" of our everyday lives. To counteract the familiarity, he suggests, the brain creates a weirded version of the world in dreams, the mind's version of dropout. "It is the very strangeness of dreams in their divergence from waking experience that gives them their biological function," he writes

I think there is a link between ghosts and dreaming. Almost like a different state of consciousness.

I'm pretty skeptical and usually raise an eyebrow at spooky stories, however I work in a really old castle and a couple of things have happened to me which I just can't explain.

I do sometimes stop and think how weird it is to be alive. To think, and feel - to be an entity - to be a unique individual. To have my own thoughts, my own reality. I mean it is just mind blowing. Completely mind blowing. Life is busy, and I guess you just function day to day without really addressing it. But there MUST be something more going on! And whatever we understand about life now will be considered extremely primitive in 1000 years time. I’d love to know what we’ll discover by that time, but I guess I’ll never know. Maybe I will if I become a ghost!!

@DontWannaBeObamasElf - that's exactly what I felt like when I went to the event. I went in a non-believer and left an agnostic.

@EerieSilence

I am a sceptic but I had an experience which made me question whether there is something beyond death and what form it takes. I went to a ghost hunting organised by a group in one of the most haunted mansions - a plethora of spirits and ghosts, plus Satan himself are rumoured to have graced the visitors with their presence. A walled-in baby was found during reconstruction works and is purported to have belonged to the daughter of the family the house used to belong to who went mad and died, locked in a room. It was said that the family dabbled in black magic and some funky stuff but in order to keep up the pretenses they locked the poor daughter once she found out herself pregnant with one of the visiting guests (and the legend later made Satan the father of the baby).

They were using all modern ghost hunting electronic gadgets and we went through the house in a complete dark. It was one of those so-called lockdown nights before lockdown took another meaning.
There were some moments which I can't really explain - while calling for spirits to show themselves, in a complete dark and circle, holding hands, the girl beside me suddenly flew forward and said something pushed her really hard. Nobody was behind her but at the time the temperature dropped rapidly and I was freezing all of a sudden.
In the room where the daughter of the family had died, we used Kinect to look for unknown presence and we saw three figures, one of them was a smaller child jumping up and down on the bed, the bigger ones were just hanging around, sometimes responding to us when we asked them to wave at us.
Then we went to the upper flour which used to house mentally ill patients and nun novices at different times as the house was changing owners. Lots of activity there, what really stays in my mind was standing in the dark and suddenly I felt a breeze and someone passed by me, I remember the stench, like an unwashed and mouldy coat. Nobody in the group was unwashed or stinky and the stench disappeared.
In the room where the family and guests used to play card with Satan, the door suddenly opened. There was nobody around as the rest of the group were upstairs and we were on our own and the door was too heavy to be opened by wind.

There were other things too, I didn't join the Ouija board session but apparently the discussion was very lively and interesting.
Once again, not sure but it certainly made me doubt my beliefs in no ghosts.

But @EerieSilence. you were at a ghost-hunting event (so how skeptical are you really?), at a place reputed to be haunted, surrounded by other people who are unskeptical enough to attend a ghost-hunting event and everyone seems to have accepted the 'history' of the house, which helpfully included a mad daughter, illicit pregnancy, walled-up infant bones, black magic, visits from a card-playing, impregnating Satan, mentally-ill people and novice nuns, so hits every possible ghostly mansion cliché and someone else says she was pushed in a dark room, it was dark, and cold and draughty and smelly. None of which seems all that surprising in the circumstances! People who believe in ghosts, or are at least open enough to the idea to attend a ghost event, are expecting some supernatural activity at a reputedly haunted old house, having been primed with stories about dark events in the house's past.

And Kinect is just a motion sensor detector, most familiar from XBoxes and the like, as liable to software glitches as any other form of tech, surely...?.

@Subulter - I went there, because I wanted to see it live, know how they do it. I went there as a total sceptic.
The history of the family - as I said already, the family were real. Their dabbling in occult was real. The illegitimate child - real. Satan as Daddy - not so much.
I also went there on my own. None of my friends went with me and the people I met there were complete strangers, believers and non-believers. It was an interesting experience.