To start the spooky stories thread?

[SurpriseItsMeHorseyNeighNeigh]

Of course I'm not, it's Halloween, let's get scared.

So what is the spookiest/most unexplainable experience you had? We're talking paranormal here.

Oh and the other one I remember- the nightclub in Southend . Where a poster went back to nightclub many years later and saw a man at a bar who looked exactly the same as he did all those years earlier! Blonde angry looking guy I think

Apart from the leaning horrible woman/animal thing - the story which sticks with with me is an imaginary friend one from ages ago.

This imaginary friend of the OPs little son apparently didn't like OP and started to suggest things to the boy like biting her 😳 The IF began to lurk in the hallway and not come to the boy if OP was around. The little boy confided in his mum that he didn't like IF anymore.

OP did something unbeknowns to the son (i can't remember what now, salt on thresholds or something) and the next day the house felt lighter and the son genuinely seemed happier in himself. The son was playing in the living room and OP want in and casually asked him if IF was around and the son said no. But (and pointed to the window) he's out there watching us - and he's angry!
😵

Finally come back to the thread with some stories, these are pretty outing to anyone who knows me

First one is just quite a nice one. My grandma had her last big birthday in the function room upstairs in a local pub. All the family were there and it was a lovely day. She died a few years later
A year or so after that one of my family had their wedding reception in the same room. Again, a lovely day. The weather was awful however so all wedding photo plans had to be ditched. Towards the end of the day we decided to come downstairs to the now empty pub to get some group photos.

it was just our side of the family. I remember saying ‘Grandma would have loved this’. We suddenly became aware that the song from the 80s ‘Grandma we love you’ was playing on the jukebox. We all looked at each other. Checked the jukebox, the song wasn’t even on there but the jukebox was definitely still turning. No staff around and anyway why would they know about my grandma?
Might have just been a lovely coincidence but I also remember buying her the single for Christmas when it came out years before. I like to think it was a little sign that she was there with us

Also one from years ago. I was having a pretty rough year at the time, grandfather not long died, going through a divorce, house move just fallen through amongst many other things….

I was driving home from work on the motorway in rush hour on a dark winter’s night. I was in the outside lane and suddenly hit a large concrete block that had fallen off a motorway bridge earlier that day (I found out later).
It took out the steering and blew out the rear tyre, car veered slowly to the left, miraculously not hitting anything and coming to a stop on the hard shoulder. I have no idea how I didn’t hit anything as it was so busy, the traffic sort of parted and let me through.
Anyway I got home hours later having been rescued by the AA.
When I got home there was a definite presence in my house. Doors slamming, clothes billowing up on the back of my chair, the room was icy cold (it was a new build). I just knew it was my grandfather looking out for me. Hard to explain but I’d had lots of weird things happen since he died, usually when I was upset or stressed out. Eventually I got so scared on my own in the house that I said ‘stop it grandad, you’re scaring me!’ and it stopped.

The next day I took my car to the garage. It was a mess but they were able to do a temporary fix. I went to pay.
The woman behind the desk said ‘what happened?’ I told her and she said ‘someone was looking out for you last night’. I laughed and agreed with her.
she said ‘I’m being serious, you had a visitation last night didn’t you? Who was it? How long have you been able to see things?’
’It was my grandad’ I replied. ‘Been seeing things since I was 15 or so’
‘That’s nice she said, I’m a spiritualist. I could see that you could see!’
I walked away completely shaken but really quite comforted. No explanation at all. I’d never met her before and I wasn’t living locally to my family. Was pre social media. Comforting though.

Long time lurker here 😁
Love these threads!

I've got loads of "second hand" ghost stories, told to me by others, but none of my own!
I've never ever seen anything or had any paranormal experiences, Which makes me wonder.
How is it that some people can "see" or "feel" these kinds of things and others can't?
All of my immediate family members claim to have had an experience of some sort, but I've never seen a thing.

I'm sure I'll get someone helpfully informing me that it's because it's not real 😁.. Which is absolutely fine if u believe that, (and I really don't know what I believe myself tbh), but I'm just curious 😁.

IMO some people just can see or sense things, in the same way that some people’s brains can compose beautiful music/understand astrophysics/ produce amazing paintings - things that the majority of us simply can’t.

A neighbour of a niece is one such, an amazing gift, but she doesn’t advertise or charge.
I’ve probably told this before on MN but here goes anyway. Niece and family had recently moved into a property, some of it very old, but with later extensions.
One long-unused, almost separate part of the house was going to be renovated for their dcs.
But from the word go, their dog refused absolutely to set a paw over the threshold of that part of the house.
None of the family had sensed anything.

Niece mentioned it to the neighbour, who offered to take a look.
She said that many years ago there had been a tragic death there, and the person responsible was still there, out of guilt.

At any rate, she asked him to leave, and evidently he left, since after that the dog was perfectly happy to enter that part of the house.

I dare say someone will tell me that the dog had imagined it!

.. "I dare say someone will tell me that the dog had imagined it!"

😂😂😂

No, but my explanation would be that there might be several houses the dog wouldn't set foot in, presumably they hadn't tried with every single house in the neighbourhood, and it just happened that the particular house had a death associated with it. Also most older houses will have had someone die in it at some point.

How is it that some people can "see" or "feel" these kinds of things and others can't?

I totally believe that people do see and feel things that can't be easily explained and are not making it up*, but that these are auditory or visual hallucinations, or our senses going into overdrive. Just talking about a ghost usually makes our hairs stand up on the back of our necks.

*Also that accounts and memories of such things get amplified or change over time.

This is very interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound#:~:text=One%20study%20has%20suggested%20that,supernatural%20events%20are%20taking%20place.

So I do believe in ghosts as such but am highly sceptical about them being spirits of the dead.

Also has anyone had a sound bath? How does this affect you?

I get all sorts of images and visualisations in my head with my eyes shut and lying down when experiencing the resonance of a gong or crystal bowl. Sometimes it makes me emotional and sometimes people find it a negative experience.

I think some people notice or experience different things in terms of our senses. DD1 is highly sensory and couldn't stand loud noises as a child. For DD2 it's smells, some strong smells practically bowl her over. Animals with their keen sight, instincts and hearing, can also experience things strongly or be upset by it.

Following

"I totally believe that people do see and feel things that can't be easily explained and are not making it up*"

Yes, this is what I was thinking too!
That people really are seeing, feeling or hearing things, but that they're not necessarily seeing ghosts in the traditional sense.
I've always wondered how that works though, when more than one person has seen and heard the same thing!

It's all very interesting!

I remember this one!
Made my blood run cold!

Sorry, my previous comment was in reply to this post by Laiste 😁

My brother died at 7, before I was born, and my mother said that for a long time she would 'feel' him getting into bed with her after Dad had gone to work.

I've probably posted this before when similar topics turn up. We lived in a hot Mediterranean country and at night we would go to sleep with just a sheet over us. During the night OH would go to the loo and then pull the blanket up from the foot of the bed as it was cooler and tuck it round me. Before we left that place we were living in a different flat and we were talking with friends about kind gestures. I mentioned this with the blanket and OH went pale, I never did that, you were the one who tucked it round me!

Later we were in another country and were introduced to a couple who, it turned out, had lived in the same flat years earlier and the wife's first comment was Did you still get tucked in at night?
Even now, almost 50 years later, the hairs on my arms are sticking up as I type this.

We have recently had a run of very weird things going on, it all started with my 15 year old DS. He was up late on his phone, and a touch activated bouncy ball in his room lit up. He started filming it and has caught a very quiet woman’s voice that says “I know you”. The next day, at his dads house, he heard tapping in the hallway outside his room, went out and snapped two pics. One has nothing, the other has a female at the bottom of the stairs staring at him. You can even see her blouse and pig tails. It all died down for a month or so, but recently we’ve had things moving in the house(shower curtain has moved on its own twice, some dvds flew off a shelf, and a football rolled on its own) and something touched my foot in bed the other night as I was dozing off. I shit myself at that one 😱

Are you sure it wasn't your shit hitting your foot wrapped up in a deja vu?

So how come the dog was happy to enter the area after the ‘presence’ had been politely asked to leave?

You tell me - perhaps someone had put some particularly anromatic and enticing treats in a far corner? A tuna tin with some of it left in would have enticed our old dog anywhere, but I’m sure you’ll think of something even better. 🙂

Mine is more of a creepy coincidence. Years ago I used to work with a woman who had an unusual surname that I'd never heard before or since. It turned that my stepmum knew this woman from a few years back and told me that she had sadly had a stillbirth a few years prior.
A few days after this conversation I was walking to the supermarket which you could cut through the cemetery to get to. I was with my sister.
We started wandering around looking at the graves and I found a grave that must have been this woman's stillborn baby as I recognised the name.
I told my sister about how our stepmum knew the mother of the baby and it was my work colleague and that that must be her baby's grave. We carried on walking till we got to the supermarket, saying how weird it was that we had come across that grave, considering I had only just heard about it from my stepmum and how vast the cemetery was.
As the words were leaving my mouth, who do I see, but the woman herself, getting into her car in the supermarket carpark. It was just so odd, as if the coincidence wasn't enough to see the grave, to then see the woman as we're having the conversation was very strange.

I definitely believe in ghosts.
But my sleep paralysis was caused by insomnia.
Also some of my experiences were caused by sleep deprivation.

I'm on a CPAP and I haven't had one instance of sleep paralysis.

When I was about 9 years old, we lived in a house where my bedroom was at the far end of the upstairs landing.

At the opposite end was a floor-to-ceiling window - that stripy kind of glass you can't see through properly. And outside the window was a streetlight. The head of my bed was next to my door, so with the door left ajar, I could see down the hall to the lit-up window.

I woke up one night - didn't really have any idea why. My face was turned towards the gap in the door, and it took me a few seconds to realise what was wrong: I couldn't see the streetlight. Everything was dark grey - that kind of fuzzy grey your room turns when the lights are out.

When my eyes focused, I realised why everything was grey: because I was face-to-face with something that had a fuzzy grey face and black smudges where its eyes should have been. We were literally inches apart, and it was looking right at me through the gap in the door, its face level with mine.

I froze and sort of crept down under the covers really slowly. I don't remember falling back to sleep, but it was gone when I woke in the morning. Neither of my parents had been to check on me overnight, and I have no clue what it was. I still get recurring nightmares about it now.

I’ve told this one before but might as well add it to this thread (which I really need to stop reading at 1am!).

I used to work in retail management and my store was an old Victorian building on a high street. Obviously the shop was at the front and then behind that was my office, a staff area, a downstairs stockroom and a steep flight of stairs led off that to a landing and then two larger stockrooms on the first floor.

I worked there for ten years and from the outset I had a feeling at times that if I looked up the stairs I’d see a man at the top. I couldn’t shake that feeling. I hated going up the stairs, spending time in the stockroom and often I’d walk through the downstairs stockroom with my eyes trained on the floor so I didn’t get a glimpse of the stairs. On several occasions I’d go up to the stock rooms and see what appeared to be a patch of mist fading.
I never told my staff about any of this.

Anyway, one evening we were getting prepped to close for the day, I was in my office and one of my assistants was mopping the floor downstairs. Suddenly she came rushing into the office, looking white and was shaking.
She said she’d looked up the stairs and a man was standing there watching her.

My mum had a dear friend (much older unmarried lady) who died when I was pregnant with my (now adult) DD. She wasn't blood family but we called her Auntie G. I was single and 22, unplanned pregnancy. She left everything she owned to my mum - it wasn't much: the contents of her little flat and maybe £1000. Rather than get rid of all her things, we used them to help furnish my first flat when the baby was born. I had various bits including her little floral 2+1 suite, her ironing board and some kitchen bits. It was very welcome though and saved me a small fortune when I was poor and alone.

Anyway, fast forward to when DD was a toddler. She was quite precocious with her speech and talked early and talked a lot (still does!) When she was about 18 months she started talking to "the lady who gave us our things". She was so matter of fact about it like I should know exactly who she meant - on questioning her further (What things? What lady?), she said "Auntie G, mama!"
I still have (and use) her ironing board - they don't make them like they used to.

DD also described people in old fashioned clothes and a rather horrifying man with "all his face not there" whilst we were parked outside a florist in town. We later found out that the florist was a funeral home from the mid 1800s until around 1940. DD remembers none of this now and is the least woo person I know.

@MadisonAvenue I get the black mists in the house now dh is dead.