Weird activity in my house (again)

[MozzchopsThirty]

At the risk of sounding totally insane we have spirits in our house.

Dd (21) has always heard people talking at night, going up and down stairs, walking the landing etc
After my divorce it got worse and lights were going on and off, doors closing etc.
I had a priest round who blessed the house, then a clairvoyant 'cleaner' which made things much better.

Now things are starting again, dd hearing things and now ds1 has told dd he often feels like there's someone in his room.
Last night I woke to him screaming from his bedroom that there were people whispering outside his room and walking along the carpet! He was too afraid to even come out. Now ds1 is a no nonsense rugby playing teen who is certainly not hysterical at any time. He ended up sleeping with his sister (he'd generally rather die than this!)
There was also a cross knocked off a shelf and down the back of cupboards in ds2 room when I was here alone.

Don't know what to do? Do I get cleaning lady back?
Are we all going crazy?
(Sorry didn't know where else to post this)

Why is it rude to say something is in someone's head?

I have never hallucinated before or since. I am not so wispy as to have delusions, or swoon, or in need of smelling salts or the like. I don't get migraines, I am not, nor ever was bereaved. I have never seen anything that wasn't there before, or smelt anything that did not exist.

On the balance of probability, given that I have never imagined anything before, or since, even the science of mathematics would back me up in saying that there is a very high probability that I DID see what I thought I did.

'in your head' is a way of telling someone they are imagining things, or they are mad.

Do I REALLY need to explain this?

and yet YOU are the one suggesting that I am hard of thinking...

m'kay...

"'in your head' is a way of telling someone they are imagining things, or they are mad"

Really? I don't think that. Our brains are complex things. Sometimes things that are in our imaginations can feel more real than real things. Some dreams, for example.

I think I was very clear in saying that I would never deny the people saw what they saw. Where we disagree is that I still think there is a scientific answer albeit maybe not one that we yet understand.

"On the balance of probability, given that I have never imagined anything before, or since, even the science of mathematics would back me up in saying that there is a very high probability that I DID see what I thought I did."

Well, no it wouldn't, actually. On the balance of probabilities your experience came from the same place that all other similar experiences came from. Because lots of people have had various sorts of hallucinations and dreams but nobody has ever had a supernatural experience that stood up to investigation.

Have you considered night terrors OP? Your son is clearly frightened - he has experienced something but going by what he reports it could be hypnagogic in nature.
I have night terrors myself and they can bE terrifying - basically the mechanism that controls sleep and wakefulness and the associated dreaming/paralysis goes a bit awry. So for example you swear you're awake but you feel someone sit on the bed next to you, or you see someone in your room. The sleeping brain superimposes the dream into the reality around you. I assure you it feels 100% real and if I was in any way prone to religious/spiritual thoughts I can see how I'd be convinced it was that.

Anxiety and hormones are two big triggers. If you read up on night terrors you'll see they are common across all countries and cultures and have spawned some fascinating folk beliefs!

Something to think about anyway. There are some quite effective methods for dealing with them if you think it's that,

Hissy, I actually think it possible you were perceiving something in the environment, external from you.

Just because another person might not perceive it, or might not perceive it in the same way does not mean nothing was there. However variations in perceptions means they (the perceptions) are partly, at least, 'in your head' because your brain has to process what your senses are detecting.

There lots of detail, in the environment, our senses detect that we only subliminally process.

So this, (above), is different from hallucinations etc, since the brain is attempting to process something external, however because we don't understand the nature of the phenomenon there is no simple explanation as to what has occurred.

OP it really doesn't matter whether or not anyone else believes in spirits.

What we can all agree on is that carbon monoxide poisoning does exist and can be fatal. Please go out and buy a carbon monoxide detector today. Rule that out and then explore other non-fatal phenomena.

www.nhs.uk/conditions/Carbon-monoxide-poisoning/Pages/Introduction.aspx

As someone who has dealt with wierdness my hunch is that sometimes the brain is processing stuff in the exterior or interior environment which comes out as images or sounds. My brain is dyslexic and I process in images and some of the wierdness that I've seen and other people tell me about could well be this. Other people do not have brains wired this way and perhaps that lies at the root of 'it can't happen.'

Sometimes it is about MH issues and a training course for clergy I went on last year was really keen to stress that what can look woo or wierd is a symptom of an underlying MH issue. Perhaps the stigma that our society puts on MH sends people to priest rather than the GP which is a shame. I'd be happy to support someone to access medical help if I suspected that this was the case.

But sometimes the wierdness defies explanation. If someone is grieving a sudden death, telling them that the image of their wife at the foot of the bed that they saw the night before they had the news of the car accident, or the favourite chair that keeps moving, or the smell of the beloved's perfume or tobacco is not real and is just an illusion is not helpful. They may be in the mind or they may be something else. These things fade with time and if prayer helps the person who is bereaved then to deny that because someone else's world view says it can't seems mean minded.

These things fade with time and if prayer helps the person who is bereaved then to deny that because someone else's world view says it can't seems mean minded.

Agree, thegreen.

When I was a child I lived in a house that terrified me, I hated being upstairs by myself as I used to see a man at the top of the stairs, I frequently fell down the stairs as I could feel him behind me. He or something used to make the rocking chair in my room move. I used to sleep in a sleeping bag so that ghostly cold hands wouldn't touch my feet anymore. I could hear spirits in the loft and it was so loud it would wake me up. I couldn't walk under the loft hatch which was a bugger as the only toilet was past that.

I'd come at lunchtime or from school and some days it would be okay and on others the sense of foreboding was so much that I couldn't go inside to the empty house, I might sneak a peak through the letterbox at most.

Then one day I stopped believing in god and all that went with it. I never saw, heard or felt anything ever again.

How strange, Wex. What do you think caused it?

Sorry Wax. Misread your name there.

I believe you OP.
I think the negative energy from the split is likely to have started things up again.
As you had success with the priest and clairvoyant 'cleaner' I would recommend doing that again.
Try not to get frightened, these things feed off fear and sadness.
It will get better.

I'm not sure pondering but I suspect I was abused by an uncle. I was always scared of him and he was convicted of abusing his step daughter and daughters some years ago. They were slightly younger than me. Even at the time of his conviction, I didn't really put 2 and 2 together. In the last year or two I've slowly come to make sense of some fleeting images in my head and odd situations that I remember. I still don't actually remember being abused though.

If I was, then I guess it was traumatic a situation for a child to make sense of and with having lots of older siblings who probably wound me up no end about ghost and ghouls, then this is how my brain processed it.

Can I share the story that made a sceptic of me at the age of about 5? We moved to a new house, and I saw, and was utterly terrified of a "green man" in the kitchen. I could not be convinced that there wasn't a green man. I refused to go into the room, and, I am told, everyone else was starting to get spooked. Then my mother, who was an excellent lateral thinker, got down to my level, and saw the splash of dark green paint in the shape of a man's face under a shelf where only someone the height of a 5 year old could see it.

Now,if we had moved again, we could easily have believed the house was haunted. If we had redecorated the kitchen, the green man would have vanished, and it would have been easy to associate his departure with some other event that coincidentally happened at the same time.

All supernatural events that have ever been investigated are "green men" of some sort. Or dreams, hallucinations or hoaxes.

I have another Betrand. I went upstairs (in already scary house) and reached my hand in to turn on the bedroom light. As i reached in I could the rhythmic rasp of heavy breathing. I stood rooted to the spot. Slowly as the panic subsided I realised that the horrifying sound was someone outside shoveling snow.

My mum had a picture that cried. It was a postcard of a house in a cheap clip frame. However, if you sat to the side of it - where my DMs chair was, the way te windows and bricks were sometimes made it look like a face. My mum was freaked out a bit and even more so when drops of water made it look like the face was crying. It was a leak in the chimney and the water was travelling slowly down the textured paper.

My strange experience was sleeping on the top floor in a holiday home we'd rented, when in the middle of the night the firmly shut door burst open. There was no one there. However I was so angry (dog tired baby DC) at being woken up I just swore, strode across the room and slammed the door shut again. It wasn't till the morning that it occurred to me I couldn't work out how that had happened. Didn't happen again though!

"My strange experience was sleeping on the top floor in a holiday home we'd rented, when in the middle of the night the firmly shut door burst open."

Not properly shut. Draught. Uneven floorboards or door frame. House settling. Damp wood drying. Something caught in the door catch. Someone trying to scare you.

Sorry, I can't help it- it' s a sort of reflex!

I did check it was shut Bertrand. It was the sort of door that really firmly shut. And it really slammed open. It was a big place, someone trying to scare me wouldn't have made it down the straight corridor in time. Anyway I wasn't scared, thought it was quite funny, if it had been something scary, my absolutely foul mood had seemed to see it off!

Until about four years ago, I was the lifelong sceptic and atheist who had nonetheless had an unexplainable few incidents in one of my student flats. Something was happening to me physically, as well as sounds and sights. So real, solid, undeniable and inexplicable. Always in bed. I was at a loss to explain it until a few years ago when I found out about hypnagogic hallucinations (because my DD was having them). So... that's what it was then! They really felt so, so real.

It's funny how so many strange experiences happen to people when they're in bed/ sleeping/ maybe a bit tired and dozing in a chair.