Have you ever felt the presence of evil?

[Petridish]

I mean, without having any rational reason to feel it? It could be a person or a place.

For me, a friend's father used to really radiate evil - much later, my friend confessed that he had been physically and emotionally abused by his father

I also knew a woman who had a senior job with the police. She was a friend of a friend and I had a bad feeling about her. She eventually got struck off and imprisoned for stealing huge amounts of money from a children's charity she was in charge of.

I think it's reading subtle body language in people. Having had a questionable childhood I get this a lot. Most memorable being 12 and hanging out with a friends awful boyfriend and his older mates. One guy was at least a decade older and it seemed odd he hung out with teenagers. He kept smiling at me and it made my blood run cold. I refused to engage with him. He then offered me an alcoholic drink. My brain was screaming at me not to drink it so I politely declined. I went home I was so freaked out. Found out at school the drink had temazepam in it. He'd given it to one of the older girls and when she passed out he'd spent hours raping and buggering her he told everyone she was ' up for it ' but many others at the house said no, she had been unconscious for a while before he vanished with her.

When I was very little we lived in North Wales. I had a childminder who my mum loved. The CMs husband was generally at work, but then spent a lot of time at home because he had been suspended from his job. My mum never liked him, got a really bad vibe from him. We then moved from the area.

A few years later, the North Wales children's home scandal came out on the news, and the husband was one of those imprisoned for the awful awful things that happened. My mum heard from friends she still had in the area that the CM had no idea and was just broken by it all, poor woman.

This thread is fascinating.

The main one I remember is my local hospital. Most of it is lovely, clean modern etc. no problems at all. Until you go towards the other side of it, onto a corridor and the whole atmosphere changes.

Off the corridor is the mental health unit, as soon as you walk in there it's like everything gets sucked out of you. It's hard to describe but the feeling you get is unreal.
Even the staff look like they've got this feeling. You feel suffocated in there and have to get outside to "breathe" again.

Horrible.

NoNoKuni a friend of mine ended up somewhere like that in Cornwall with an "artist" Ted... Is it the Scientology place??

I had a feeling of evil from one person, the only time I can recall feeling it so strongly. I was quite young, and it was a man who had just moved in next door to us, and when I saw him out in the garden a day or so after he moved in I knew he was BIG trouble. Over the next few months we had loud music played day and night with abuse shouted at us through our walls, he was also beating his pregnant girlfriend. I called the police over and over (they said he was well known to them but didn't say why), but it did no good - not even when she was taken away in an ambulance after he threw her down the stairs.

Fortunately our place was rented so we could move away, it was years ago but I still worry about that woman and her child.

NiNoKuni, sorry.

Yep, TeaStory, that's the one. I see it has achieved fame of sorts

I suffer from night terrors - it's clearly a manifestation of my anxiety and nothing 'spooky', but I often wake up with an overwhelming sense of an evil presence in the room. It is horrible.

Almost every post is about a man. No evil women around?

One of the most evil people I've met was a woman. She had managed to hook up with an equally evil bloke, and between them they caused a huge amount of damage to other people. See my earlier post about personality disorders - hers was so bad she had actually been sectioned, and like some weird horror movie, the man she hooked up with seemed attracted to her mental health issues.

Are there any mental health experts posting, because I have found that things such as personality disorders don't seem to be treatable (or even noticed), unlike other forms of mental issues such as schizophrenia or depression. Is this true or am I making presumptions?

I am incredibly intuitive and pick up vibes from people and am very rarely wrong. And I am VI so no body language there.

But this is a place... we moved into a house in 2004 just before ds' second birthday. It was a relatively new build, less than ten years old iirc. Anyway the back of the house just exuded an awful feeling of evil, I can't put my finger on why or what, but there was a feeling when walking through the utility room or around the back of the house. And strange things happened there, a ring of mine disappeared off my finger and turned up six months later on the kitchen floor, the dog bowl moved across the kitchen floor without reason, and one night I was home alone because xh had gone to his parents to sort out computer problems they were having and I heard footsteps walking across the decking even though the gate was closed and it hadn't opened. And I used to have horrible, horrible dreams about a presence which would pin me up against walls - this was a recurring dream which disappeared when we moved out in 2011.

And interesting ly the people who bought it after us only stayed there for 2.5 years before they sold it so I often wonder why that might have been.

I was talking of women and men in my post. It was a woman I knew who'd convinced people she was lovely, earth mother type, embezzled hundreds from a small mh charity!

I've seen the results of evil actions very clearly and it's awful. I can't imagine how prison warders and policemen cope with having to handle that sort of thing every day.

I've four times had a sensation of pure evil. One was completely inexplicable. I would like to dismiss it, but that seems like a denial of my own experience and a bad thing to do. But it is annoying that I can't explain it rationally!

The 2nd was a situation where I had to sleep in a certain room, it was the only one available. I and everyone else found the room really unnerving and there was a sense of malice. I dunno if it was the proportions of the room or the dim daylight or something.

The third time was closely attached to a rather lovely woman, but not her, herself. Like an invisible cloak around her. I can't explain it, it sounds stupid, but that's the closest I can get.

Did find out later something which makes me wonder if my intuition there was rather chillingly accurate, can't put it here, it would out her or me.

There's someone who's a convicted paedophile at the end of the road here but strangely, I don't get the same sense. This particular man is odd, but not evil (and yes, I'm well aware that most people would hang him or burn him alive given his conviction).

I have had the sense of evil from some inmates of a youth prison in the psychiatric wing though. I don't think they should ever be let out, though that's not really a legal possibility. They are so very, very clearly damaged and damaging beyond repair. Twisted childhoods and they have become twisted, pitiable but extremely dangerous teens and adults.

I've been around some people who just make my Spidey senses tingle. It can be either sex, I just avoid and keep my kids away from them

Meerka it's interesting you saying you don't get the evil vibe from the paedophile, I've had to work with convicted paedophiles before and I haven't got a bad vibe off them either. Indeed, some have been so polite and charming it would be easy to believe they had been wrongly convicted.
My neighbour's on the other hand - perfect, quiet neighbour's, accept parcels for me if I'm out, have had to be CRB checked for their jobs, they give me the bloody creeps. They are sociable and often have friends and family stay and I'm not at all keen on them either, something about that group make me feel nervous.

Are there any mental health experts posting, because I have found that things such as personality disorders don't seem to be treatable (or even noticed)

Not formally trained as a MH person but had experience of dealing with some unwell people.

Some personality disorders can be treated with a good chance of improvement, eg Borderline Personality Disorder. Not guarenteed; it depends on the severity of the illness, the quality of the help they get and most of all the person's own will to get better. It also tends to get better with age, apparently.

Some can't, or it's extremely difficult. Mostly because of the nature of the PD. Narcissistic and sociopathic are two; the people tend to think they're fine and by the nature of the illness, that they know better than anyone else. Hard to treat that, I'm told.

People with sociopathic PD -can- do absolutely fine though if they are brought up in loving and consistent households. There's a lot of people with sociopathic PD living perfectly reasonable and constructive lives. They jsut have the potential for callous ruthlessness, but it never comes out. If they have unstable or destructive childhoods though .... they tend to become the same, themselves.

I think we're basically animals and highly attuned to non-verbal cues, so yes, I think you can 'pick up' bad vibes from someone.

There's an interesting book on this, Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear. Basically saying listen to your gut instincts; often you're picking up something that's wrong. Gift of Fear

Not sure if I've experienced "evil" as such but definitely a feeling that a person was not as nice as they seemed and to be extremely wary of exposing my children to them. My instincts turned out to be correct, the person in question was definitely a not nice individual and was extremely abusive to his ex gf. Thankfully, he was never particularly prevalent in my life and is now gone from it completely.

Interesting thread. I can't think of one specific example but like to think that I can judge my surroundings and know when to moveon.

I believe in the banality of evil. The people I know who have been locked up haven't been 'evil' in some horror-movie devilry kind of a way. They've been unprincipled tossers.

My PE teacher at school was clearly a pervey with a thing for young girls. He had this awful mullet and used to make us take off our skirts at every opportunity. He wasn't hellish, just pathetic, insecure and opportunistic. We all knew that he wasn't 'right' and we all took the piss out of him in private. He ended up in jail for having sex with an underage girl he was 'training', twenty years later.

Ditto for the pathetic man who lived round the corner from my parents and used to put on a blazing show of Christmas lights in his tiny terrace to attract in young children. Bespectacled, beer-bellied, and stupid - he was more dweeby than devilish. Didn't stop him doing a lot of damage, though.

I found out years later the PE teacher at school abused a peer student of mine, the boys at the time all hated him.

This guy: www.burytimes.co.uk/news/2286382.school_caretaker_on_attempted_kidnap_charge/

I knew him years ago. Always thought he was a creep. Then in 2008 he did this.

Have just googled, he got sent to prison. Good.

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/caretaker-who-tried-to-kidnap-girl-971267

Two people, and one house:

• My aunt's husband who as a child left me feeling really creeped out. I was only young, 8yrs old perhaps, so couldn't explain it, but he really made me uncomfortable and I would avoid being around him. Turns out that he was a cheater, and a beater, but I don't know if there was more to it than that.

• In a queue at a local shop, middle of the day and somewhere very ordinary like Woolworths. A man came into the queue behind me and I didn't even have to turn around but I was filled with such dread at the sense of evil coming from him that I not only left the queue, I immediately left the shop. My instinct was screaming that I had to get away from him.

• Once when house hunting with my parents, aged 10, we visited a place which absolutely filled me with dread. Even to think about it now makes me shiver. I apparently made it very clear to my parents that I hated it, and I cried, and they agreed that it wasn't the place for us. Phew.

I don't think any of this is down to woo. With places it's often to do with frequencies that we can't quite hear but can still detect, here's a link to an article about it. www.cracked.com/article_18828_the-creepy-scientific-explanation-behind-ghost-sightings.html

With people I think it comes down to a discrepancy between what a person is saying and doing and what their eyes, facial expressions and body language is telling you. I'd bet money that most of the people giving off an aura of evil are sociopaths or psychopaths. they can mimic the behaviour of regular people, but they can't quite hide their real feelings and intention, these leak out via their faces and bodies and people who are sensitive enough pick up the clues and see them for what they really are.