Your degree of separation from (alleged) paranormal phenomena

In My Humble Opinion
1

Thought I’d set up a poll, and hope it’s not too confusing. A lot of stories of paranormal phenomena seemingly come from a friend, a friend of a friend or on further out; and I thought we might try to quantify this roughly.

Paranormal phenomena could be anything commonly touted as such, including UFOs, EVPs, ABCs and ROUSs.

A degree of separation of “0” means you personally have experienced this.
A degree of separation of “1” means you have heard the story from the person who directly experienced it.
A degree of separation of “2” means your friend, family member or acquaintence told you about what his or her . . . .etc. . . . directly experienced. (But if you got direct confirmation from the person, then it should be a “1”)
A degree of separation of “3 or more” means your friend told you what his friend’s friend him (the second friend).

And let’s stick to people we’ve met face to face; assigning a score to things we’ve heard on a message board would be approaching infinity. And it has to be things the subject genuinely believed happened (at least according to the story) – not making up a deliberate ghost story to BS people.

And last, tell us what the story was, whether you believe it or not.

All that being said, I’m choosing “1” for myself though it might be closer to 0.5. My mother told me that when I was a toddler she would hear me wake up and start talking to somebody. When she walked into the room, I was standing up in my crib looking out, and seemed to be deliberately answering some person’s questions even though the room was empty and dark. When she asked me who I was talking to, I described an old man with overalls. She was seriously freaked out. But of course I don’t remember any of it now.

2

And to clarify, your poll answer should be the narrowest degree of separation in your experience. I’ve also heard friend of friend stories, but I’m choosing 1 because that’s even closer to me.

3

I voted “heard from a friend who directly experienced”

This person was a coworker though, not really a friend. She claimed to have met someone on the bus who seemed to know her, reassured her about her grandfather’s recent death, and gave her advice directly relating to things going on in her life. The person disappeared when she turned away for a second, and nobody else seemed to have noticed he had ever been there. She said that later she was looking through her grandfather’s things, and found a picture of him in his youth (before she was born) which was unmistakably the person she had met on the bus. She is convinced that she spoke to her grandfather’s spirit.

4

degree zero
Precognitive dreams (always about random stuff, never the winning lottery numbers)
Occaisionally knowing things that I have no way of knowing - yesterday, I found a small part for a tool that had been lost by another person, months prior… just walked over and picked it up out of a can of random small parts - one of many such cans, btw

5

I put “heard from someone who directly experienced.” When I was growing up my mom swore up and down that any time one of her kids was in trouble - like for example, when my younger brother was involved in a (non-injury) car accident one night - she would “just know” instantly, to the point that she would wake from a sound sleep with this knowledge that something was wrong.

I think it was a bunch of coincidental BS, myself.

6

I guess I missed putting an option for those who might want to put down that they’ve never heard a paranormal story at all either second-hand or third, fourth, fifth or however many -hand. If there’s anyone out there like that, pls feel free to post as well!

7

0 and 1

The 0 is seeing a small figure nipping around a corner into a bathroom, and finding it empty in my flat in Brockport NY back in 1983. That same night people staying in the flat with me also report waking up to find the sliding door to the balcony open, and objects moved from where they had put them.

The 0 is also the same flat, where every night of the 4 months I lived there I had one of 2 types of nightmares. One recurring, and one random monsters coming to get me. The recurring one involved reliving a false first day in the flat. I was unpacking, and upset because I could not hang anything because there were red and black scribbles all over the walls and the landlord needed to repaint first. I go to bed early, leaving my roomie Keith in the living room watching tv. I wake up to feel something watching me from the doorway - a hooded and cloaked figure that was half black and half white like the ST:TOS episode, but with glowing red eyes. I try to yell to get Keith to come help me but realize that I am prevented by the figure. In real life I would wake Keith up by screaming.

The 1 and another 0 from the same flat: Keith had a job across the parking lot at the Burger King. One of the evenings he was walking home and he saw ‘me’ standing in the window of the bedroom in his big fluffy hooded velour bathrobe [that I liked to steal when I took a shower] and when he came in he woke me up to ask me why I didn’t wave back. I had been asleep for about 2 hours by that time. Also, when we went to move out, I lost an earring off the back of my desk and we had to peel back the carpet along the wall to get it back and found a medallion with the same crap engraved on it that I saw in black and red on the wall in my nightmare.

And a 1 from my mother: In the house built by my greatgrandfather, in the 1950s when my dad was dutystationed overseas she came home several times to an empty house with every single light from locked attic to basement. No chance of it being anybody, she did not have a live in maid at the time. And a second one, my imaginary playmate when I was in that same house when we came home on leave was my very long dead great grandfather who I had never seen the 1 existing photograph of until a couple years later. That was diagnosed by a child psychologist my mom had in to see me because I had an imaginary playmate.

And a 0, 1 and 2 from that same house: Sounds of the attic bathroom door opening, footsteps across the attic and the office door opening and closing. My great grandfather had a full bathroom, a dressing room with huge walk in closet, and an office that was a room the size of almost the entire front half of the house. The people who bought the house from us were friends, and I still spent a fair amount of time there as the daughter was my best friend growing up. They tried to rent the attic several times to have people move out because they did not like the ghost walking around. I was the only person that was never disturbed in the attic, so it became my default bedroom when I visited. When they moved to Pittsburg to work at Carnegie Mellon, they rented the house out to SUNY Geneseeo students, who reportedly kept complaining about the noises.

8

Score of 1 for me. At my sister’s old job, there were a series of odd breakages, such as glasses that smashed for no obvious reason, over a period of several months. At the time, she was somewhat convinced something weird was going on, as she couldn’t understand what was happening. For example, she reported a test tube falling onto the middle of the floor when she was alone in a room. With hindsight, she is a lot more sceptical - the “activity” stopped when a particular person left, who was known to be a be a bit strange.

I think by far the simplest explanation is that a prankster was at work. He must have been quite clever about it, but imagine the tricks an amateur magician could pull if he wanted to.

9

I was about 13 and laying on my back in bed. I heard a sound like someone clearing their throat preparing to spit. Then I heard the spit and felt a cold glob of foamy goo right onto my right eye. WTF?

I wiped it off puzzled as hell and shouted to my mom in the next room. Hey mom did you just spit at me? She replied “No don’t be stupid. Go to sleep!”

So I puzzled about it for a little while and eventually did just that.

10

I’ve got a 1:
Friend works as a funeral director, and when she was there late a night, with just her and her boss, the organ started playing by itself. Plus, there were apparently a couple of instances when walking down the stairs that it felt like something was breathing down her neck, and she was alone in the stairway, and that whatever it was followed her down the stairs (she ran) and stopped after she got outside.

I’ve always wanted to experience something like that first hand.

11

Oh man I’m getting chills just reading the thread. I have a big phobia of ghosts, and if I ever found out where I lived was haunted I’d have to burn it to the ground.

12

My mom believes in ghosts and UFOs because of experiences she has had.

The ghost one isn’t very good; she just claims that she felt the presence of her father sitting at the foot of her bed on the night he died.

The UFO story: she and a friend saw a flying-saucer type craft one night. They ran in the house and their other friends separated them and asked them to draw what they saw. They drew the same thing! Twilight Zone theme

I’ve always been a big fan of ghost stories and would be delighted to see a ghost, but unfortunately I don’t believe there is any such thing.

13

As much as it kills me to say this, the apartment I just moved out of had some strange things going on in it that I was unable to come up with rational answers for. Of course, for the things my wife and I both experienced, I made up something that sounded halfway reasonable because my wife has anxiety issues and she was worried about it.

Starting shortly after we moved in, on random occasions, if you washed your hands in the bathroom sink and walked out of the bathroom, sometimes the hot water would be on roughly full blast when you had already walked away. Like a full revolution of the knob for the hot water.

I never heard it come on, but using only cold water to wash your hands, turning it off, drying your hands and walking into the other room only to find that you can hear rushing water was kinda odd. Occasionally when we went on vacation or a trip for a few days, it would be on when we came back. It happened more often when the apartment was very messy, or when we had guests.

My wife took a photo showing off her new haircut in our living room that appears to show a hand sticking out from behind her back. What’s odd is that both her arms are holding the camera in front of her and no one else was in the room.

I saw glasses of water scooting across our table, then falling off the edge. I checked the slope of the table and the glasses were actually moving uphill. It only ever happened with water, so it never ruined anything. I guess that was kinda polite.

My friend that was sleeping on our couch one night visiting us from our hometown swears something slowly pulled the blanket down over his feet and onto the floor. He thought it was our cats, but then realized they were shut in the bathroom. When we got up at six he had been standing on our porch smoking for about 3 hours because the apartment was too creepy. I was told by him and another one of our friends that they felt they weren’t welcome there and that it was odd.

Of course, anything I experienced could be a manifestation of my narcolepsy. Occasionally I have dreams that don’t end when I wake up or begin before I am actually asleep, which can produce some very vivid hallucinations. They are pretty easy to tell apart and usually come with sleep paralysis though, and cleaning up water that spilled or paying higher water bills when you were gone a third of the month kinda makes it hard to deny to myself that something was going on.

But the hot water thing was experienced by at least 5 people.

14

:eek: Wow. Any chance you could share it here?

Reminds me of one of the creepiest movies scenes I’ve watched, with no gore or jump-out-gotcha-BOO at all.

15

I voted 1, but only because I forgot about this experience I had last Summer.

16

I’ll try and upload it when I get home.

17

My grandfather said he had precognitive dreams, he wrote an article about them for one of those paranormal magazines. He saw the cause of the Apollo fire that killed 3 and some more minor things in our family’s lives. He told us about them to see if my bro and I had them too and I told him I didn’t. I lied. But it’s never anything important so I don’t dwell on it.

18

#1. Several months (?) after my grandpa died, my grandma says she heard him call her name, plain as day. She’s a devout Christian woman who would not believe any kind of communication with/from the departed is possible and is very down to earth with no history of mental illness and/or psychosis that I’ve ever heard about, so I don’t doubt what she says she heard. Still, I think it’s quite possible for a “normal person” to experience that type of brief hallucination due to the stress of grief.

19

One of my co-workers saw the “ghost” of an employee that had died a year earlier. What made the story kind of creepy: she had never met the person and had no idea that he had worked in the office, but described him to a tee.

20

My personal experience with the supernatural.