Let me say up front that I don’t believe in ghosts. For the sake of this thread though, I’m going to pretend the apparitions people claim to see are real. Why do we assume they have to be undead spirits and proof of the afterlife? I know that’s the traditional interpretation, and the go to explanation of our ancestors, but what if there’s a better modern day explanation? What if they’re aliens watching us with cloaking devices and placing small experiments to see how we’d react? If true, the OP has aliens in his house, be careful what you do lest it be shown to alien archaeology students on Tau Ceti 6 in a few years!
Bldg 2 is gone now. I left there in 2004 and it was razed shortly thereafter. There was asbestos within - I understand the deconstruction was a sight to see! The engineers were put into a couple of old barracks buildings. No more cube farms - they got offices!!
I was there from 1985-1997, and again 2000-2004 - did that overlap your uncle’s time? PM me if you’d like.
Or maybe it’s like in Stephen King’s Dark Tower books: someone steps in from another dimension, takes your car keys to operate YOUR vehicle 5 years in YOUR future (wrecks it, probably), then returns your keys 20 minutes (your time) later, after you’ve gone pretty much insane looking for them. And they’re right were you left them.
That Edith Wharton quote posted earlier is close to my feelings on the matter of ghosts, too, although I can’t firmly say “I don’t believe in ghosts,” with conviction because I’m too curious to dismiss the possibility. After all, since recorded history began, human cultures all over the world have reported ghostly experiences…
I have a recent story to share, too. I live in a building that used to be a school, built around 1900. There are law offices on the first floor, which is open to the public, and to get to the apartments you have to go through one of two locked doors to get to the elevator and stairwell.
The other night, I went to get my mail down in the public area of the first floor. I walked to one of the doors to the elevators and out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone walking toward me, as though they were intending to pass through the door behind me. I assumed it was one of my neighbors and went to unlock the door, but the lock was not opening for me.
This was in itself odd because the lock on this door is so sensitive that it feels like you don’t even have to turn the key and the door will open (many times have I double-checked from the other side that it is indeed locked because it’s so easy to open). But not this time. I stood there for a good while, fiddling with the lock, while feeling someone standing behind me waiting to get through. I even apologized to them, saying, “I’m so sorry, the lock seems to be sticky!”
Finally the key unlocked the door, and I opened it and held it open behind me for my neighbor to walk through. As you probably have guessed, there was no one there. I’m telling you, I saw someone and felt someone’s presence just as strongly and genuinely as if there really had been.
Mentioned it before here, but my mother had a decidedly odd experience in the early 1950s. My father was duty stationed overseas and had left my mother at home in Western NY. The house he had bought when they got married previously belonged to my great aunt and had been built by my great grandfather as one of 3 [for he and my great aunt, for my grandfather and for my great uncle.] One Saturday she had joined my grandparents and my uncle and his then fiancee for an early supper, and my uncle had walked her home from next door to find the house still locked tightly but every single light in the house on from attic to basement. They called the police and had them search for burglars, but nobody was there, no signs of anything missing and no breakins.
And this house was built by the same great grand father that was my ‘imaginary’ playmate when I was 3 and 4 years old … as determined by the child shrink my parents took me to when they determined that I apparently had an imaginary playmate.
All that being said - I heartily disbelieve 90% of any claimed hauntings - if there were ghosts in every building that someone died in, there would be no room for us living folks. As far as I can tell from watching all the ghost hunting shows on tv [my guilty pleasure are those and the Ancient Aliens with the scary hair dude] almost every scary thing that they claim happen can be explained away very easily as buildings shifting, random air currents, EMF effects in the brain, air hammer and other mechanical issues, for a while there was one of the ghost shows that paired a building inspector and the random psychic idiots. He would go through the place as if he were inspecting complaints and find real live world explanations for all the spooky shit, then the idiot psychic would come and claim all sorts of whacked spook crap. So of course everybody went with the psychic. sigh
My ultimate wist would be for a few million bucks, the rental of 3 structures that are similar with one having the claim of a haunting that has not yet ever been on any ghost show. Then I would like 3 teams of ghost busters. I would transport them to the location in a manner that they can not know where they are at all. They would be told that one of the 3 structures is claimed to be haunted but no other details. Then each team would spend 24 hours in each structure, swapping them around and being filmed and given their usual ghost hunting equipment. Then we would analyze all 3 reports of the teams and structures to see which ones claimed what structure was haunted, and if they all picked out the same one and same haunting stuff or what …
You are SO not allowed to tell that story without posting the picture. 
I just got a phone call from beyond the grave!! I googled the CID number and it belonged to my daughter’s ex-step-FIL who died a few months ago! :eek: :eek: :eek: The voice mail was just garbled indistinct noise. :eek: :eek: :eek:
OK, so it was probably just that his widow butt-dialed me, but maybe not…
I remember when I was a teenager my friend had a neighbor that practiced some sort of weird religion. I have no idea what it what was (I’m guessing Buddhist), but whatever it was, it involved lots of people coming to their house and chanting.
These neighbors had a young son of about five or so. Kid was straight up creepy.
One day my friend and I got to talking about creepy kid. My friend was droning on about how the neighbors are Satanists and that little kid was demon spawn. We aptly named him Damien. As we were in the midst of making fun of this poor kid, the phone rings. When my friend picked it up, nobody was there! (Remember, this is before caller ID days)
And to make this story even creepier, when I opened the door to leave my friend’s house, creepy kid was there at the end of the walkway just staring at the house!
FTR, I don’t believe in the supernatural, but that kind of did creep me out as a teenager.
Slowly, I opened the curtain
Inch by inch
Don’t believe in ghosts. But weird kids? They’re real, man, oh, they’re real…
“The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time.”
As a fairly analytical soul by nature, I find it hard to believe in ghosts. If I were to believe in any of that, I might believe in the concept of residual energy. I’ve had two experiences that may or may not have been paranormal. I’m betting they weren’t, but there’s just the tiniest seed of doubt that was planted.
My dad died when I was a young teen. For years he had attended every one of my recitals, plays, science fairs, etc. (yup, I was a joiner AND an overachiever) up until the last week or so he was alive. During the following school year, I was performing with the school choir, standing on risers on the stage. I looked out into the audience and there was my dad, right about in the same spot he always sat, smiling as he always did, and nodding his head along to the music as he always had. He appeared alive in every respect. I caught my breath, blinked my eyes, looked back and he was gone. I’m sure this can be explained by my brain ‘placing’ him there in the spot I so often remember him occupying in life. But then…
The first Christmas my husband and I dated, he gave me a music box that played Silent Night. It worked for a year or two, then stopped. I always put it out every year because it held special memories, but there was nary a tinkle of music in the next 20 years. The first Christmas after he died, when my older son and I were sitting on the couch (the music box was on the coffee table), it began to play. It played once through the song and then stopped. Both of us later admitted to one another that we smelled dad’s cologne when the music was playing. I went so far as to take the music box to a clockmaker who told me there was no way it could have played. The mechanism was shot and there was a small piece missing. I have a harder time explaining this one away.
You know, this kind of thing has happened to me more than once. I come home for lunch, get the sandwich bread out of the drawer, undo the twisty tie, take out a couple of slices, go to close up the bread bag and… the twisty tie is gone. Disappeared. Nowhere to be found. I spend twenty minutes tearing the kitchen apart looking for a stupid twisty tie that has to be somewhere it was just here two seconds ago goddammit!! And I gotta say, someone from another dimension swiping it sounds like as good an explanation as any!
My wife and I kid each other over this (she hasn’t read any Dark Tower, but when I explained it to her, she jumped right on it) but we also give each other The Sideways Glance when it happens–and it does!
Some day you will look at the spot the twisty tie was last seen in and it will be there; mark my words!
I’ve got a bunch of right gloves that have gone the same place.
I was in the hospital on a woundvac (infected surgery site) when I saw 2 ghosts – There was a thin older black lady sitting in the chair by my bed,reading a book… She had her hair done in cornrows,shd was wearing a skirt and blouse… I glanced away and she was gone… Later there was a middle aged,balding white man wearing a white shirt and khaki pants looking out the window… He turned to walk out the door and faded as he went. I wished both of them well and hoped they found where they should go…
My Mom passed away a few years ago in late May. The following year on Mother’s Day I turned a corner on a gravel road approaching a rather steep hill. As I completed the turn a mylar balloon blew gently across the road until it was directly in front of my car floating about 5 ft off the ground several yards ahead of me. The balloon then stopped for a second, shifted the direction of its drift 90° to travel up the road staying ahead of my car as i drove. It kept on this path for about a half a mile to the top of the hill where again it stopped and shifted direction this time floating to the side of the road and sinking to the ground. I stopped the car and retrieved the balloon. It was like any other disc shaped mylar balloon you may send somebody as the focal point of a ballon bouquet except for the fact that it was just plain silver. There were absolutly no pictures or lettering of any kind on it. I decided it was a hug from Mom and I kept it until it deflated.
Thais take ghosts to be a fact of life. When I lived up North, the locals were amazed that I wanted to and could live alone in a large house. They all said they’d be too afraid of ghosts to do something like that.
Even my rational wife, despite not believing in ghosts, about fainted in fright one night upcountry when I wanted to take a shortcut through a local cemetery. Her conditioning was just too strong.
This reminds me of an anecdote from a philosophy professor I had in college. He was discussing ghosts with a student from somewhere in Africa. The student said that of course Americans didn’t believe in ghosts, because we hardly had any here. But where he was from, there were tons of ghosts; it was preposterous to not believe in them where he was from, as they were clearly everywhere.
So, ya know, maybe we’re just in the wrong part of the world. 