I THOUGHT it was a ghost, but . . .

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Inspired by this thread. I’m interested in hearing about your experiences that more gullible people might have attributed to supernatural powers or entities (ghosts, crop circles, UFO’s, pixie dust, whatever), but of course were not. Also, you must tell us the mundane explanation for the event. Please put the explanation in a spoiler. I’d like to see if we can figure out the real cause.

My own experience was when I was visiting my grandmother. I was reading in the living room at around 3 AM. The only light in the house was the lamp I was reading by. While I was engrossed in my book, I heard a definite heavy sigh come from just behind me. There was no one in the house but my grandmother and me. I got up and checked my her bedroom to reassure myself that she was sleeping soundly. I wasn’t sure I even heard the sound, and convinced myself that it was just my imagination, and went back to my book.

About 30 minutes later, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end when I heard it again. Imagine someone taking a deep breath and slowly letting it out as a whimpering sigh, as if that someone had the weight of the world on his shoulders, and it had been right behind me. This time, I couldn’t convince myself it was just in my head.

I sat in the chair, alert to any noise or disturbance, determined to find the source of the noise. About half an hour later, I heard it again, and was able to figure out its origin.

It was my grandmother’s old heater turning on, and the sound of the initial “gust” from the vent. That’s it. Sorry.

2

When I was very young, I was awakened late one night by a banging noise coming from the hallway just outside my bedroom. I was too petrified to move or cry out, and I couldn’t run to my parent’s bed because that would mean going out there with whatever foul fiend was rapping on the walls. The rapping and banging continued for at least 20 minutes, and then I heard a low growl, and with a huge rush of relief realized that our insomniac Schipperke was in the hallway with a bone, tossing it around and bouncing it off the walls. Stupid dog.

3

My mother gently broke it to me that we were going to have to get rid of my cat. After years of being a wonderful family pet she explained that he started to get this wierd look in his eye, he would climb onto a table and try to attack anyone standing close by. Scroll please I havn’t figured out the spoiler thing yet!

I’d taught him to jump onto my shoulder - took a few week but I managed to debrief him.

4

To do a spoiler type [spoilerX] Your Text [/spoilerX] without the X’s.

Like this: Ta da!

I trying to remember a not-so-ghostly experience I had but I must have blocked it out. (It wasn’t that traumatic, fer Pete’s sake. :rolleyes: ) I’ll be back when it comes to me.

5

Ohh! Ohh! I remembered!

One time my Dad and I had stopped at Wendy’s for dinner. We’d just sat down when I looked out the window and saw what appeared to be a dozen or so golden glowing orbs flying in the air off to the left. They were about 30-40 feet above the ground and moving so that they’d pass over the property behind the Wendy’s in just a few seconds. I’d listened to enough Art Bell to know that people would claim to see orbs like these but I knew there just had to be a logical explaination. Were they the reflectiion of lights on a big semi-truck passing by on the road behind me? No, it was still too light out and besides, the angle was all wrong. What the heck were those golden orbs? Was I really seeing something paranormal? No, it can’t be!

I must have had a strange look on my face because my Dad said, “You look like you’re seeing a ghost.”

Just as he spoke, the orbs grew just close enough for me to see what they really were. By the time he finished his sentence, they had flown behind the restaurant. I breathed a sigh of relief as I realized…

…They were a flock of seagulls with the strong golden light of the setting sun reflecting off their white feathers, effectively obscuring their birdly shapes.

6

I see dead people

7

In the family room of my mom’s house, there’s a large sliding glass door that looks out into the unfenced backyard. There are vertical blinds covering the door. The last time I visited, I glimpsed what appeared to be a white-robed figure walking just outside the door. I couldn’t see any detail, because the blinds were closed. When I went to the window to see who was walking through the yard, there was no one there. This happened a few more times over the course of an hour, with the figure always walking in the same direction and always disappearing quickly. Ghosts? Angels? Jesus?

The sunlight reflected off of passing cars and onto the blinds. My mind interpreted the moving white flashes as a robed figure.

8

I was getting ready for bed in my camper, in the middle of a deserted parking lot. I heard what sounded like a teenage girl giggling next to the camper. I ignored it, figuring that she’d go away in a minute, but when I heard it again, I went outside to shoo her away. Only there was no one out there. I was puzzled, since there was nowhere nearby for anyone to hide…

So I went back inside, and damn if she didn’t giggle again, only this time it sounded like she was *beneath * the camper. I hopped outside and looked under the camper - it was kind of dark, but no one could have been hiding under there. I ran around the camper, then doubled back. No one around! No one within 50 yards! WTF was going on?

I was pretty agitated by now, but eventually I got to sleep. The next day, I looked under the camper again, and then it dawned on me…

I have no freakin’ clue what that was!

9

I was camping with scouts at the Gettysburg battlefield, right behind where Pickett’s charge started. It was the middle of the night and I had to go pee (it’s a guy thing). So, I unzip the tent and start walking towards the edge of the campground where the blue port-o-johns are. In the woods, to the right of the port-o-johns, I heard what sounded like footsteps rustling through leaves. Looking over, I saw blue blinking orbs floating all through that area. I remember saying out loud ‘You gotta be sh-ttin’ me…!’ while watching them.

Still, needing to pee is needing to pee, so I walked fast over to the nearest port-o-john and rinsed out the plastic urinal piece with great relief.

It wasn’t until the next night that I realized…

Oh God, I Missed Indoor Plumbing…! Oh, the spoiler… right. That’s when I realized that Possums and Raccoons, who were living off food disposed of by careless campers, were frolicking in the leaves while chasing Lightning Bugs! Evidently, due to their diet on the plants available to insects in that area, lightning bugs there glow ‘blue’ instead of ‘yellow’ like the ones where I grew up.

And also

Remembering that post, I really need to pee again. Be Right Back…!

10

Not that I ever thought it was a ghost, but it did have me going WTF? for a few days.

In my garage, if you stood at the right spot, you could hear something that sounded like a radio turned low, sort of a buzz. We had just moved in, and I know it wasn’t any radio I had.

This went on for about 2-3 weeks, and I finally got tired of it. I wan’t going to stop until I figured out what was causing it. I started looking and looking, and narrowed down the source to an old desk I put out there until it’s new home was cleared out, and I could move it.

I looked inside the desk, and saw where mud daubers had built a sizable pan flute nest on the inside of the back of the desk, which was a piece of thin lauan plywood. It served to amplify the buzzing of the critters.

11

I have never, ever heard of Lightning Bugs glowing blue, & don’t believe it is possible.

Cite? :dubious:

12

[SPOILER]The next night, while on a walk to a spot where we and our kids could see some local fireworks better, the whole group of us saw the blue lightning bugs again. I was able to half-swat at one and get it to land on my hand. It was a lightning bug, or something in the same family, but its light was a very pale greenish- blue. I have no pictures or cites, just what I saw crawling on my hand. It was a bug, not a ghost. It had 6 legs and a beetle-ish appearance. The underside of its abdomen glowed light greenish- blue. No, I can’t prove its color was diet-based; that was the best guess I had for it. But how can I prove the existance of a bug I saw while on a camping trip 2 summers ago without pictures or physically producing the bug?

[/SPOILER]

13

Search the web.

14

[spoiler]IANAE but I found this for glow worms: “If you ever find one of these individuals in an old, rotten log or under a board on the ground, put it in a jar and take it into a very dark room, and you will observe the dull blue glow coming from the rings around her body that are yellow in the light.”

I know, it’s not a lightening bug, but . . .[/spoiler]

15

Could these beasties have been eating glow worms/grubs?

Both Raccoons & Possums will eat grubs, or so they told me in the Cub Scouts.

16

What I witnessed flew. I have emailed a university website entertaining inquiries about Bioluminescence about when, where, and what I saw. I’ll let you know what they send me.

17

Once, when I was first married, I had a couple of my girlfriends from my single years come to stay for a weekend. We visited and gossiped and drank, and then everybody went to bed in their respective bedrooms for the night. All the bedrooms in my two-story hillside house were on the first floor. In the middle of the night, I heard slow footsteps going upstairs to the kitchen. Our dog heard them, too - I saw him sit up in his bed and stare up at the ceiling underneath the staircase. The next morning I asked my friends, “Okay, who was going up to the kitchen for a snack last night?” Both of them said they were tuckered out and had slept soundly all night and hadn’t heard a thing. I was convinced that that place had a ghost after that.

But a year or two later I deduced it: it was too one of the girlfriends. I discovered she was a major night owl, as in she liked to eat dinner at 3 a.m. and hit the hay around 5 and rise at about 4 in the afternoon. She was being too polite to say that our hours were way too early for her, and she was probably hungry at some point long after midnight and went up to dine on leftovers. Then she was too embarrassed to 'fess up.

God I hope the spoiler box works. I haven’t made one for a long time.

18

I have a couple spooooky UFO stories:

During college, myself and a few other “student observers” had access to the observatory on our campus. We had a nice 6" refractor telescope, probably 20 feet long or so… built during the era when they were observing the “canals” on Mars.

One night my buddy and I opened up the observatory to continue a project we had been working on (trying to observe as many of the Messier Objects as we could). We turned on the inside red lights and opened the slit in the dome and kicked back for a few minutes to let our eyes adjust and to allow the temperature to equalize. While we waited, we looked up through the slit in the dome to see what was up… when we saw the weirdest thing! Blobs of white light were randomly appearing and disappearing all over the sky. The best way I can describe it is this: picture 20 or 30 people randomly shining flashlights for just a second or so at low clouds, a poor description, but that is sort of what it looked like. We watched this for a minute or so, neither of us with the slightest clue what we were seeing.

We finally went outside to see if we could get a better grasp of the phenomenon; but had no better luck outside, until after several minutes, we finally realized what it was. It was quite a relief to have an explanation, let me tell you!

It was a flock of Canadian geese circling over the campus. They were just high enough that the campus lights didn’t hit their bodies, until one would occasionally dip low enough that their white bellies would reflect the light for just a second…

The second is also Astronomy related; a buddy of mine had recently been given a nice Meade telescope for his birthday. He had never had a 'scope before, so we went off into the desert east of San Diego one weekend so that I could teach him how to “star-hop” his way around.

We had been playing around with the scope for an hour or so when we took a break to stretch our necks (which were getting a bit tweaked from twisting around to look through the 'scope at various angles).

As we sat there enjoying a couple of beers, an extremely bright light appeared on the North-West horizon and slowly climbed straight up into the sky. When it reached maybe 10 or 15 degrees above the horizon, it stopped and just hovered there… exactly the way a brick wouldn’t. Both my friend and I saw it, but neither of us made mention of what was quite obviously an alien star destroyer; we both were confident that after a few more seconds it would move and reveal itself to be an airplane, etc.

The light was easily the brightest object in the sky, didn’t move, and made no noise. After a couple of minutes, when the light hadn’t moved at all, and maximum creepiness had caused the hair on the back of our necks to stand on end, we both simultaneously said “WTF is up with that light??”

My buddy headed for his telescope, and I headed over to the truck where my binoculars were, and we took a look:

It was, of course, an airplane, as revealed by the navigation lights once we had the thing magnified a bit… it had taken off from an airport to our North-West, probably LA or near there, and was headed directly towards us. From our point of view, it had risen directly up, and once at altitude, didn’t seem to move at all until several minutes later when it passed directly overhead!

19

Well, yeah, but to be fair,

You ARE a mortician

20

Now I get it! :smack:

The responses have been as interesting as I hoped. So far, I haven’t been able to figure out any of the spooky events without resorting to the spoiler. They’ve also borne out what I already figured: People attribute to the supernatural because it’s usually a lot more interesting than real life. :slight_smile: