Thanks for sharing.
I’ve hesitated to tell this story to people, because it sounds sounds pretty hokey.
A man I worked with a few years ago told me about the family next door. The old man, the pillar of the family, was a goner. The only question was when he would die. Some of his family was in the hospital room when his heart stopped. The family members were hugging and weeping and starting to call relatives when the old man opened his eyes and began to talk about the strange thing that happened.
He said he had gone down a lighted hallway, where he was met by someone who told him, “We’re just too covered up right now. You’ll have to go back until tomorrow.”
On the next day, September 12, 2001, he died normally.
:eek:
Witnessing is supposed to be done in Great Debates.
Where’s the witnessing?
I’ve had three experiences which I have not been able to explain. I believe that all things are, by definition, natural. I am put in mind of ball lightning, which scientists claimed was bunkum and fraud for many years until, relatively recently, it was found that the electromagnetic phenomena which allow ball lightning to occur is both rare and easily disrupted by electrical fields – so the very electronics being used to try and document it caused it not to appear.
Anyway, these are my experiences:
When I was a teenager, I used to spend a lot of time at what was then the Museum of Man in Ottawa. The building where it was located had a reputation for spooky happenings. I knew one of the security guards who worked there, and while she had never experienced anything odd, she said many others had, to the point where some people refused to go back after their first shift.
I was there one day when the museum was mostly empty, and I was wandering around in the section dedicated to human superstition, appropriately enough. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed someone walking down the ramp into the same area I was in. The only reason I even noticed is because the museum was so empty. I didn’t think anything of it, at first, except my subconscious kept trying to draw my attention to something alarming. Eventually I looked over and realized that the person had passed behind a pillar, but hadn’t emerged from the other side. I stood and watched, and still the person didn’t emerge, which was odd. They couldn’t have gone back up the ramp without me seeing, so they must for some reason be standing behind the pillar – yet when curiosity got the better of me and I went around to look, there was no one there.
My second occurance was even more dramatic. I lived in a house for some time with what is called “poltergeist” activity. There were five of us who shared a large old house. The attic was constantly noisy, with sounds like someone walking back and forth on the creaky wooden floor. This could possibly be explained as settling, except that every now and then there would be the sound of one of the boxes stored up there sliding across the floor and then thumping into the wall.
When I first moved in, the room I was supposed to move into was still occupied, so I just laid a bedroll in the attic. They attributed the strange noises from the attic to raccoons, and they had bought a human trap. I was a little concerned about sleeping in an attic with a crazed raccoon, so they demonstrated the trap to me, showing that when it went off it was extremely loud, and there’s no way I could sleep through it. Every night, when I slept up there, they would bait the trap with a tin of tuna. Every morning I’d wake up, the trap would be set off, and the tuna would be untouched.
One day while I was alone in the house, I saw the attic door open and close by itself. My door was closed, but it had a transom over the top through which I could see the top of the attic door. I have to admit that my balls scurried up inside me and I didn’t have the courage to open my door and see what, if anything, was out there.
One night I got up to use the bathroom and found the toilet paper roll unspooling itself on the floor. The bathroom was a “cold spot” which was always several degrees cooler than the rest of the house – which I actually measured, to be sure. Who knows, maybe there was a draft or something.
The one event which sticks most in my mind about that house was the day I and one of my roommates were sitting in her room and discussing what we had experienced. She had seen similar things in the house, and both of us were trying to come up with explanations which didn’t involve the supernatural. As we were discussing this, the floor lamp tipped over for absolutely no reason and landed right in between the two of us.
The third event is the one which I think will draw the most disbelief here, but I’ll relate it anyway – and then my explanation for it.
I had a fundamentalist christian friend, and he was forever trying to “save” me. We were arguing about religion (again) one day, and he convinced me to get down on my knees and ask for “a sign.” He said if I was a true scientist, then I should be willing to undertake the experiment and accept any empirical evidence with an open mind. I agreed, and did as he asked, right in front of him. After an hour or so of chatting without any burning bushes or heavenly choirs, we decided to go out for something to eat.
We were crossing a local bridge and stopped to watch the city workers blasting the ice under the bridge. As I stood there, someone grabbed me by the jacket and dragged me away from my friend. Now, I’m 6’5" and roughly the size and shape of refrigerator, so I’m not someone easily “dragged away.” The person responsible was a black man, dressed in a black suit with a black car coat, black gloves, and carrying a black attache case of the type lawyers use. Without introducing himself, he launched into an angry tirade. He informed me that God had spoken to me twice before, and both times I had ignored him; that if I ignored him again, that God would turn his back on me for a very long time. And then criticized several things about me which I won’t mention because they were personal, but things which a stranger could not easily have guessed. At one point my friend came over and wanted to know what was going on. The Man In Black wouldn’t address him, telling me, “Send him away! I’m here to talk to you, not him!” My friend, mystified, went back to watching the blasting. Then, without waiting for a response, he turned on his heel and marched away, shouting at me over his shoulder, “Remember! You have been warned!”
I went and grabbed my friend and ended up babbling a bit about what had happened. He wanted to talk to the guy, but when we turned to run after him, he was gone. It was the middle of a bridge, and there’s nowhere the Man In Black could have gone unless he had jumped over the side. There hadn’t been enough time for him to sprint away, even if the sidewalks hadn’t been covered in snow and ice. And we’d have seen a car stopping to pick him up.
Now, for my explanation. I am an atheist. I do not believe some Jewish skyfather sent an angry black man to berate me. However, I have read enough Man In Black accounts to know that my experience is far from unique. These sorts of encounters have been happening to people for millenia – although until relatively recently, they were considered to be “demonic” encounters rather than Men In Black. My guess is that these Men In Black are archetypal in nature. Carl Jung noted that UFOs began appearing in great numbers only after the end of the Second World War, and proposed that they were in fact archetypal constructs: great, glowing mandalas in the sky symbolizing our universal terror of nuclear annihilation and our desire for spiritual unity to counter it. Likewise, I think the Men In Black are the alienated Other, the Doppelganger of existential mysticism. My encounter was not evidence of God, but rather evidence that we live in a representational Universe which answers constantly to our own mental state. In fact, I think we may discover that many of what we recognize now to be “supernatural” phenomena will one day turn out to be manifestations of deeply-rooted archetypal symbols.
The whole thread is witnessing. The OP is asking for witness. All “paranormal” witnessing is religious witnessing, and it goes against the mission of the board for people to spout assertions of supernatural nonsense without allowing any rebuttal.
I think your trouble is with the word “paranormal”, perhaps you’ll be satisfied if Estilicon asked the mods to change it to “very vaguely creepy part X” or somesuch?
I think I might’ve posted on this experience the last time I participated in a thread about this sort of topic, but that was long ago and I don’t recall it getting any response then anyway. I don’t expect any cynics or skeptics will think much of it, and it wasn’t that impressive of an occurrence even at the time, but here’s my true “ghost” story.
Four years ago, my boyfriend and I were reduced by circumstances to living in an SRO hotel in one of the least “fashionable” blocks of San Francisco (for anyone who’s never heard that term, SRO stands for Single Room Occupancy – four walls, a window, a door and a sink for $600-800 per month, with shared shower and loo; they’re where most of the poor people in SF live). After several months, we were dug in comfortably enough, especially after we dumped the fetid mattress supplied by the hotel and started using a nice futon with lots of pillows for sleeping and lounging about on the floor. On the evening this happened, my man was out for a while; I was sitting comfortably on the futon, smoking a cigarette and reading James Ellroy’s Brown’s Requiemwhen I glanced up and saw a stranger standing across the room from me, just inside the doorway.
Before I go further, I must stress these two points: I was not drunk or high, and hadn’t been either in well over a week. Nor was I sleepy at all or even particularly tired.
There was nothing ghostly or insubstantial about the youngish African-American man I saw in the doorway. He looked as real and solid as the chair I’m sitting on now, and quite ordinary as well – wearing a red flannel shirt and tan jeans, with his hair styled in a moderate Afro like many young black men favored in the mid-1970s.
My first thought was that I’d neglected to lock the door and a friend of the guy next door had come into our room by mistake; about a quarter of a second later I realized that no, of course I didn’t leave the door unlocked, I never leave that door unlocked! And then, at what seemed like the very same fraction of an instant, he noticed me – the look on his face was all of a sudden as startled as mine certainly must have been – and he was gone.
Yeah, the entire event happened in about a fingersnap’s amount of time. But it happened. I damned well know what state of consciousness I was in and I know what I saw, too – I saw that guy.
For about a minute afterward, I just sat there, staring at that door. I wasn’t scared, just astonished and, yeah, a little awed. I’d heard and read about apparitions and suchlike phenomena, but this was the only time I’d actually seen anything like that at all, and the main things that struck me about it were how, well, un-alarming it was, how normal my “visitor” had looked and reacted.
There was a brief follow-up to the experience a month or so later. I had been out for the evening and just gotten off the elevator on my floor. My across-the-hall neighbor was standing outside his room smoking and talking to a couple of friends of his; I nodded to them and started opening my door when Aaron, the neighbor, said something to his guests about there being “a spiritual presence here, for sure”, which piqued me to turn and say “y’know, you’re right – I think I’ve seen it too.”
“Young black guy, about my height, right?” Aaron asked with a grin. That rattled me more than my seeing the “presence” myself had; I said “uh…yeah” and went into my pad, feeling a wee bit pole-axed all of a sudden. That wouldn’t work as corroboration to a skeptical questioner, of course; even to me, it’s admittedly a pretty sparse description, but enough of one to have sufficed just then.
Read the OP again.
My post was not witnessing. It involved one physical incident, and one coincidence that could have been translated into confirmation bias, if I were that dim, which I’m not. Of course, maybe I shouldn’t have posted at all, since neither were paranormal events. I offer as an excuse that a) paranormal events don’t exist, and b) I was bored and felt like posting. I think I managed to stay within the spirit (heh, heh) of the OP, though.
I did. You are asking for witness to the “paranormal.” If you aren’t really asking for assertions of the supernatural, then maybe you should have used a different word.
My wife’s grandfather, “Poppy,” was in poor health and knew he didn’t have much time left, but he promised her he’d make it to our wedding. Unfortunately, he passed away a few months short.
Weeks after the wedding, my wife told me there was something she’d been putting off telling me because it sounded too crazy. “Poppy was at the wedding. He put his hand on my shoulder.” I asked how she knew this and she said, “I just knew. I felt someone touch me, and I was just 100% sure it was Poppy.”
Understand that my wife is an atheist who is normally skeptical of any notion of an afterlife. So coming from her, this was pretty convincing.
Read it once again. Perhaps I was not clear, I never had a paranormal experience, an by paranormal I mean something weird that can’t be explained rationally. Perhaps all of the posts so far can be explained rationally. If you want to do it do it somewhere else.
Please stop ruining my thread.
That argument is bullshit. What the OP has requested is that people like you stay out and don’t do exactly what you’re doing.
Explainable with physics, but weird nonetheless.
At our favorite chinese restaurant, the plates and dishware have a tendency to “wander” due to the texture of the table and the temperature of the plates when set down on a damp freshly wiped surface. The air under the lip of the dish heats up and creates a little hovercraft boundary layer effect, and dishes will often will randomly get up and slide an inch or two before cooling.
This one time, the waiter set down a full pot of tea. Mrs G and I were talking and didn’t touch anything. About 1 minute after the waiter left, the teapot suddenly slid to the other side of the table, nearly 4 feet away, then stopped and did a 180 degree pivot, and then slid all the way back to the other side, stopping in its original spot.
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Diogenes, your idea of witnessing is not consistent with mine. Or indeed, the majority of the posters in this thread. GD is indeed for witnessing. Religious witnessing. Such as “Do you know Jesus?” type of witnessing. Asking for paranormal experiences is not religious witnessing.
You’re stretching the definition beyond recognition. Don’t do it again.
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I had a few experiences my self, but this one is kind of a favourite, although in fact it is my father’s. He’s an atheist, and do not believe in the paranormal. I posted this before, in a similar thread, a couple of years before:
Short background: My father’s father was a war vet (WWII) and emotionally absent, unable to connect to his kids. Instead, my father got to know a man who had a workshop, where he hang around for a couple of years during his teens, and that man of course became a father figure for my father. Later, my father moved to Sweden, got himself wife and kids and didn’t think much of the workshop guy anymore.
However, one night, my father dreamt that he was walking down the road, and approaching him from the other way, was a man with a bad limp. Soon my father realised it was the man in the workshop, who he hadn’t seen since he moved to Sweden, many years ago.
The man said: “Hello, old friend. Are you afraid of me?”
A bit startled by the strange question, and the meeting, my father said: “No… of course not.”
The man patted him on the shoulder, saying, “That’s good”, and continued limping his way down the road.
My father awoke from this dream in the middle of the night; and it being such a strange dream he told his wife about it.
Later that year, while we were visiting my grandparents in the land from where my father had moved, my grandmother asked my father if he rememberd the man in the workshop.
“Yes”, my father said, thinking it was a strange coincidence that she would mention him now; they hadn’t talked about him in years.
She said: “He died earlier this year. He had a thrombus in his leg this winter and got a terrible limp, and later he died.”
Fermentation, Dude. I’ve seen hot sauce bottles on restaurant tables explode like that.
Poltergeist activity is just one explanation, not the only one, and certainly not the best.
I pick up auras and energy vibrations from people all the time – it’s so commonplace, that I don’t even think of it as paranormal anymore.