I mean, experiences that, were you of a less skeptical bent or had less information, you might have interpreted as paranormal. But, you actually have a mundane explanation for them.
For instance, a couple of times I’ve been all alone in a room, and I very distinctly felt someone tap me on the shoulder. In the next second I’d realize that it was just a muscle spasm in my shoulder. But if I’d been a more superstitious person, I would probably have thought a ghost was haunting me or something.
I was sent from the party last Saturday with a simple task- retrieve a book of matches with which to light the hookah. No problem, I thought. I stepped out into the unusually chilly night air, determined to be the hero of the festivities. I headed off to the left at a slight trot.
The street was empty by this hour. Off in the distance, I could hear the faint whispers of other cheerful gatherings and a barely audible female singer emanating from some stranger’s radio half a block away. The street itself was deserted, motionless. I jaywalked across the street, under the lights that seemed to change for invisible traffic.
Next to the side walk, a dark green sedan sat parked. The driver, peering somberly toward the building beside me, sighed noticably. He looked at me. I nodded. He nodded back. I glanced quickly over my other shoulder to read the dimly lit plaque on the side of the faux stone structure.
“Klinefelter Funeral Home,” I muttered as the air turned stale. I tossed a glance back at the sedan. It was empty now. A beam of light from the streetlamp was all that rested on the driver’s seat.
I was convinced that my brain had merely played a trick on me. Surely there was no man in the first place. Surely I had nodded toward an empty vehicle. I still ran.
Hookah?
I used to astound my daughter every time the phone rang because I could predict who would be calling before she answered. But we only knew a handful of people who called on a regular basis. That’s a pretty common ‘psychic prediction’.
When I was a kid, I saw a UFO. We’re not just talking one little light in the sky either. We’re talking full fledged saucer with lights all around it rotating very plainly in the distance.
I ran inside and told my mom, who of course was like :dubious: but after some prodding she finally came outside and looked. And sure enough, she saw the flying saucer too.
Until it flew our way, and when it got closer we could see that it was a biplane with a scrolling light advertising sign across its bottom wings. :smack:
If it hadn’t turned our way, I would probably believe to this day that I saw a UFO.
“paranormal experiences that weren’t”?
All of them.
b’dum cha!
From back in college: My friend and I were sitting in the cafeteria talking and eating our lunches. Suddenly, his glass of water slid across the table, probably six inches or so, without anyone touching the glass or jiggling the table or anything. He started exclaiming about the paranormal experience that had just happened. I pointed out the pool of condensation that had gathered underneath his glass.
So I’m walking back to my car after paying for gas inside at the Kwik-E-Mart humming a tune to myself, get in and start my car and lo and behold on the radio is that same song and it’s in sync with my humming! Wow at first but after a few seconds I thought:
The radio inside was probably on the same station.
Fun while it lasted.
I have vivid memories of a couple of frightening encounters with monsters from my early childhood that I now know were hypnogogic hallucinations. In one of them I was sleeping in my parents’ bed when I saw and watched a tuft of hair obviously attached to someone or something moving back and forth along the foot of the bed, like its owner was crawling from one corner of the bed to the other on the floor just out of sight. In the other there was a huge praying mantis poking its head up from behind my bed chewing on my hair. I remember other childhood bad dreams, too, but these two were unique in that I was aware of my surroundings but couldn’t move. With these kinds of hallucinations it’s apparently possible to have your conscious brain asleep, yet have your eyes open and your brain processing visual stimuli. So, you see the room and your parents sleeping there as they really are, while the dreaming part of your brain adds in the thing crawling back and forth. And, of course, you get the sleep paralysis, so there’s nothing you can do to react to what you perceive to be a terrifying reality.
This one happened a few years back. My wife and I got into an argument as to why I moved the bed away from the wall. The thing was, I didn’t. She accused me up and down of moving it. Of course, I knew that I didn’t touch it. IIRC this argument actually lasted a few days (well nights, she noticed it as she was getting into bed). On the third night after she was done being annoyed at me for moving the bed she plopped done on her side… “WAIT, Get off the bed” I exclaimed. “Okay, now hop back on like you just did” Swoosh, the bed slid away from the wall. Turns out we still had those Muscle Men furniture mover things under the legs and between that and her pregnancy weight and the way she sort of just collapsed into bed it was enough to move it a few inches each time.
Someone filling up their car at the gas station with the engine running, then when they were finished they got in, the engine shut off and they drive away, then I saw they were driving a hybrid.
I was reading late one night in my grandmother’s living room. Although I was the only one up, I heard a mournful sigh behind me. This happened a couple of times within a hour before I figured it out. It was my grandmother’s old central heating turning on.
Still creeped me out.
A while ago, my sister contracted dengue fever and was quite ill for a while. She is the born-again Christian type, and she believes that she had an encounter with God and he taught her to sing and dance in ways that she never could before. I remain rather sceptical of that. I’m pretty sure it was hallucination caused by the fever/virus.
I’ve had but one experience I can’t fully explain, but I assume it has a natural cause.
Sitting on a hill overlooking Silicon Valley, I noticed two moving lights, presumably airplanes, at the same apparent altitude and distance moving toward each other. When they met, the one that was moving from my right to left kept going, but the other one disappeared.
Fearing I was seeing things, I asked my date if she saw it, and she had.
It must have been the single aircraft’s light refracted in a column of air, but even that seems inadequate.
So I’m outside, at night, with a good friend, and there are plenty of streetlamps around but a decent enough amount of shade over in that recessed doorway where I just now thought I saw a lurking man – but, sure enough, now that I’m looking closely, it’s empty; just a solid wooden door set in an ordinary brick wall.
No, wait – I’m still looking right there, I haven’t moved an inch, and there he is again. There’s a dark but unmistakably manlike figure standing there: standing in shadow, but unmistakably darker than the shadow – just for a moment and then he’s faded away; he was there and now he’s not, and that’s all there is to it.
And so I’m telling the young woman next to me to take a look, because that’s what people in movies always do at this point. And if this were a movie, she’d be that character who of course doesn’t see anything unusual. But this is real life, and so she of course sees what I saw: a dark figure, dark even in the darkness but unmistakably manlike, there one moment and gone the next.
She doesn’t know what it was.
I want to find out.
She’s game.
We advance on the shaded doorway; there’s no one there – and then there is, just for a moment, but then he’s gone again. But we were closer this time, and I saw enough to know that it was a ghost. I saw the brickwork before he appeared, even in shadow – and I swear I could still see it through him, as if he were no more substantial than a shadow himself.
Which, of course, is all he was: just the shadow of a statue from way the heck over in the other direction, which occasionally got thrown in there by the headlights of an oncoming car before disappearing.
Sleep paralysis/hypnogogic hallucinations; very real and terrifying when they happen. I can see why some people interpret them as visits from ghosts, demons or aliens. This is also apparently the basis of “astral projection” - if you become aware that you’re experiencing sleep paralysis you can try to make yourself “leave” your body. I’ve tried it a couple of times but have only got about as far as half-way towards my ceiling before properly waking up.
The less skeptical might believe their soul is really leaving their body whereas I know it’s just a waking dream. Still a very cool feeling.
So if he taught her these things, did you ask her to demonstrate? (Get video.)
Every time I use the hair dryer, when I turn it off, two seconds later I hear a tap or click in the hall. I look out and nobody is there.
I finally realized that the click was coming not from the hall but from the power transformer box plugged into the wall, and it’s the ground-fault-interrupt button disengaging.
I have a couple spooooky UFO stories (cut and pasted from another thread):
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!
Nah. That would seem a bit too, um, confrontational? These are supposed to be stuff for the kids in the Sunday school and pre-school that she teaches in.
There was a story on This American Life, about a family that were all seeing ghostly apparitions and believed that the “ghosts” were trying to hold them down and strangle them during the night while they slept. Turns out it was just a case of continual carbon monoxide poisoning.