Please post any experiences you’ve had, here, with real or alleged ghosts. Don’t be shy. It could be something as simple as a room becoming usually cold, inexplicably.
Then if you are a skeptic, feel free to take it apart.
I’ve heard on the Travel Channel people say that they weren’t true believers, that is until…
Me, I still don’t believe in ghosts or an afterlife. But I find such stories interesting. (As I said, I heard my father [who was unusually prompt] tell me to get my butt out of bed, shortly after he died, and when there was clearly no logical explanation.)
I put this in IMHO, because I am asking for a response. But I am hoping it creates a robust debate too. (Moderators please direct, if necessary .)
On all those freaking woo woo shows they say that. It’s totally BS. They’re all true believers. It’s such garbage. I’ve finally gotten my sister (who used to kinda sorta maybe believe some of it) to mock it along with me.
As also said in that thread, one possible logical explanation is pareidolia, the tendency to see or hear distinctive patterns in random noise. Pareidolia is quite normal in some situations, but flat-out auditory hallucinations including “hearing voices” is also a real if less common phenomenon.
As an aside, I find that I’m subject to auditory pareidolia when I lack sufficient sleep, such as having been up all night. It manifests as hearing distinctive patterns of sound in white noise, such as the sound of a fan. Sometimes it’s in the form of music (usually with a distinctive beat) or songs with constantly repeating verses. It can also be in the form of vaguely heard human voices, though I typically can’t make out the words. I imagine this might seem quite freaky to someone who actually believed in ghosts. Personally, I believe in the need for adequate sleep.
I was hoping to read some personal ghost stories. One mild comment by the OP followed by four skeptics but no other stories. Maybe some stories will yet appear.
I’m fascinated by the utter conviction of debunkers. People spend a lot of energy looking for and constructing logical explanations for possible ghostly, paranormal, afterlife, etc., occurrences. Why? Why not just say, “Maybe they’re true. I don’t know everything. Who cares?” The fact is, maybe they are true. We don’t know.
Anyway, that is a different discussion. I know there are reasons why individuals are hostile to and defensive about this topic. Don’t want to hijack.
Back to the topic. I want to hear some ghost stories! Without the each one (assuming any ever show up) being instantly challenged.
BTW, when I first joined this board a long time ago, I started a similar topic and it never got off the ground. Skeptics and other buzzkills stomped it into pulp. That’s my history with this topic.
Two things. In deference to your wishes, I’ll tell you a ghost story, but a bit of a preamble first. Although only a minority of us are actual scientists and practitioners of other fact-based professions, we are collectively more or less a rationalist lot. Thus we tend to believe that, in the case of alleged ghostly hauntings, almost any physical explanation is far more likely than a paranormal one, for which there is not, has never been, and never will be any evidence-based support. This is not the same as belief in aliens, for which I believe the chances of their presence on earth is merely fantastically unlikely – past, present, or foreseeable future – but not actually impossible.
But moving on, here’s the story. It’s not first-hand, but it does come from a very trusted source, meaning that the facts as related can be taken as true, but the explanation is up to the reader to decide.
A good friend once told me about her little daughter frequently talking about a little friend she played with in her back yard, another little girl about her age, who she described and named. She was quite persistent about this other little girl, frequently describing long conversations they had together, although no one ever saw her and it was apparently one of those “imaginary” friends.
Now this house backed on to a fenced cemetery, and for some reason they went there one day, possibly to look for a ball or some object that had flown over the fence – I really don’t remember. And they came upon some headstones, which were not far from the house but certainly much too far to be clearly visible from the yard. And the upshot of it was that an entire family that had perished in a terrible car accident was buried there. Looking up the story in the news archives, the deceased included a little girl exactly as my friend’s daughter had described, exactly that age, with exactly that name. Her invisible friend.
Mine is kind of lame, but it’s all I got: when I was 8, in third grade, I made friends with a new kid who was really into ghosts and monsters. He liked to tell ‘true’ ghost stories, and he introduced me to the old Aurora monster model kits. I got really into the supernatural, and would write and draw illustrated ghost and monster stories.
But my new obsession came at a price: I became a big ol’ scaredy-cat, thinking any weird sound in the night was a ghost or monster. If I went into the kitchen to get a cookie for a midnight snack, the ticking sound of the furnace cooling was the footsteps of a ghoul coming up from the basement. Once I got up to use the bathroom late one night, heard evil maniacal laughter coming from the family room, and freaked out. It turned out to be my dad staying up late watching TV.
One night I woke up in the middle of the night and looked over at the door to my bedroom. As usual, it was cracked open an inch or two to let the hallway light in a little bit. It was a compromise-- I was too old for a nightlight, but no way was I going to sleep in full darkness. Suddenly the door swung open and I expected a parent to walk in, but there was nobody. I got up and looked out into the hall. Nobody up and around and the house was quiet. The oddest thing was I wasn’t freaked out at all. I even thought to myself, I should be freaked out but I’m not. I decided that was because I sensed that it was a friendly, or at least benign, ghostly presence.
Of course there are probably a hundred natural explanations for why the door opened, but it was winter, so no wind from an open window. Doors that are out of true can open on their own, but this was new construction-- the house was 3 years old at the time. And the door didn’t slowly, gradually open, it went from completely unmoving to swinging open as if pushed.
I was 12-13 and playing a computer game in the computer nook under the basement stairs when my brother walks past me behind my back and through the door into the unfinished part of the basement. I lean over and look through the door seeing him walk into a storage room at the back, and for funsies lock the door behind him. 10 minutes later I’m surprised he hasn’t yelled bloody murder, so I look for him, and there is no one there. There also aren’t any other exits than the one I locked.
I don’t think that was a ghost, or that there are ghosts, but I’ll leave my “this is why there’s no reason to believe in ghosts despite all the stories” rant for another time and thread.
Just last week, I heard a voice coming from inside the house. My dog heard it, too, because she turned and looked in the direction it came from, so I know it wasn’t an auditory hallucination. Later in the morning, I heard it again. I talked with my boyfriend, trying to figure out what could be causing it. Maybe an electronic had been left on, but I checked out the TVs and Bluetooth speakers and nothing had been left on. I asked my boyfriend if his computer in the basement could have made the noise, but he said it didn’t even have speakers. My top two theories that I could come up with were: (1) That someone was outside in the street, and the acoustics made it sound like the person was inside. or (2) That Amazon Alexa was speaking, unprompted.
Then, later in the week, I heard the voice again and went rushing towards the voice, desperate to solve the mystery. I ran into the bedroom to see if Alexa was saying anything, but it wasn’t. I looked out the window towards the street and didn’t see anybody, ran into the living room to look out another window and couldn’t see anyone, either. Besides, the acoustics of the voice were such that it definitely sounded indoors. For a voice to be heard that clearly from outdoors, the person would have to be shouting, and you could tell that the voice was not a shout.
The spooky part: Earlier this year (late winter/early spring), the previous owner of the house had stopped by a couple times to give me some old pictures of the house and chit chat as only a retired, lonely person can. The previous owner was old, and I decided to Google his name to make sure he was still alive. Found an obituary saying the guy had died on January 28, 2021 – right before this owner started showing up at my house!!! Could the ghost of the former owner be visiting my house?
After some further sleuthing, I think this obituary was for another guy with the same name (which isn’t terribly common), around the same age, who died in the same state, but I think it’s a different person.
But the mystery remains. There’s some sort of voice in my house, and I can’t tell where it’s coming from.
Is your friend an author? This story appears in a lot of older short story collections. I think I first read it in an Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine that was originally published in the 70s. I can’t recall the author but I’ve read it in several anthologies.
The only difference is the backyard slopes to some trees that have a creek running thru it. The mom actually hears her daughter and the “friend” a couple of times, but by the time she gets to the creek the daughter is alone. It does end with them finding a child’s grave.
I’d like to add a ghost story, but mine are always explained by reality altering substances.
Not an author, but a very level-headed intelligent lady not given to flights of fancy. And certainly not a prankster. The story was related to me in all seriousness, and I’d frequently been to the house where it happened, though daughter is now grown up and they no longer live there. The similarity to fictional stories is unsurprising but my friend would be quite offended if you suggested that she was just making it up.
Similarly, I lived my first 5 years of life in military housing in Kaiserslautern Germany. 1961-66. My Great-Grandfather died in 1953. I had an imaginary playmate that told me fairy stories when I was bored and supposed to be napping. He was very distinctive [a port wine stain on his face.] I was having ‘issues’ and my parents called in a kiddy shrink to shrink me. In addition to being high functioning autistic, apparently my very dead great grandfather was my imaginary playmate. And the only extant pic of him was at my grandparents winter house in Florida, which I did not visit until Dec 1966, on our way back stateside to live.
In high school, one week my family was going to be inundated with house guests. My parents said “hey, if you can find a friend to stay with this one night, that would be great”…So being the clever horny teen that I was…I convinced them that only my girlfriends house was available. It was cleared with her parents and my folks agreed. So, it’s like a Wednesday and I’m over at her house and its bed time…her folks go to bed and we’re in her room and we’re getting ready for bed…
Now–she lived in an old creaky house and she swore it was haunted. You could always hear someone walking around… I remember even hearing her old dog go down the stairs and then the house was -quiet-. I was facing the bedroom door and was about to take my shirt off and when BAM! It was like a fist punched her bedroom door as hard as it could–the door even buckled a little. Then the houses was completely quiet once again.
If it had been her dad giving me a “warning”…I would have heard him walking away…there would have been something. But as it was…dead quiet. I looked at my girlfriend and and she just shrugged.
Sometimes the explanation is obvious. It was the Father, and you didn’t hear him walking away because he didn’t walk away. He sat by the door all night listening to what was going on inside, ready to leap in at the slightest provocation.
.)
One mild comment by the OP followed by four skeptics but no other stories. Maybe some stories will yet appear.
Without the each one (assuming any ever show up) being instantly challenged.
Why did no one ever tell me this about The Dope??