Real Ghost Experiences

Yes. That is correct. And your second paragraph is an equable statement of my opinion. I only take issue with this:

This is incorrect. Simply because a typical person (whatever that may be) cannot explain certain phenomena, that is no cause to label those events supernatural. For instance, I cannot explain how gravity works instantaneously across a distance, and in fact, top physicists also debate the true and complete nature of this force to a very large degree. That most certainly does not make gravity a supernatural phenomenon.

Ignorance does not validate supernaturalism; supernaturalism rises out of ignorance. To maintain otherwise inevitably leads one into a tautology.

I give up.

My brother once claimed a ghost had given him my hat, and I believed him. But now that I say it, it sounds like an excuse. That bum!

OK, about the closest thing I’ve ever seen to match this thread happens on rainy/foggy days in downtown Jersey City.

The end of Montgomery Street, by the PATH station, is Directly Across the Hudson from Ground Zero. Everyone who used to use that station got used to seeing the Twin Towers in the morning and at night (They used to light up the sky on cold winter nights like distant Christmas trees) Anyhow, there’s a big open patch of sky where the towers used to be. When it rains or gets foggy though, there are times my eyes still see both of those buildings outlines. I’m not the only one it happens to either.

But I also know its just an optical illusion from seeing them there so often and then seeing them gone, with an off-white matt background.

Attention: OpalCat

I’ve posted before about a poltergeost in my house but this really freaked me out…

For the record, no alcohol was consumed prior to the events in this story.

Every year, my girlfriends and I take the weekend after Thanksgiving weekend and go to Eureka Springs. We stay in a house or B&B. This year, the B&B we stayed in is called “Home Suite Home” and we were very pleased with it (the first night but not the second!). It used to be the school in Eureka. More on that later.

This year, we decided we’d go on the Crescent Hotel Ghost tour. (This is the hotel that OpalCat mentioned in her post in the aforementioned link.) We thought it would be fun. It never crossed my mind that something would actually happen to us. So, we show up for the tour and before we go in, I wanted to take a pic of the hotel from the outside. My digital camera starts doing weird things. I’m looking at the lcd screen and there were blue lines like interference going back and forth. I didn’t know what it was but the camera still worked. So, I snapped a few pics.

OK. Inside, during the tour. We hear about all the “happenings,” rolling our eyes quite alot. The guide tells us that the hotel had, at one time been used as a cancer hospital by some quack named Dr. Baker who swindled his patients out of untold fortunes. One end of the hotel )called “The Annex”) had been where the terminal patients had been locked up to basically scream themselves to death. She says, “People frequently see 2 nurses walking together or a nurse with a man in a wheelchair or a nurse pushing a gurney with a body on it. Or the “energy” will manifest itself as orbs of light” Yeah, whatever. So, we go up to the next floor and I was the first one up there. I snapped a picture looking towards The Annex. I always use the screen while taking pics, never the viewfinder. Anyway, when I looked at the pic I had just snapped on the screen, there was what looked like a white dinner plate hanging on the wall. It’s in the pic but not there in real life. So, I ask the guide.

Me: Is this what you meant about “orbs of light?”
Guide: Yes. Boy that one’s really big and bright. I’m surprised you didn’t see “someone” there.
Me: I can assure you I did not.
Guide: Ususally, if they are that large, they’re transluscent. Or if they are that bright, they are usually pretty small.
Me: Um, OK.

So, I take several more pics but don’t see anything else. Next, we go to the basement where the morgue was. There is no way to describe the feeling I had there except to say that I believe I was in the presence of evil. The guide talked about several specific “ghosts” that are commonly experienced in the basement: one likes women’s jewelry and unclaspes necklaces and bracelets. While we were there, one woman’s earring came off twice. When she reached down to pick it up, the back was still on it both times. There was just this suffocatingly dark and sinister feeling there. I can’t describe it.

So, after the tour, one friend and I are still walking around the hotel taking more pictures (evil feeling is gone, only felt it in the basement) and we get several more pics with orbs. When we come down the stairs, my firend who drove us there jumps up from her wingback and says,

Friend:ARE YOU MESSING WITH ME?! I swear to God, if you are I’ll kill you!
Me: Whaaaaa???

Here’s what happened to her while we were taking pics after the tour: she (Susan) and the fourth friend were sitting in the lobby waiting for us and thought we’d left aand gone to the car. So, they head out. On the way, the car alarm starts to go, along with the car next to ours. They start running to the car and Susan is hitting the car alarm trying to make it stop. She hit the button 10-12 times. It wouldn’t go off. So, she stops running, is standing, looking at the alarm fob, not touching anything and the alarm goes off and the alarm of the car next to ours stops. She and other friend look at each other and take off running as fast as their legs will carry them back to the hotel. On the way back, they have to pass the diningroom with massively tall windows. They are about 20 feet from the windows and hear a BANG BANG BANG on the glass. They look in the window but don’t see anyone (they thought it was me, messing with them). While still looking at the windows where no one is standing they hear BANG BANG BANG again. They run into the hotel and to the diningroom but there are just a few servers going about their business, no one near the window. They sit down in the lobby and a few minutes later, we join them and Susan asks if I’m “messing with” them.

So, now, completely freaked out, we go back to our B&B. When we get there, the front door (accessible only with a combination keypad) is open but we were the only ones staying there. So, we thought one of us had left the door ajar when we left. We search thoroughly but there’s no one in the place and all our packages from the day’s shopping are still there. So, we’re standing around, looking at each other, wondering what to do when we heard from upstairs a BRING! BRING! BRING! like the sound of a schoolbell! There was nothing in the place that ould have made that noise. No clocks, no watches, cellphones, vcrs.

We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. We packed our stuff and left. It may sound silly but, even in the light of day even now, we all say we’d leave again. No regrets.

When I got home and looked at my pics and printed them, there were about 12 with orbs of light, including the pics I took outside before the tour when my camera was experiencing the interference (that, btw, has never happened before or since). They are not merely refractions of light…one set is the exact same hallway where I got a pic of an orb that was visible on the lcd screen and I took another one without moving my body from it’s spot. The orb is farther up the hallway. I’ve been all over the web looking at photos of orbs and read about conditions in which orbs can be faked. None of those conditions existed at the time. If you want to see the pics, email me and I will send them.

It’s the most scared I’ve ever been in my whole life.

mmm…

…and this voice keeps saying “…whose got my Golden Arm…?”

I’ve had 2 requests for pics. Please note: in the past 2 hours, I’ve changed my email address on my profile. I do not have access to the old email account anymore. So, if you recently emailed me, please re-email me at the new address. I will be happy to send those pics. Thanks!

mmm…

I do indeed live in a very weird part of Michigan. However, that was a typo. Shoulda read 3:21 California time (sometimes we’re three hours ahead of them here…)

*Everything can be explained. Just because some things cannot be immediately explained doesn’t mean they can’t be.

while i agree that Statement 2 is correct, it does not automatically imply that Statement 1 is correct too.

just because some things which are unexplained now can and will be explained in the future does not mean everything can and will be explained in the future. you can’t know that.

Sure they can. Yes, quantum mechanics says that some things cannot be known but we can explain why they cannot be known.

your initial statement was “everything can be explained”.
explaining why something cannot be known is not the same as explaining something.

i’m sorry for nitpicking about this. it isn’t so much an attempt to find fault with what you said, as an attempt to clarify this in my mind.

and as regards the OP, umm…i’ve spooked myself by thinking about ghosts, but nothing’s ever actually happened to me.

Less semantic debate, more ghost stories please.

OK first off I am NOT a believer BUUUT…

This is my story…when I was a kid my mom had just remarried and I was staying with my grandparents while my mom and new dad were honeymooning. I had a room just off the kitchen with a cot and there were two doors…the one to the kitchen and the other door was to the basement.

Everything was fine up until the last night. I was sleeping and I heard a noise in the basement…I got up and went to the basement door and I swear I heard what sounded like someone slooooooowly walking up the stairs. The steps got closer and closer and I of course being the brave little rugrat I was back then hopped back into bed and cowered there. I SAW the basement door slowly open with no one there and I covered my head with a blanket and…eventually went to sleep.

Big deal you say? How can this be a ghost story? Well I told my grandparents about what had happened and they poo poo’d me saying it was only a dream.

However…

The next time(four days later) I was over at their house the door to the room I had slept in was sealed off with wallpaper and if you didn’t know the room was there you couldn’t tell there was even a room. Keep in mind this was the ONLY way to get into the basement from the inside(there was a door outside to get into the basement) but this is Wisconsin and the winters are really cold here. You are not going to shut off the only way into the basement without a really good reason.

Two months later my grandparents moved from the only home they had lived in for the previous 20 years with NO explaination.

To this day they refuse to talk about it almost 40 years later

Like I said I don’t really believe in ghosts but this has haunted me ever since and just writing about it now gives me the creeps.