As a single mom with three young children, I bought my first house. It had a family room in the basement with no windows. It also had a fireplace in the room. I used to light the fireplace, turn off the lights, play records(remember, kind of like big cd’s:)) and lay on the floor. The first time I did this, simultaneously the roaring fire just disappeared and the record stopped playing. I was suddenly left laying in pitch black silence. When I jumped up and turned on the light, the chair was rocking. I am pretty practical and just thought it was a weird set of circumstances. It happened a couple of more times exactly like that. Right after the last time, I lost my cool and yelled at “it” that this was my house, I worked hard to get it, I wasn’t going anywhere and if “it” wanted to stay, it would have to stop it. Even I realized how absurd it was to threaten to kick a spirit’s butt, but I did. After that, the spirit left my music and fireplace alone, but caused me to lose a housesitter, made my friends who were staying with me go stay in a motel and I lost a perfectly nice cleaning lady who said no one could make her go down there again. I found out later that there were all sorts of rumors generated by kids who had come over to play (once) that my basement was “haunted”. “It” didn’t really bother myself or my kids anymore although it was noisy at times. I never really gave much thought to what “it” really was and was able to co-exist quite nicely once that darn spirit stopped scratching my favorite Abba album. The moral of this story is you can rock my chair, but don’t mess with my music.
It is a true story, but at the time I was too busy to give it much thought and now am cheered by the thought that we still have a lot to learn. Amazingly, I’m also still pretty skeptical when I hear about these type of events.
I’ve had so many of these things told to me over the years (I guess you could say my family is “sensitive” to these things), but here are just a couple that actually happened to my grandma and mom, so I’ve heard them first-hand.
Besides me, however, all of my family has “seen” or “felt” things. One of the creepiest and most unexplainable was one my grandma told me that still really scares her to talk about. Small town in central Kentucky, mid 1950s. She was going roller skating with her cousins at the rink they owned, but saw that she had picked up the wrong pair of socks. She went back up to the house (called The Old Home Place, built before the Civil War, home to countless families over the years, with many deaths in the house) to go get a different pair. When she opened her door she saw her father laying on the floor. She knew that he was about an hour drive away that day working, and that there was no chance of him being there. She had a terrible feeling rush over her, and got the hell outta there. She ran back to her cousin’s car and spoke nothing of it, just a simple, “You know what, I think these socks will be fine.” She later confirmed that her dad had been nowhere in the area all day.
Another one that my mom (generally skeptical in these situations, and usually says too much moonshine was to blame for stories we’ve all been told) even admits to happening, but doesn’t like to talk about. When my mom was a child her dad worked nights and she would sleep in her parents’ room on a small roll-away bed next to he parents’ bed. My grandma awoke one night to see a big ball of light and fire come slowly drifting into the room towards my mother, who was still fast asleep. My grandma reached down and grabbed my mother and yelled at the thing to go away. It vanished and my mom said to my grandma, “Oh mom you got me just in time,” even though she hadn’t opened her eyes during the whole occurence. I would just attribute this to some crazy thing my grandma dreamt, but then I asked my mom and she said that she remembered it, but she seemed like she didn’t really want go into more detail about it.
There’s a ton of things like this that my grandma has experienced, and actually many times there’s someone else to corroborate her story. I’ve never actually experienced anything of the sort, maybe because I refuse to put myself in a situation where I get a strong feeling something like that might happen. I startle pretty easily, and even this thread has seriously creeped me out, so I don’t know what would actually happen if I experienced something supposedly supernatural, but I would probably be pretty unsettled for a pretty long time.
Act I – The Dead Relatives
For quite some time now, I’ve had plain old dreams of deceased relatives. Usually grandparents, but occasionally a close uncle, or more distant relations. These would be standard dreams, with standard dream situations and the standard feel, and the relative is part of the dream as a regular character. Then, there’s the “visitation”, which is a different event altogether.
A visitation is not a dream in the usual sense. The setting is always some place that I’m familiar with and have happy feelings associated with it, such as my maternal grandparent’s farmhouse when I was growing up. I am there, and here comes the dead relative. I always ask why they are here, because they’re dead, and the answer is always that they’ve come back from heaven for a little bit to check up on me. The rest of the event is spent with me telling them the personal news of the day, and maybe getting a little Ann Landers style advice. I always wake up from a visitation slightly weirded out, but in a good way.
That is background. In the autumn of 2000, my mother was losing her battle with lung cancer. I would make the 120-mile one way trip to her house each weekend to be with her, and to give my sister a bit of a break from caring for Mom. I was at home, and a visitation happened. The situation was a Saturday morning, and I was meeting my mother for breakfast at a greasy spoon. She pulls up and we greet, and I ask what she’s doing here, because she’s really in bed dying of cancer. She starts to answer me, and I interrupt her by saying, “I know this isn’t you, because you’re in bed wasting away, but I want to take a minute to look you over because you’re healthy.”
She answered me with, “The way you see me now is how I want to be remembered, not as I am in my bed.” The visitation ended, and I woke up very creeped out, because I thought that maybe Mom died in her sleep. She hadn’t, and lasted 3 more weeks, dying a week after the election.
Act II – The psychic hippie cousin
Not much of a story here. One time I was telling one of my cousins about my visitations and especially the visitation from my mother, and he told me that when Grandpa died (Mom’s dad, also of cancer), he appeared to Steve, who was living in Arizona, and told him that he died, but he was fine. That’s how Steve got the news first hand.
Act III – This week: Something a little more lighthearted.
I was going to start a thread to tell this one.
More background development. I consider myself to be very bright, but I also have to fight myself constantly to keep from being an underachieving loser. I got my ass bounced out of Purdue University because I f*cked around for 2 semesters and wasn’t committed to doing my coursework. I ended up getting an engineering degree from a different school, but my grades were severely mediocre and completely not up to my potential.
I started working right away, and almost immediately, I was dreaming that I was back in school, working on a second Bachelor’s, and I would ask myself, “Why am I doing this? I have a degree already.” This went on for many years, until the opportunity for graduate work arose with my former employer. I could do graduate non-degree coursework, but I was untouchable for a Master’s. Long story short: I’m now finishing a 2nd BS.
As soon as I started the 2nd Bachelor’s degree, my dreams shifted to where I was back at “Purdue”, busting my ass on a research project, and hanging out on campus. Only the campus was different somehow; I couldn’t put a finger on why the red brick buildings were laid out differently and looked different. Also, I’m a big model railroader, and the layout for the Purdue Club was radically different. Mind you, I’ve been having the same dream for 4 years now…
As I have lamented here many times before, I was laid off in May from a job I’d had for 15 years, and had never known unemployment before. I got a new job, and moved to Virginia on Halloween, having never lived out of Indiana since I was in Kindergarten. The wife and I have settled in to the point now that we’re starting to seek out the activities we’d done before, and this week I went to visit a model railroad club about 15 miles from where we live.
As I was getting the tour, I was marveling at the skills of the current members, and taking it all in. Then we turned a corner into a room where there are 2 levels of benchwork, and it struck me. This is the scene from my Purdue dream where I am shocked at the club for so radically changing the layout. The double whammy: I realized that the Purdue campus in my dream is really the geographic center of the NASA facility where I now work.
VunderBob is now home.
That’s Phred Phelps’ god, not mine.
I get weird coincedences occasionally…
One happened recently. I read a lot about nuclear weapons (unusual hobby I know) and have quite a few books on the subject, most of which I’ve already read.
Anyway, I’m always looking out for new facts and things that I didn’t know before…on a thread, possibly from this site (I have a collection of threads marked “interesting” from a lot of places that I have stored on my harddrive) when it mentioned a classification level for the person that carrys the nuclear football, “Yankee White”. I’d never heard of that designation before so it automatically went into the “to learn more about” box in my head.
Later that evening I was watching TV when I had the sudden urge to look at a book I’d bought from a second hand book shop but never got around to reading before, never even gave it a glance through.
Picked it up, flicked it open at a random page…and the paragraph I looked at was going into an indepth description of the designation…“Yankee White”… 
No biggy, but its just one of those moments…
Had several unusual experiences…maybe I’ll tell about my prophetic dreams one day
You’d be surprised at the number of people that actually like the fire and brimstone concept. Me? I don’t even believe in hell, per se.
I spent my highschool years in a haunted house. The previous owner lost two wives and a son while living in that house, and then died of a heart attack while working in one of the flower beds. His widow built a new house below this house before she sold it to us…
My first experience was when I had a sleepover in the basement with two friends. This basement was a huge open square room, with one entrance/exit and one other door directly opposite that lead a furnace room and then a bathroom.
Sometime during the night I went to use the bathroom… I walked in to find the light on, the sink faucet running and the toilet unflushed. Me being the neat freak I was, righted all this and went out and chided my friends… then I went back in to use the restroom, and I found…the light was on, the faucet running, and toilet paper thrown into the toilet to make it look used.
Another night I had gotten up in the wee hours of the night to get a drink… I used a waxed paper cup…after I used it I flicked the bottom twice to hear the “thump thump!” noise that those cups make when you flick the bottom…I then placed the cup in the trash… as I was just about to exit the kitchen I heard behind me “thump thump!”
There were plenty of nights I hear music or voices arguing coming thru the heater vent, only to search the house and find no source.
This thread came along at the perfect time; I’ve had some ongoing ‘weird experiences’ but wasn’t going to start a thread devoted just to them.
My friend Bekah has just moved into a new apartment. It’s the top floor of an old single-family home (built in 1928). Below there are two other apartments. For the record, as others have said, I am an atheist, but the constant weirdness in the apartment is beginning to get to me. Bekah always said it was haunted, which I chalked up to suggestibility, until the ‘spookies’ started happening to me as well.
First, there are little knocking noises that come from the direction of the bedrooms at odd times. I figured they were air in the pipes, until, one night, our friend Derek decided to be a badass and yell “Shut the f*ck up, ghost!” There were about three seconds of silence, then, very loud, BAM BAM BAM. The noises continued, and got loud and hard enough to vibrate the walls, floor, and stuff on the coffeetable, and didn’t stop until Derek apologized and Bekah burned some sage around the house. Creeeepy.
Secondly, Bekah has a “spooky room.” It’s a little spare room near the kitchen which just has a weird feel to it. The closet door opens and closes itself, and a recliner shifts positions once in awhile in the room. Also, the cat has a weird obsession with the closet.
The noises and such are always worse when Bekah’s not home. We made the mistake of leaving a couple of friends in the apartment for maybe 20 minutes while we made a cigarette run. When we got back, they were hiding in a closet. Apparently, Kim was petting the cat when it stood up stiffly and started staring into the kitchen. Shortly after, bangings and door-closing type sounds started coming from that area, and one of Bekah’s dogs started freaking out - whining, crying, etc. The cat ran off, and they both heard a small, faint voice, which was when they decided the most logical course of action would be to hide in the closet, heh.
Last is the most annoying thing to me. Bekah has a long, creaky wooden staircase that leads up to her front door. Two or three times a night we will, very distinctly, hear someone thump up the stairs and knock on the door. When we answer it, nobody’s there. Now, because of how loud the staircase is, there would be no way for someone to knock on the door and run back down without us hearing or seeing anything. It’s loud enough, and specific enough, that more than one person in the apartment will jump up to answer the door at the same time.
Now, having plenty of free time, another friend and I are making the rounds in the Historical Society archives looking up the old property owners and neighbors. Also, there seems to be some sort of a false floor in the spooky room closet, so we’re looking into that as well. Hmmmmm.