I’m a skeptic and generally a rationalist and I believe in ghosts. I don’t know what they are, I have no clue as to how many ghost stories are “true” v. hypnopompic hallucination & what-not, but I’ve definitely had some experiences I couldn’t explain, some of which occurred in front of witnesses.
I grew up on a farm in middle-of-nowhere Alabama that had once been part of a huge (10,000 acres+) plantation broken apart after the Civil War and sharecropped well into the mid 20th century. The earliest and the most vivid supernatural memory I have (this is the short version of a very long story):
I was about 5 years old and playing in a scuppanong arbor near the gates to our house (about 1/10 mile to the house). I heard children playing and that was odd because there were no other kids anywhere near the place- my siblings were much older and in school and our nearest neighbor who didn’t have liver spots (and my last name) was 2 miles away. I went out to see and there were two little black children (I had seen black people before but there were none who lived in walking distance) playing in the sunlight.
The oldest was a little boy who I would guess was about 2 1/2-3 years old but I remember what he was wearing- a man’s ragged shirt that fit him like a gown. He had a baby sister just old enough to walk who was wearing a flour sack like piece of cloth and had her hair tied in scraps of cloth (which was something I’d never seen before). He was spinning her and they were laughing and when I went running up to see who they were they vanished instantly (no special effects, sounds, fade-out, just “there”- “not there”).
I remembered the incident for years but basically convinced myself I’d imagined it. When I was a teenager my Aunt Carrie moved from her house (the original tin-roofed & log family homeplace about half-a-mile from us where she had been born and lived her entire life) came to live in our house. She was over 90 and she babbled constantly, sometimes about TV and sometimes about her past. It was so constant that I generally learned to tune it out but would occasionally catch then end of something interesting.
One day that end of something interesting was to the effect of “and the two little n*gra chirren who died right down there nexta where the scup’nong bushes ere”. I asked her to rewind and got the story (short version):
Crow (so called because he was so black- this was again c.1900 Alabama) was a sharecropper who lived in a shack near the edge of our woods (near the scuppanong arbor) around the turn of the century (when Carrie & her twin would have been about 11). One morning Carrie and her family smelled smoke and a very haggard looking Crow came walking up shortly after and asked my great-grandfather “Mistah Jimmy… I needs a box big nuff to bury two little nggrs” (I’ve always thought that sentence spoke volumes about the plight of the man). His shack had burned during the night and his two youngest children were killed in the fire, very near where I had seen the two small children vanish.
Well, I freaked out.
There have been several other incidents, but that’s one of the few “explained” ones. I don’t know what ghosts are (my guess would be some form of time-space quirk) but I have no doubt they exist. I’ve lived in new houses that did have weird happenings and old spooky places where nothing strange ever happened so who knows what the explanation ultimately is.
Trivia: I used to live 7 miles from Andersonville, the infamous Confederate POW camp where more than 10,000 men died in just over a year in a two acre enclosure and many more survived as skeletons [and at least one baby was born to a woman disguised as a man] and if there is a place in Georgia that you would think would have a feeling of hell on Earth it would be this place. There’s absolutely no sense of terror or evil or tranquility or anything else there- it’s just a piney hillside- nothing spooky in the least. OTOH nearby was a 3 BR house with a pool built in the 1970s on the street where I lived at the time that had been sold numerous times below market value because people who lived in it swore it was haunted, while houses on either side of it had very stable occupancy histories.
[sup]Seems like Snakespirit should consider becoming a GHOSTBUSTER[/sup]