What's the closest thing to a 'supernatural experience' you've had happen in your life?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I’ve had a few premonitions that have come true.

The first was when I woke up out of a dead sleep because I dreamt that my father’s friend was contemplating suicide. I was so distressed that I woke up my husband, and then called my father at 6am to tell him to keep an eye on Mr. R. I didn’t know Mr. R very well, but I knew with certainty that my dream was a warning. A few weeks later, Mr. R shot himself. My dad found him. :frowning:

The most recent was a few weeks ago when I was shopping for my friend’s “Grandmother Shower” present (her first granddaughter was due on 12/20 and we were throwing her a party). I usually love buying baby things but this time I couldn’t shake the feeling of doom, and I delayed until the last night to buy something. And it felt wrong. I went in to work and my co-worker came up to me and said, “We’ve canceled the party.” I knew right away that the baby hadn’t lived. She died en utero less than 2 weeks before her due date.

22

Years ago my sister, who was also my roommate, went to a fortune teller on a lark with a friend of ours. Just a fun thing - neither of them believes in anything really. So the visit went as expected with the lady looking at palms and cards and revealing the future in the form of the usual drivel: “You’ll be married within the year”. “You will see great happiness soon”. A bunch of that kind of stuff. As the appointment was over and they were getting ready to leave, the psychic stopped my sister and said, “Tell your sister (me) to be sure to unplug her blow dryer. I see a fire.”

My sister was alarmed in spite of herself and the psychic told her not to worry - it was the potential fire she saw. We could still prevent it by heeding her warning. My sis told me this when she got home and we both said and though basically ‘Hunh. That’s weird’ and then forgot about it.

Until the next morning, when I went to plug my hairdryer in and the outlet immediately sparked (a LOT) and blew the breaker. I reset the breaker and tried again with the same results. At this point I suddenly remembered the events of the previous evening and thought “That’s REALLY weird”.

The landlord called an electrician who said there was some kind of problem (I don’t remember now what it was) that was causing the outlet to short out, and yes, we could have had a fire.

23

Wow. Just WOW!
I started clicking Multiquote before I realized there’d be so many amazing stories; might as well show some of them anyway:

I tend to be skeptical about such things, but have formed a vague model where such events might be compatible with physics! (But any explanation would have to be posted in BBQ Pit. :smack: )

I’ve my own story that seems too amazing to be just coincidence though it may not astound as much as the above examples. Very briefly:

Picnicking with wife and infant, I brought up the subject of my wife’s mother’s famous ghost and immediately the largest wasp-hive in our orchard fell to the ground. (A once-per-year event or less.) We raced away from the wasps carrying our baby, did a few things and stood catching our breaths in wonderment. I said something like “Wow, as soon as I mentioned your mother’s ghost …” but before I could finish the sentence, the sky turned quite dark and a ferocious wind drove sand at us so hard we were immobilized protecting baby. The storm was quite unusual but not unprecedented. With hindsight, it was likely an early wind gust from that storm that brought the wasp-hive down. Still, that the timing of the two singular events coincided exactly with my two mentions of the ghost seemed bizarre. (No one will live in the house where my mother-in-law died, and when unknowing outsiders were boarded there, they left after one night and made camp outside. The orchard with the wasp-hive is 4 miles from that house and also allegedly haunted.)

24

I’ve told this story in similar threads before.

When I was 10 years old, my mother and stepfather and I went down to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to visit my great-aunt and uncle over Christmas break. For New Year’s Eve, a popular thing to do there is to go out on party boats into the ocean and watch fireworks that are set off from shore. My great-aunt got us all tickets on a boat, but when we got there, she took one look at it and refused to go on it. She ended up buying us tickets for a different boat instead. We all thought she was nuts for spending all that extra money for no reason.

We passed the other boat in the water at about 11:45. Shortly after midnight, it capsized, killing more than half of its passengers, including a Brazilian actress. My aunt fielded a LOT of phone calls on New Year’s Day from people assuming she was dead.

Just found it on Wikipedia (although I don’t think it has its own article). 100 people died on that boat.

25

When I was 13, I was considered “gifted” (didn’t pan out) and sent to a special free-form class for an hour a day. We did everything from reading “Lord Of The Rings” to learning Bridge.

One project we did was an ESP experiment. The details are a little fuzzy, but as I remember we were given 32 cards with one of four different geometric patterns on them. (circle, triangle, star, and a square IIRC). The idea was to pick a card from the deck, focus on it, and “push” the image to the kid sitting in front of you. A kid named John was set as my partner. I started as the “receiver” and I got four or five correct, which is pretty much random chance.

When it was my turn to push, however, John got 30 correct. We tried it again. John got 31. He said that he could see the image flash briefly on the back of the card. Like I said, the details are a little fuzzy, but I definitely remember that he got 30 and then 31. None of the other kids in the class came close to that number.

We excitedly told the instructor. She basically said “Yep. ESP is known to exist in some form, and the CIA is doing research to see if they can get something useful out of it.” Figuring that we were nothing special after all, we moved onto something else.

The thing is, ESP has apparently been pretty much debunked. I certainly don’t believe in it, and that sort of experiment is pretty easy to replicate. The only way I think John could’ve cheated was to have a partner behind me mouthing the shape on the card, and I’m pretty certain I would’ve noticed John glancing at him after 64 times. Besides, John was about the most straightlaced kid I knew, and he was also convincingly startled.

I’ve no doubt that there’s a rational explanation for it, but it’s still kinda cool.

26

I entered a music store contest (as a intermediate schooler) for some musical instrument, and knew that I would win. I did.

I never play the lottery, but one week, I knew that if I did play, I’d win. I didn’t play, and I always wonder what would have happened.

27

Two things: I dreamed about going to my junior high school before I ever got there. And all the details I dreamed about were pretty accurate.

And I came back to life after being clinically dead for 45 minutes.

28

Stephen Hawking participated in ESP experiments at Duke University. “He came to the conclusion that it is only people who have not developed their analytical faculties beyond that of a teenager who believe in such things as ESP.” Mental faculties.

29

I took an ESP test once. My partner & I did get one exact match (and she made a semi-interesting argument about how “it worked because we weren’t trying to make it work”) but the overall results were worse than 50/50. Hmm, maybe that’s your supernatural event right there. :cool:

30

As I noted, I do not believe in ESP or any other psychic phenomena, nor ghosts and goblins, or gods and monsters. Certainly he could have cheated in some nefarious way, or a trick of the light could have made the cards vaguely transparent. It was an experience I had, and it certainly fit the thread title.

At the age of 13 I certainly believed it was ESP, if that is what you’re implying. :slight_smile:

31

If you can dream to order, you’ll make a mint. :slight_smile:

32

I have had two ESP like coincidences while driving. Once I was driving with friends on a winding road through a forest. Approaching a blind corner I suddenly had an overpowering urge to pull over to the side of the road. As I did so a truck came around the corner on the wrong side of the road. The others in the car wondered how I “knew” that was going to happen. I had no idea.

The other time I was driving to my brother’s at night. He lives in a rural area and a routine problem is the possibility of hitting a kangaroo. However in 20 odd years of going to his place I have never seen one on the road he is on and I don’t drive around worrying about the prospect. On this one night I was convinced I was going to confront a kangaroo. So I only dawdled along. Coming around a bend I saw a 6 foot kangaroo sitting on the side of the road eating, it’s tail laying across the road. I drove around it very slowly so as not to startle it. Surprisingly it just kept on eating. I have never seen another kangaroo in the area since, and never had the same conviction when driving in the bush.

33

About a month out of High School I went on a vacation by myself. Drove up the coast from LA to Eureka. I was going to stay in Eureka all weekend and head back on Monday.
At 7:20AM I woke up with a feeling of dread. Something was wrong. I called home, nope everybody is fine. Called a few friends, nope everybody is fine.
I was so bugged by this I packed up, checked out and headed south in a snow storm at 10AM.* Got home on Sunday.
Called all of my close friends, everybody was fine.
OK, I forget about my feelings and go about my business.
Three weeks to the day after I had that feeling, I am driving near my high school, and I see Mary’s house. Mary and I never dated, just friends, and we had a few classes together. I decide to stop and say hi. No clue why, we were just classmates.
I knock and ask for her. her mother says she will see if Mary is up to having company.
She was so I come in and we talk. She had just gotten out of the hospital from a bad traffic accident. She told me it happened on her way to work, three Saturdays before. She lost control of her dad’s very large car on the freeway and wrapped it sideways around a telephone pole. Firemen had to cut her out and she was in ICU for a bit.
Here is the conversation that followed.
“The accident happened three Saturdays ago?”
“Yeah”
“On your way to work?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“This is going to sound crazy but did the accident happen at 7:20AM?”
:eek:“Yes it did, how did you know what time it happened?”
“Well let me tell you about my Saturday three weeks ago.”
:eek::eek::eek::eek:
I have had a couple of other “feelings” like that over the years, but none as strong as that one.
But if and when that little voice starts to talk to me, I will listen.

*Back in the day LS City schools graduated two classes each year, I graduated in February.

34

My friend’s young daughter is freaky. She seems to know about many things before they happen. Her own mother has used the word “creepy.”

I can’t remember all the examples, but one morning, she asked about “the earthquake.” Later that morning, we heard that there was an earthquake in the area, but it hadn’t hit the news until later, and hadn’t been felt right where they were. We live in the Midwest; the last earthquake was when I was in fifth grade, 25 years ago. (Maybe she’s like the princess in The Princess and the Pea.) Other examples abound.

I can’t explain her. I just don’t think about it very much.

35

I once had the name “Antonie van Leeuwenhoek” come into my head for no apparent reason; actually, I had the first name as “Antoine” in my head, but that’s likely due to poor reading when I had encountered his name previously. Now, I knew that he was an early scientist of some sort, but when the name came into my head I assumed he was a chemist of some sort, confusing him with Van Der Waals and Arrehnius probably. He’s actually known for his early results in microbiology; while he improved microscopes, he clearly couldn’t have been seeing anything going on chemically, so labeling him as a chemist was just plain wrong.

Later that day I read a thread here about the probability of life developing on Earth-like planets and was browsing Wikipedia doing some research into constructing a post in that thread when I ran across his name. How would the name of some random early scientist I would later read about that day come into my head like that, especially when I wasn’t even correct in my intuition of why I knew him?

–

I mentioned this before, and it seriously weirded me out as it made very little sense. The clock in my car runs fast by about three minutes a year. It’s annoying to set correctly because all I can do is advance the time, so it just stays incorrect and I constantly mentally readjust how much it’s off by regularly comparing it to clocks near the road. My car is over 10 years old and it was over a half hour off one night when I went by a clock outside a bank or something that was within a minute or two of my car’s clock. I swore I had to be dreaming and my mind was subconsciously supplying the time on clocks to all be similar, but no, it really was wrong and really nearly matched my own wrong clock.

Why would a bank’s clock be off by nearly a half hour? And why was it so close to my own clock? The probability of the event just boggles my mind.

If something like this happened to me, I’d be led to believe in quantum immortality.

36

When I was a small child, maybe 3 or 4 we received a package in the mail from my grandparents. My mother says I knew what was in it before it was opened. When I was younger I could always find lost things in the house. I don’t have that ability anymore and it drives me crazy because I became used to it.

In 1986 I had a new Chevy Sprint with a manual transmission. I had been driving a stick for around two years at this point and it was a new car so I didn’t stall when getting into first from a stop very often. I was stopped at a red light and when it turned green the car would not go. I would try to ease it into first and it didn’t stall, it just wouldn’t go, the pedals were weird. Press the clutch, try again. Suddenly a huge motor home went barreling through the intersection. I would have been smashed like a bug. The car never did that again.

We had just gotten new flooring in our kitchen and I had a very realistic dream that the floor had been water damaged and was peeling off the floor. I woke up with that weird feeling that comes with very real dreams and the kitchen floor was water damaged and peeling. The hose had blown off the dishwasher in the night and gotten water on and underneath the floor.

37

This actually happened to me

38

I used to live in Hawaii. A beautiful place, with wonderful people. Lots of belief in haunted places tho. I was young and I listened to them. While I was going to college, I worked as a janitor at the Arizona Memorial. It was a good place to clean restrooms and pick up trash because for the most part, everyone was respectiful.

For those who don’t know, the memorial areas around Pearl harbor were built very close to the ocean. I could stand on the Arizona Memoral’s docks and watch aircraft carriers come in, almost the entire crew standing in dress uniforms and saluting the sunken ships.

This was a place with many, many stories of ghosts and hauntings. It wasn’t just the Arizona Memorial, Hawaii is a place with a rich tradition of hauntings. I would hear about them on a weekly or even daily basis.

I worked from noon until 9 pm because after the visitor center was closed, we needed to get the place cleaned up for the next day’s crowd. After the visitor center was closed, there was one park ranger and my boss, my co-worker and myself. The park ranger didn’t count to us.

Twice a week, my boss and co-woker would get in a little motorboat and go to clean the Memorial, while i cleaned the visitor center. One night, while they were cleaning the Memorial, I was scrubbing sinks in a restroom.

I was wearing earphones, scrubbing in time to the music when I heard a sound and looked up to see the restroom doors in the mirrors. They were all moving. I looked around to see if anyone was there, and I was alone. I took my headphones off and kept cleaning. When I got to the next sink, I heard a loud moan and when I looked in the mirrors, I saw all the doors open at once. Then I heard a groan, and the doors slammed closed. By this time, I was scrubbing as fast as I could, pretending to forget that I was working in a National Cemetary.

I moved onto the next sink and suddenly, I heard a loud GROAN, the doors all slammed open and close and something hit the top of my head.

That was it. I paniced, ran across the visitor center screaming at the top of my lungs. Of course the Ranger didn’t even notice. When I got to the dock, I remembered that I had a radio and a cell phone, so I called boss. He could hear the panic in my voice and they both instantly dropped everything, jumped in the motor boat to come to my rescue.

I was jumping up and down on the dock, sceaming my head off, my poor co-worker was telling my boss to go faster because I was getting raped and murdered and my boss was telling co-worker that they could see me and that I wasn’t bleeding.

When they got to the dock, I calmed down enough to tell them what had happened. Now that we were in our pack again, we felt safe enough to creep through the visitor center, past the Ranger who never noticed a thing and then peek our heads into the restroom. There were pieces of tile all over the floor and a crack in the wall big enough for my Samoian co-woker to put his fist into. Not that he tried.

My boss made the decision that we should all go clean parking lots until we finished our shifts, so we happily left the Ranger to his fate.

Remember how I mentioned that the visitor center was right at the waterline? The ground had shifted and half of the building had cracked.

39

The poster who simulaposted with me knows what I’m implying. As for the other thing I was implying, namely, “mental faculties”:

Sarah, in this YouTube video, explains that that is a term used in psychology. Not necessarily a term only used in logic (no pun intended) as Stephen Hawking was implying. btw, Hawking is a positivist (qv analytic philosophy). Also I wonder if Hawking is familiar with Piaget. Hawking is linked to The University of Cambridge. But I digress.

What I was implying was that I was, ironically, a 13 year old who believed in ESP and was reading Stephen Hawking’s Universe. I took Clifford’s maxim of “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” before I even took a course in logic, let alone learned about the maxim. Although I respected, admired, and placed Hawking in the highest regard (next to Einstein), I did not believe him. Do I believe Sarah? I don’t know. I’m applying Clifford’s maxim to that as well.

So the closest thing to a "supernatural experience’ I’ve had happen in my life was the realization that I was any college student on a college campus from 2003 to 2007. Oh and my senior thesis paper, given in April 2007 with an accompanying experiment:

The experiment (now classified) - ESP and Game Theory
It worked. I received an ‘A-’. :smiley:

And now I know what thread to start. A Great Debate on the evolution of civilizations. Greatest inside joke ever!!!

40

Thanks for this link, glowacks. I’d never heard of the concept, but it almost has a ring of truth.

I’ve been in a few auto mishaps where my avoiding serious injury seemed phenomonally lucky, and I imagined I had a “guardian angel.” Quantum immortality could be just that “angel” (though that implies a myriad of “other worlds” where my family grieved my loss in the same accident).

(As one example, I had to hurtle, spinning, at 70 mph toward oncoming cars and trees. Any collision would have been dreadful, but I ended up contacting two trees simultaneously, one at car’s front, other at passenger door, and the combination brought my car to rest comfortably.)