I’m not terrified of climbing down most things, but if someone asked me if I wanted to hike with them, I’d assume unless told otherwise that I wouldn’t have to climb a 20 foot cliff. Even though I have done so before spontaneously when I have seen particularly easy-looking 20-foot cliffs.
I was at a carnival with my mom and sister and we were in the line for the bumper cars. In front of us was a little girl standing in line all by herself. Suddenly she turned around and started talking to me like she knew me. I assumed that my sister knew her since they were about the same age, so I started talking to her using phrases that would work the same whether we knew each other or not.
After the ride, I asked my mom and sister if they knew the little girl, they said “what little girl?”
Here’s one of my stories, completely true, involving a mysterious phone presence, a giant skull, and a forest that kills.
Nothing really ghostly,but sufficiently strange to post here>
When I was about 14, the whole family was sitting at the dinner table, in the kitchen of our small house. There was a ketchup bottle in the center of the table, with salt and pepper shakers. Suddenly, the metal cap flew off thye bottle, and desscribed an arc of about 2 feet-it landed on the table, right in front of me.
I don’t understand how this happened.
Nothing inexplicable ever happens to me. 
Was it the cap of the ketchup bottle? I’ve seen stuff like that before, up to and including the entire bottle exploding. It can be caused by the ketchup itself starting to go bad, and the pressure from the “fumes” getting to be more than the bottle can handle.
And not to go all Dio over Soylent Juicy’s photos, but those seem to be simple reflections. Those are glossy stones, they reflect what’s in front of them – like the people standing in front of them to take pictures.
I always thought so too.. until it happened. 
You know how everything is always perfectly fine until it’s NOT, like the economy. So have hope.. or, conversely, urr… be afraid, be very afraid.
I agree; I’ve had similar things happened to me at least a couple of times.
I have had few strange experiences in my life. I can’t really say I believe in spirits and ghosts but the things that went on around the time of my Dad’s death make me think there may be something out there. There was not one major thing that could be pointed at as absolute, but there were lots of small weird things that happened that day that when put together makes me wonder.
I was 21, all my brothers and sisters were married and out of the house, I was the last kid still living at home with my parents. We lived in a small farming town in a large older house ( built in the early ‘20s).
At the time, my Mom was away staying with one of my sisters about 30 miles away. My sister had just lost a baby at birth (still born) about 2 weeks earlier so my Mom had gone up to stay with her. It was just my Dad and I at home.
One night one of my older brothers and his wife came over to visit. My Dad wasn’t a big drinker, but he would on occasion have a beer or two if he could get away with it and Mom not know. He had sent my brother to the store to get some beer and we were all sitting on the front porch talking. My Dad started talking about his life and us kids, how he had lived a good life, raised 7 kids and we had all turned out good. Nothing unusual about the conversation but just not stuff we normally heard him say. Now my Dad at this time was 69 years old and was starting to wear down. No major health problems but he had worked hard all his life farming and ranching and was still going at it. Working from sun up to sundown everyday and it was starting to cause him some problems. As a matter of fact, he had appointments the next day at the VA hospital for some tests because he was starting to have breathing problems and feeling tired a lot.
Well as the night wrapped up about 11:00, my brother made a comment about keeping Daddy up past his bedtime ( he was usually in bed by 10 and up at 4:30 every morning). Dad said it wasn’t a problem because “he didn’t have to worry about getting up in the morning”. Now it didn’t register to us then, we knew he had to be at the VA at 8:00am so we took it to mean “ I don’t have to worry about getting up early and going to hay field because I have to go to the doctor”.
Daddy and I went to bed, my parents room was at the back of the house and their room had an attached day room/sitting room off it. Because of his snoring (and maybe having seven kids) he normally slept in a day bed in that room and my Mom slept in their regular bed. My room was at the front of the house with my door right near the front door. (I think my room was originally the formal living room or parlor of the house).
About 5:00am I woke up and heard Dad in the kitchen making coffee. He always used an old manual Dripulator coffee pot that required boiling water and then pouring it into the coffee maker. I could hear him banging the pots around, nothing unusual about it, he did it every morning. A few minutes later, I hear him opening the front door and open my eyes to see him at the door (because of no A/C we kept our bedroom doors open). He told me everything’s ok, go back to sleep. I guessed he was going out to get the newspaper (normal morning routine) and I fell back asleep. At 6:30, my alarm goes off, I get up and go into my bathroom and shower. As I am coming out, I hear the phone ringing. I run to the living room and answer it and its my oldest sister that lives behind us about a ¼ mile. She wants to know if everything is ok, she hasn’t seen Dad’s truck leave the house and thinks that is unusual. I tell her everything is fine, he has those appointments today. I hang up and look in the kitchen for him. No lights on, he’s not in there and there is no coffee pot on the stove. I walk into my parents room and see him. He is in my mom’s bed, still in his boxers and undershirt and I can tell from across the room something is not right. I run over to him touch him. He was dead, already cold and stiff.
I ran back to the phone and called my sister and told her to get up there. Her and my BIL were there in just a couple of minutes. My BIL went in and checked and confirmed what I already had figured out, he had been dead for awhile. I told them, I know he was up an hour or so ago, I heard him making coffee and saw him going to get the paper. He was dressed and everything. They tell me I must have been dreaming it or remembering another morning. I thought yes, that must be it.
My sister (Sherry) calls my other sister (Jill) to tell Mom what has happened, when my sister answered the phone, Sherry asks “is Mom awake”? Jill says yes, she is sitting right here telling me about a dream she had last night. She tells her to put her on the phone and tells Mom that Dad is dead. Mom says “Yes, I know, I was just telling Jill that I dreamed he had died”.
Jump ahead a couple of hours, all the family is at the house and friends and neighbors are over to check on us and see if there is anything they can help with. I haven’t told anyone else about what happened early that morning and have about decided I really imagined seeing and hearing my Dad but in the back of my mind I can’t help but feeling it was real. The lady that lives next door to us is talking to me, giving me comforting words I guess. I was telling her how I thought he was up and I guessed I dreamed him going out to get the paper and all. She says “no, you didn’t dream it, I saw him leave too”. I look at her kinda “HUH?” and she says yes, I saw him when he left. She says she was standing in her kitchen (where she can see our house) and she saw him. He went down walk, across the yard and disappeared. She said at first she thought she must have looked away and missed seeing him go back in the house or something, but then when she heard he had died, she realized that she had seen him (his spirit) leaving.
I was freaked out!
Later, my brother asked me if I remembered what Dad had said the night before about not getting up. It hadn’t registered with me then but when he brought it up I was like WOW. He said the same thing, he took it to mean that Dad wasn’t worried about getting up early because of the doctors appointment, but now, thinking about what he actually said, maybe he knew….
Related, but explainable, so it loses the theramin music scary factor.
I was at a work presentation, sitting about four feet away from the projection screen where a powerpoint was being shown. The screen filled most of my peripheral vision.
The presenter tabbed out of the presentation, and his desktop wallpaper was a pretty pastoral woodland photo. My peripheral vision, however, saw a large horrible face staring right at me fixed in an angry scream. Picture the classic Donald Sutherland scream from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, life-sized, 4 feet away from me.
I startled, looked directly at it, and it vanished, becoming just a field of leaves and branches. I returned my gaze to the side, and after a few seconds my brain reprocessed my peripheral vision and the angry screamy face morphed into view again. I was able to repeat the look-at-then-look-away illusion about 4 more times before my brain stopped playing the trick and could no longer see the face amidst the branches. It wasn’t a “sort of looks like Jesus on toasted bread” illusion either, it was full blown fidelity lifelike reach-out-and-touch apparition.
The post-processing that your brain does to its vision field is amazingly complex. If I were at all religious or superstitious, and it had happened in an old house instead of in a clinical corporate boardroom, I’d certainly have a demonic vision or vengeful ghost story to tell the grandkids.
That’s kind of a weak way to try to explain away the unexplained. If you want to know the real answer to these stories, it’s really quite simple: Bored jerks with time machines. They scour the internet of the future for stories like these, then go back in time to cause them to happen. Don’t try to reason how they can cause something that they read about before they caused it. That’s the real mystery.
My story (didn’t happen to me, but to my dad): He was a state patrolman back in the '60’s. His jurisdiction included an air force base. One night, he and his partner got calls from civilians around the AFB that they were seeing a UFO moving around. They went to investigate, as they had to do, and actually saw the UFO on the ground.
He said they saw it quite clearly and that it was the stereotypical UFO looking thing. Then all of a sudden it shot up and flew off. As they were getting ready to leave, some guys from the AFB showed up and basically told them, “You will not repeat what you saw here tonight. Nobody would believe you anyway” or something along those lines.
Now, does dad think it was aliens? No. He thinks it was probably some experimental craft or something (this base is known for experimental/secret craft being housed at it) and since he still hasn’t seen anything that matches it that has been declassified, it was either abandoned or still classified. He just likes being able to say, “I saw a UFO.” and see the reaction it brings before he clarifies.
That was actually my first thought. But my dad was way across the whole cemetery at the time and nobody else was there. And I was looking through the camera straight at the stone, not in the directions the images are looking. And I’m a 30+ small female, certainly not a balding man with a pointy nose…
I have loads of other stories and I promise to write them later when I have more time.
This one’s second-hand, but I trust the source.
A former co-worker, “Alice,” was a very straightforward, no-nonsense woman. She was in her 40s when I knew her and her husband had died some time previous (I don’t know when or how).
Alice had inherited her late husband’s childhood home. She rented that home out and went through a few tenants over the years with no problems.
A new family had been in the rental a few months when the renter called Alice about something minor. Alice soon got the feeling there was something on the tenant’s mind and casually asked, “Is everything ok with the house?”
“Well, we love it here, but our four-year-old keeps seeing a man.”
“Somebody’s on the property?”
The tenant hesitated, then explained her little girl kept looking at the same spot in the living room, chattering to a “silly man” only she could see. What made the family a bit uneasy was as she moved around the room, she’d adjust her gaze so she constantly was focusing on a spot about six feet above the ground just inside the front door.
Alice brought over a photo album and let the girl flip through it. She skimmed past photos of Alice’s husband and others without a second look. Then she happily pointed at a shot of Alice’s late father-in-law (who had died years before Alice met her husband) and happily declared, “The silly man!”
Alice got home and called her sister-in-law and jokingly said, “Looks like I need to charge your dad rent.”
She then explained what had happened and her SIL laughed along before asking where the silly man was.
“By the door.”
“In the corner between the front door and the closet?”
“Yeah.”
SIL uneasily explained that’s where her dad had his fatal heart attack.
Went to look at it again and sure enough, looks like my UFO was … a bug. Ignorance fought, thanks.
Yay, a victory for the SDMB!
The bit about marijuana growers scaring off folks in the woods makes sense too, that or a shambling creature from another dimension. As much as I don’t believe in this stuff I’ve got lots of odd stories. All true. Here is a short one.
My grandmothers house has a lot of rooms in an odd configuration with high ceilings and breezeway halls and an attic entrance from a closet and looks kind of spooky to boot but us cousins would gather there as kids and romp all the rooms and climb all the stairs and swing the lights hanging down on 6 foot cords and generally make a racket of tromping and yelling all about. Except for one room.
It was just inside the entrance hall to the left and had nothing special about it. It was large enough to have been a parlor or smoking room with a fireplace and tall windows but much of the house had similar items. It was hard to put a finger on why we all thought the room was spooky but we would dare each other to go in with a “now touch the far wall, I dare ya” kind of thing. When we were older we would hold seances there with nieghbor girls which would break up when someone inevitably stole a creeping hand along the nape of some girls neck and all erupted in pandemonium. It was fun and a little scary because it was THE ROOM. We didn’t give it a lot of thought though.
Years later after my sweet granny had passed and the place sat empty I was showing my young bride the house I had so many happy memories of and all the games played and secrets revealed there. We had gone through every room in the place with me telling her of sleepovers and meals and such and came to THE ROOM where I walked in and was examining some nicnacks on the fireplace mantel I had forgotten when I looked back and noticed she had not followed but stood instead on the threshold. I asked her what was wrong. I hadn’t told her a thing about the room yet. She said something in it was watching her. That’s it. That’s exactly the feeling I always had there.
To reach the front door of my parents’ house, you have to go through an exterior gate and then go under the house and up a flight of stairs to reach the actual door that leads inside. My dad got sick of fumbling for keys in the dark so he installed a set of motion-sensing lights just above the inner doorway.
Now, these lights had pretty weak sensors; you had to walk literally right under them, and maybe wave your hands around a bit, before the lights would turn on.
When I was a kid, I woke up one night to pee and I saw these lights turned on, shining through the kitchen window which overlooked the front door. I didn’t think much of it and went back to bed.
It wasn’t until the morning did I register that this meant someone, something, had gotten through the gate and was just standing quietly right outside our front door in the middle of night.
A more likely explanation is that the lights detected a bug or something that flew on the sensor, but I don’t know. I should have looked out the window that night. Or not.
I don’t believe in what I see, much less in what I hear.
However, this couple of videos of a true UFO taken by two different persons in different angles ask for an explanation.
Only Unca Cecil could explain this weirdness.
BTW, I do not believe in extraterrestrial UFOs (I do not believe in anything except in people and mainly The Straight Dope Master), so my first guess is that this is something made by persons, Occam style, but what the heck is it?
I believe it’s quite probable that there is life out there, but I am very skeptical that they have ever visited us, especially considering the quality of the “UFO videos”, but that is probably the most baffling one I have ever seen. Good find… I’m not sure what I’m looking at but it doesn’t look like an artifact, insect or blur like 99.9999% of crap on youtube.
Some of it looks like space junk reentering the atmosphere.
Hi, I never had any experiences whatsoever until i built a house in Gulf Breeze. The whole ordeal was strange. Before we built in this area, we had different people asking us why we wanted to build in this particular area etc… They even tried to talk us out of buying it because they said it was “wetlands” But I have done all the research, and on the county sites it was NEVER wetlands, its high above sea level etc… Just a lot of random weirdos making it hard for me to build. I even got a letter about it may be an indian burial ground and if we found bones while clearing the land we must quit immediantly… Totally wierd stuff. (there is a sacred burial mound in ft walton about 45 mins away) well we built our dream house, for my wife and 2 little girls. We notice all the stuff gulf breeze residents see on the regular… stars that all of a sudden light up and haul ass across the sky. You are guaranteed to see them at least every 10 days out here. I just chalk it up as hurlburt airforce base down the road. I mean we pay TONS in taxes im sure we got some bad ass aircraft that can land in the ocean etc… I have always thought “military” once i started seeing all that… (off subject, got cell phone pix of one, amazing) well this is the most recent story. I never really had dreams, im a light sleeper. i start having dreams of riding a white bull with indians all the time, so im like what the hell is this… (just a wierd dream i suppose) But anyway. This next part is not a dream, or it was a dream where you think your awake but your actually not, I believe i was awake though. I wake up one night and 3 figures made of light are floating above my bed. Like i could reach out and touch them. They looked like zeus, apollo, and michael… (i had to google the michael one, the other two were familiar looking) They didn’t say anything to me, they just studied me. My wife is right beside me sleeping. I for some reason didn’t react. I was kind of in awe of the light particles racing around to form their images… I waited a few days, now weeks, waiting for something to come from it but never did. (like a calling or something) And I basically said oh well. So this is months later, Im star gazing with my wife in front yard looking for the military stars that zig zag etc… when i say jokingly, maybe I can contact zeus. She goes, sure try it… So i jokingly put my hands in the air and say, zeus king of kings, god of gods, if you are real will you give me and my wife a sign… at the moment i put my hands down, a star lights up super bright and takes off across sky, lights up on other side of sky and flies back towards us, then disappears right at the handle of the big dipper. We both freaked out, like no fuking way… So ya gulf breeze is crazy. I am agnostic by the way. I believe in balance. Yin Yang i guess.
so this is the latest… and hopefully the last, because it freaked the shit out of me. I hear my daughter talking, its like 2:30am… I walk in there to be like “go to bed” and shes sitting straight up talking, creepy movie shit, so i wake her and say, lets go get some milk, your having a bad dream. So i get her some milk and go to lay her back down, and my dog (backyard is fenced in) starts barking right outside her room? My dog never goes on this side of the house EVER… So I am like oh shit a burglar, and grab a gun to go investigate. as I open the backdoor, I think, probably not the smartest thing to do, just running around the corner with a gun like a moron, so I tell the dog who had ran over to me, go get it. she runs back over to that corner. and shes looking at it, then me, then it, then me… etc… So im like oh shit its really on, fuck i hope i don’t have to kill someone type thoughts… Well right as I’m thinking that, a light comes around the corner, I look around for a cars lights, and there are none. It looked like a helicopter had put a light on the ground sort of… all of a sudden it starts coming towards me, and funny as it sounds I filled with fear… LOL… I was like wtf… so all of a sudden the dog is running beside it, barking at it, which brings more fear… lol… All of a sudden it blasts off and goes right through me. I look behind me to see it and it was gone, it was like it entered me. I got mad goose bumps, and was like fuck this, and went back inside. The dog quit barking and I sat up all night terrified. I waited a few weeks thinking once again there would be some purpose or calling that came from this but there was none. Gotta love Gulf Breeze.