Are ghosts real?
 

A cold draft in a closed room, footsteps in an empty house, a tugging on your shirt tail...you know the drill. Are these occurrences messages from beyond the grave, or hyperactive imaginations with nothing better to do?

Time for ghost stories. :worried: Second- and third-hand accounts are cool, too, but if you're pulling them out of your butt, at least make em believable....


edit: Never did a poll before...forgot the "I don't know" option and can't fix it. Anyhow, make up your mind, you fence-sitter.

My buddies and I went up to the old TB ward back at school one night and took a bunch of pictures of the numbered graves and the boarded up building. These glowing ball looking things kept appearing in some of the pictures, and not in others, and the lense was spotlessly clean. Not really that spooky, just wierd.
I don't own any of the glowing looking things, but I have a few of just.. stuff

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...t/DSCN0432.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...t/DSCN0397.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...t/DSCN0391.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...t/DSCN0379.jpg

:skull: When hinges creak in doorless chambers, and strange and freightening sounds echo through the hall. When candlelights flicker where the air is deathly still. That is the time when ghosts are present, practicing their terror with...ghoulish delight. Welcome foolish mortals, to the haunted cellar. :weird:


Muuhaaawwwhahahahahahah!

For those who....dare....follow me.....

http://www.ghoststudy.com/gallery.html

Ghosts are the real energy of people who have died, usually in traumatic, highly emotional or unsavory ways--murders, suicides, that kind of thing. The spirit is confused and is unaware that it has moved to another plane. Everybody knows this!

My grandfather is very attached to my mom. Even though he has died he still helps her with all kinds of things--he finds lost items, etc. My mom has seen him a few times, too. He's still around.

I used to live in a house where the the former owner had died in one of the rooms. That room always felt cold to me and creeped me out if I went in there at night alone, but I think this was just because I'd been informed of her death there. It would have been interesting if I had experienced the same feelings without knowing someone had died in that room.

Oh, and when my father died, I had a premonition about it the day before. I was driving him back to his home after having him over to my place for dinner when suddenly this chill came over me and I looked at him and I KNEW. I tried to shake the feeling off and put it down to some stress I was going through at the time. The next morning I got a phone call from the assisted living place where he'd been staying and they told me he had slipped the night before and broken his hip and had been taken to the hospital for surgery. He never came out of the anesthetic.

That's the sum total of my "paranormal encounters" to date.

Oh, yeah, almost forgot. I "died" once for about a minute or two when I was in a very bad car wreck and had broken ribs and punctured lungs and a bunch of other fun injuries. I don't remember any of it, except for the part when I came around in the ER and asked what happened. They told me I'd been in a car wreck. I asked if anyone else had been injured and they said, "No." I said "Thank God," and I stopped breathing and my heart stopped beating. It was very peaceful and I felt this great sense of at one-ness and calm - very hard to explain. I knew somehow the ER prople were working to make me come back and I wanted to tell them not to be so concerned. Everything was perfectly alright. Then I realized I was going to have come back which I didn't want to do because I knew the pain would be terrible. It was, too.

There's more than one kind of manifestation ... some are ghosts, some are other kinds of spiritual entities (the elves, faeries, and demons option on the poll.)

My hospital has ghosts.

There's the one who is fighting against restraints or a cold pack in the ambulance crew quarters on a nightly basis (and keeps the crew from sleeping) and the medical records porch ghosts who move stuff (both furniture and smaller items) around, as well as a bunch of others. They don't screw with the patients, which is nice of them, only staff.

There are female staff who refuse to go to medical records after dark.

I, on the other hand, have to reassure the medical records ghosts that I'm just there for a chart and I'm not there to evict them.

not long ago after my last roommate moved out, just got another one middle of last month, i would keep the door to the spare room closed and the air vent closed as well to conserve energy. some how, some way, i came home and they were both open. :question:

Like These? (First and second shelves from the top left, near the middle) Those aren't from the lens, they're dust in the air reflecting the flash.

Old boyfriend's brother died in a car wreck at 18 - he used to come wake us up - cat would attack walls, saw his shadow, felt him sit on the bed -
Last house hubby and I lived in, while we were gone during the day pictures would jump off walls, chair moved from one end of room to the other - yes, I believe in many different manifestations for many different reasons.

And yet they are still not credibly proven.

i've witnessed (first hand) a couple of things, but one event still makes my skin crawl. this is the short version with some of the freakier events left out.

friend, who we'll call Rocco, was having marital problems with his wife, who we'll call Gladys.

Rocco is driving home from work and gets run off of road by a car no one else saw. it looked like the police car from The Andy Griffith show, so everyone thought he was stupid, drunk, or both. Rocco falls down in shower, splitting head open - swears he felt like he was pushed. Rocco sees the same police car driving next to him on road. old time mexican cop, not looking too healthy is driving. Rocco has come to me after each event and i think he is losing his freaking mind. drugs are an absolute impossibility, so he has to be going nuts i figure. all this stupid crap in the period of a couple days?

i get phone call at 3 am from "gladys" telling me to come quick - it's the baby and she is afraid of Rocco. i get dressed and drive over afraid that my friend got drunk and did something stupid. i get there and gladys lets me in.

neither she nor Rocco had called me as they had just woken up.

Rocco is sitting in corner shaking and incoherent. turns out that Gladys woke up with Rocco screaming, gasping, and physically trying to push someone/thing off his chest. she sees "something" leave him and go into the crib next to the bed. Rocco hysterically explains that the crazy looking cop from earlier was choking him and swearing that he was going to kill Rocco.
and then i knocked on the door.

they go into the other room to get the dazed Rocco cleaned up so i am alone with sleeping baby on couch across the room from me. i have not been drinking, don't do drugs, and am only vaguely confused, not really buying the story - not freaked out. until this 2 month old child goes from sound asleep on his back to sitting straight up without using his arms (which a 2 month old couldn't do anyway) and turns his head and just stares at me. the moment Rocco and Gladys walk back into the room the little bambino falls right back into the previous sleeping position, sound asleep. my jaw is on the floor.

things got a bit freakier from there with various noises, items moving, shaking, no access back into bedroom where the crib. an unlocked door that just won't budge. not an inch. not a milimeter. it may as well have been rock. sounds of a violent argument in spanish from behind the door. and three adults sitting speechless staring at a baby sleeping peacefully.

daylight rolls around and i go to work just dumbstruck. they called their family priest over. i don't know what all happened from there, but here is the gist of what they found out over the next few days.

gladys's (birth) father was a cop who'd been gunned down years before in mexico. Rocco didn't know about this. old mexico story, didn't exactly get passed out to people who didn't already know. Gladys didn't even know the whole story. or the fact that her grandmother was a self described "witch" who had taken the time to pray and speak with her dead son through the last photograph taken of him(in his police uniform) for 20 years before giving it to Gladys as wedding gift.

grandmother threatened to rain hell down upon rocco, gladys, and family if they destroyed the picture. she was satisfied to remove the photo back to her home. they let her, under the condition that she tells dead daddy to leave Rocco alone. apparently it worked out because there were never any repeats of the strange events.

yep, i know it sounds like a campfire story. i wouldn't believe it either if i hadn't been there. it wasn't imagined or exaggerated.

skin crawling now. that was 10-12 years ago, and it is all still crystal clear in my memory.

now that's spooky

wow, lookout. good story. reminds me of the story my boss told me when I was doing my internship. Can't remember the details, but she was visiting her ex-husband's father (i think) in the hospital as he lay dying of cancer. The guy hadn't moved an inch in days, was only hours from death. Was still breathing on his own, but on oxygen. He'd also been up to his eyeballs in morphine for the past night or two. Anyway, she found herself alone with him momentarily while the ex-hubby went to get a soda or something.

The guy sat up, locked eyes with her, and reached for her throat with both hands.

She was between the bed and the wall, and had to go around him to escape. She did so, trying unsuccessfully to scream as she went. She ran to the nurse's station and said only that the patient was awake and had tried to attack her. When the nurses went to check, however, the guy was lying down as though he had never moved, except that the nose thing that delivered his oxygen had fallen down to his neck. He died later that night.

She vows that it actually happened, and that the malevolence she saw in the guy's eyes was something that she had never experienced or imagined could be possible from a human being. She had nightmares for weeks, too.

To me, this story could easily be explained by stress, fear, chemical imbalances, or other factors that are non-weird. But it sounds kind of like lookout's story...

Lookout's story is just plain spooky, so is Mr. Noodle's but his I could hazard an explanation for. The old dude is morphined out to the max and after a while people do develope a tolerance for the stuff. I was on a morphine drip for three weeks in critical care after my car wreck (above), and that stuff does very wierd things to your head after you've been on it for a while - nice sort of semi-hallucinatory state for me. So I can imagine the old man having some horrible vision brought on by the morphine and the fact that he's on his way out. He opens his eyes and sees his daughter in law as the angel of death or something, and in one last desperate effort to survive, he reaches out his hands to strangle her, then subsides back into his comatose state after this final expenditure of effort.

ICU psychosis kind of meshes with morphine induced psychosis and you get some wierd shit going on ...

I don't think that entities/ghosts/spirits/phenomena are necessarily a single thing. I most especially don't buy into the whole "died horribly and are upset and lingering" theory.

That being said, I believe in parapsychological phenomenon. I've seen too many things that I cannot explain. I myself have experienced premonitions which came to pass. I don't know the mechanism, but I suspect it is related somehow to the energy fabric which is our physical world.

Yeah, what he said.

I've experienced several different manifestations--vague, light-based, solidly human-shaped, invisible but physical, weird-shaped, and downright evil. Also, a few premonitions; one in particular that was so strong that I was able to alter the outcome. I have no idea where these things come from. I'd prefer that they not occur, but when they do, you just have to kind of go with it. :greenface

This story requires a little setup.

My Mom inherited a violin from her grandfather. No one else in the family played, so my mom had it mounted in a frame as a memory of her grandfather. My Mom's aunt found out about it and was very upset that it hadn't been saved so that someone would eventually take it up. Though my Mom and her aunt got along well, it remained a point of contention between them.

Years later ~8pm in the evening, the violin springs off the wall falling on the piano underneath it. My Mom heard the racket and came to see what happened. Now there was no reason that thing should have come off it's mounting. It was wired to the background and there was no internal tension - the violin strings were all loosened, etc.

Later that evening she got a call from her cousin. Her aunt had died. As near as we can tell, just before the violin took a dive.

I got a couple three experiences. The least scary (and most unexpected) was in Del Norte in 1995.

They had recently begun renovating the Windsor Hotel, which had been vacant since 1970 or so. It's only by pure luck that the place wasn't razed (that, and the town has no money anyway). The second floor had rotted away, as had much of the roof. Only the outer hallways remained, these wall-less and overlooking the gaping hole to the lobby below. A few rooms were still accessible, but the doors for these were mostly gone, having been used as firewood by the transients who broke in and wintered there.

Renovation happens sporadically in Del Norte, so they're still working on the hotel. At the time, they had gotten money to fix the roof, and I was taking pictures for the local paper. It was about 8 in the morning, sunny, and the building was empty. I had just interviewed the historical society guy, and he went around back to where the demo crew was getting ready to pull off the rest of the rotten roof.

I went inside and climbed the scary staircase to the second floor to nose around. Sunlight was streaming in in various places, from the windows in the doorless rooms and from the holes in the ceiling. I was getting a feel for the oldness of the building and trying to find the light for a nifty black and white shot when I got that feeling. This was followed immediately by a really strong odor of fresh cigar smoke, like someone was right next to me with a stogie. It was quite hard to see clearly because of the contrast of the bright sunbeams and the dark corners of the hotel, so I didn't see anything. Just the smell and the "someone's right there" sensation. Those of you who are aware of that kind of thing know the feeling I'm talking about.

I wasn't scared or creeped out. In fact, the first feeling was positive, like whoever it was was just saying "hi" after a long time with no guests in his hotel. I'd bet it was a previous innkeeper/owner, or that was the impression I got, anyway.

I hope they finally get the thing open for business again sometime, at least as a historical monument/museum.

This stuff freaks me out. I only read the whole thread because it's like an accident on the side of the road- you can't stop looking even though it's scary and makes you feel creeped out.
I got goosebumps all over my body about 4 times. I'm the type of person who absolutely cannot watch horror or psychological thrillers...It's 3 am and I'm alone in here. Thanks a whole lot.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot- the restaurant I work in has 3 floors. The employee room is on the second, and often, when I'm in there doing my cash-out, I hear loud thumps and banging and noises coming from the 3rd floor. It sounds like someone is throwing a bowling ball on the floor. NOONE is up there. It's a storage area. I asked someone about it. I was told, in a serious tone, that the restaurant is haunted. Oh, great.

I have had a few run-ins with the paranormal. the easiest to re-create though is the Joplin Ghost Lights..if you are ever in Joplin Missouri ask a local.. there are these weird will-o-the-wisp lights that float down the street.. one of the strangest things I have seen. failing that there's a house on the s.east corner of mass. and 23rd streets here in town.. (a friend of mine lived there) one day we were all lounging about downstairs, (and everyone was accounted for) when from upstairs we heard a loud ass thump.. so I went up to check it out (curiousity... cat... etc.) and two bedroom door were open and there was a damn cold spot right at the bend in the stairs.. and when I say cold spot.. I mean the temperature dropped from a balmy 85 degrees to frost on the breath cold. but just in that spot.. so of course I gathered a couple of other people to check it out and they all had the same experience.. there was another time with oujia board... witnesses... it's all about the witnesses (and no, we weren't high or drunk at the time, afterwards OH HELL YEAH!)

Never thought of that.. could very well be the case. Wierd that they don't show up in all the photos though, even consecutive shots from the same spot taken 30 seconds apart will have some balls floatin around in one, and nothing of the sort showing up in the second.
Digital cam btw, so no printing fluke stuff.

Several times I've had a feeling of deja vu so strong that I had nearly had violent outbursts (the actual feeling and response are very hard to describe). That is the strangest thing I ever experienced except for seeing an apparition of my deceased grandmother during a violent thunderstorm which was most likely due to a combination of over-active imagination and the raging thunderstrom going on at the time..

Mine's a digital camera, too. It has to do with whether a dust speck is close enough to the lens to be visible and blurry, and far enough to catch the flash. I'm sure my room was chock full of dust, since we had just emptied out an old bookshelf and put together the new one, and done alot of vacuuming of the books, and yet there were only three or so artifacts in the image. The variables need to be just right. The dustier a room is, the better your chances, but there are no guarantees.

I gave this link earlier in the thread http://www.ghoststudy.com/gallery.htmlThe site has supposed photos of real ghosts and ghost like appearances. One of the more popular photo subjects are these things called "orbs." Essentially they look just like the orbs in HMs photo, glowing balls of light. The guys running this site are convinced that they are true orbs and not dust particles or what they call "lense crashes." I do notice that whenever these photos are taken, they are taken during times of poor lighting, in and outdoor setting, or poor photo lighting (overexposure, over flash), or when shooting something where there might be glass, a mirror, or something equally reflective in the room. Light and lenses are goofy and has a strange way reacting to stray light sources and the reflectivity of the lense itself. I have had dust inside my lense element show up on film during certain types of lighting situations.

Here's a major ghost infestation!

http://photos14.flickr.com/13910811_d527439e41.jpg
click for large size

AAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!! :worried: :bolt:

Warning: Very scrary!

A creepy photo of a real ghost?

I'd buy that it is a real photo of a ghost's real bed linen.

[quote]My Mom says that, back in 1961, in the couple of weeks before my younger brother died unexpectedly at three months old, she had sudden thoughts such as - "What will I do with this room when the baby dies" and "I wonder if we'll move after the baby dies", etc. In the last couple months before my daughter died, I felt like I knew she wouldn't make it, I still had hope, but I just kind of knew.... We've decided these thoughts and feelings are coming from our angels who are trying to prepare us for what is going to happen. Whether these angels are friends and family who are deceased...well, probably, we're not sure.

Mom was alone in the hospital room with her Dad right before he passed away. He hadn't been alert or said anything for the last few days, but about 15-20 minutes before he died, he started talking to several people - all people who had died before him. She said he sounded very happy to see them.

And I don't beleive in reincarnation, but there are a lot of stories that could be explained by it. My parents said I freaked them out sometimes when I was little (too young to remember this), many times when we went to a place that I had never been, I would say that I had been there before, when I was a little boy.

Resurrected for halloween
 

Post your ghost stories here. Tell the truth.

A few years after my granddaddy died, we were all at the house for one of the biannual family get-togethers. It was about 10pm, and everyone had gone to bed. I was in the bedroom that adjoined a tiny utility room for the washer/dryer, which adjoined the kitchen. The doors were closed so that the air conditioners could keep the bedrooms cool. I was the last one awake, and wasn't even approaching tiredness yet, so this was completely real to me and nothing to do with dreaming or any other altered state of consciousness.

I want to wax poetic about all the memories in that little house, but I don't really have time, and now that it's gone, it makes me a little sad. So I just erased a bunch of stuff. Back to the ghost part.

Granddaddy had a pair of hard-soled slippers that made a distinctive sound when he shuffled across the kitchen linoleum. He didn't quite slide, but he didn't pick his feet all the way up, either. You knew it was him by his particular cadence -- you know how it is. Anyway, I heard that sound in the kitchen. :eek: I immediately tried to dismiss it, thinking someone else had to be in there, but no light was coming under the crack between the door and the floor, so that meant the kitchen was dark.

I got goosebumps all over me, but I didn't get scared per se. Then I heard a chair being pulled out from the table. Granddaddy's chair was the one closest to the door on my side, and it was that chair being pulled. At this point, I was listening very intently, trying to decide whether to jump out the window or open the door and look into the kitchen. I couldn't have done either because I was rooted to the bed and probably couldn't have been dislodged with heavy equipment.

That's when every single cabinet door in the kitchen (there were maybe 10?), one by one, opened and closed like someone ran from one end of the room to the other trying to beat a speed record. The entire event took no more than 20 seconds from beginning to end.

I asked the next morning if anyone had been in the kitchen after we went to bed, and no one admitted to it. The thing is, you know what your family sounds like in the house. That was Grandaddy. I never got really fearful; I felt an odd combination of goosebumps, sadness, and longing. That was before I learned to turn off that sensitivity to things ghostly.

I still haven't told my mom that story.

My grandfather owned a little funeral home in Indiana. My father and his brothers were required to help run the place. A funeral had just ended and everyone was out at graveside. My dad was pulling the letters down to post the next info for the next funeral. He heard the front door open and someone walk from the hard floor to the carpet and into the bathroom. Large door makes alot of sound. Having to go himself he waited a bit before he knocked, no answer. He went inside and no one was there. No windows, no where to hide.
There was an apt built onto the funeral home so that one of the boys could stay there at night in case there was a call. (In their town the hearse had to double as a ambulance). The apt opened into the funeral home. My dad had just laid down when he heard a knock on his door, thinking it was his dad, he got up and checked, again no one. All doors and windows were secure into the funeral home.

Heeehehee...your signature line defeats your story!
Not disbelieving you, just pointing it out!

Damn you're right, I didn't even think about that. Oh well, they're stories from my dad, who knows how truthful he and his brothers are being. All of his brothers have atleast a story or two.

I have a couple, some come from my mother though.

My experiences all take place in my grandfather's house. He had this big ranch (that's the one with all one floor, right?). The cool thing was that one of my great-aunts lived on one side and another lived behind him with a stone path commeting all the houses. If anyone was coming from those houses or my uncle's house they would come through the back door. It was an old screen door that would bang and creak. The house itself had a very specific noise when walking from the back door, through the hall and into the front entryway, dining room and finally the kitchen where I was sitting by myself wrapping up silverware for Thanksgiving. To this day, I KNOW someone came in the backdoor and walked through the house. I think it was my great-uncle that had lived in the back house.

Another time, I was going to sleep in "my room" in the same house. It used to be my mother's room. My grandmother stayed there for a brief time while before she finally had to go to a home for Alzehimer's. Suddenly, my eyes flew open and I got goosebumps and the MAJOR willies. There was something by the window right by my bed. I got freaked out for a second, but there was no malice. After a couple minutes, I fell asleep. I told my mother about it and she said that was where her grandfather used to come and talk to her after he died (they were really close). She said if it wasn't him, it was my grandmother.

Last one, I swear. Right before my grandfather died, my oldest brother was in town and my mother insisted on going to see him. He was in the hospital, but doing well and was supposed to go home soon. She and my brother went to visit. They talked for a while, he was laughing and said they told him he could go home the next day. They left. I got a call from my mother the next day that my grandfather had went to sleep and never woke up.

My mom and I and my mom and my oldest brother have a weird connection thing that has nothing to do with ghosts, but I will tell you that the night before my grandfather died, I was in THE shittiest mood. Nothing I did could shake that feeling. I finally just went to bed. The next morning I woke up and was feeling calm and restful. That's when my mother called with the news and to tell me that she had visited him the night before.

All these grandfathers...

My grandfather died in the bathroom of this very house. He was shaving and had a massive anuerysm, fell like a brick. He was a big man and the ambulance guys had to remove the door of the bathroom to get to him. He died before I was born but I know he's still here. He opens the medicine cabinet (the doors are not easily opened)--my Pepere helps me find missing things.

not v. ghostly, but I told ya anyway ;)

Couple of months ago I was out with my dog about 6.30 in the morning walking through our local park when i heard the pad pad of running shoes behind me, thinking it was a jogger I pull the dog closer to me as the sound got closer my dog turned around and I turned around to see I wasn't in the way of anyone and there was no one there and no longer any sound of running feet.
Now if it was only me that heard the sound fair enough but my dog also heard something..very strange..

I've heard mystery footsteps a couple of times. The first time, as a child, I came home after school and heard what I thought was my mother walking around upstairs. Went upstairs, no one was there...and then I heard the footsteps *downstairs.* Went back downstairs, and no one there. I freaked and ran next door to the neighbor's house.

The last time, I was walking up a stairway in a restaurant, and thought someone was following close behind me--I could hear the footsteps, and feel the weight on the stairs. When I got to the top, I turned to hold the door open for whoever it was, and no one was there, of course.

I've had quite a few other interesting experiences, but I'll tell later.

I live with a little old lady ghost and I have learnt to live with her.

This house is 100+ years old and has been remodelled and remodelled, but the original sitting room and fireplace are still intact.

If there is ANYTHING left in front of the fireplace where her rocker would of been, its moved in the morning and there are often strange marks on the carpet....like indentations from old rocking chair slides.

The other kookie thing she does is put the kettle on the stove every morning, now I use an electric kettle (natch), but I now leave the kettle on the stove with water in it.

She also *haunts* the old vegie garden, the farm guys will often get spooked when they are fencing near there....as they say something pulls the wire out of their hands or knocks posts over....etc etc.

She's not so scary though.