Are ghosts real?

[mrnoodle]

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. 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.

[Bullitt]

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

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Bullitt

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.

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.

[Bullitt]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

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.

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.

[Perry Winkle]

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..

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Bullitt

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.

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.

[Hobbs]

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.

[BigV]

BOOOoooooooooooooooo

[Hobbs]

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.


Muuhaaawwwhahahahahahah!

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

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

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.

[Brett's Honey]

[quote]

Originally Posted by marichiko

Oh, and when my father died, I had a premonition about it the day before.

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.

[mrnoodle]

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. 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.

[Trilby]

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.

[wolf]

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.

[plthijinx]

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.