So if you've seen or experienced things that make you not discount their existence, but you still don't believe, then what does that mean? You aren't sure you saw/experienced what you know that you saw/experienced? You don't trust yourself to interpret your experiences? You can say that you believe in ghosts; nobody here will criticize you... Or maybe they will.... Bad advice, carry on.

I've had experiences that I can easily believe would have completely convinced many people had they had them. Yet I am pretty positive that all that was actually happening was that I was in a not-awake-not-asleep phase and so could not distinguish between what my mind was making up and what my body was telling me.

Many of these deal with talk-radio. I used to have my alarm set to radio-before-alarm and when I hit the Snooze the radio goes back on until the alarm goes off again. Sometimes I would hit the Snooze for over an hour -- ten minutes at a time (and that's no where near my record) and the radio usually had a talk-show on at that time and it was one that I had called into a number of times. So I would find myself listening to some guy make some absurd claim or statement and I would call in and set the record straight. But then they would go right back to making the same statements again and I would call in again and they would agree with me but then a few minutes later be making the same statements again. Sometimes I would call in a half dozen times or so. I couldn't figure out why they would put be on the air so many times (they normally limit callers to one call per day) and yet totally ignore me. Then I would get my phone bill and none of those calls would be on there (the station is a long distance call for us)! Was it some conspiracy to be able to deny that I had even called? Of course, what was happening was that I was actually hearing what was being said on the radio, but my calling in was a dream. The two were getting completely mixed up in my mind and I couldn't tell reality from non-reality. I was hallucinating, pure and simple.

I will occasionally be lying in bed and can feel the water bed moving as someone climbs in behind me. But those, too, despite at the time it is happening being aware of this hallucination/half-dream state that can happen, will find myself ensuring that I am really awake and laying perfectly still as the motions continue. It is only the tell-tales that occasionally occur, such as a brilliant full moon through the window at a time when the full moon is more than a week behind or yet to come, that I am able to know, sometimes, that the experience was a hallucination.

So what about the times that there are no telltales? Could those really be paranormal experiences? I have to say that it's possible, but Occam's Razor certainly argues against it and I believe them all to be similar hallucinations. Consequently, when I have some "experience", I am highly skeptical and cannot accept my memory of the event as any kind of proof of anything because I know that my mind can play tricks on me in very convincing ways.

On a completely different note, several times I have called into one of these late night "Art Bell" type shows when they've had people calling in with all of their psychic experiences that prove all this stuff and I would spin a tale out of whole cloth on the fly and every time they bought it hook, line, and sinker. I often wonder how many other callers are doing the same thing.

 

i dont believe in these things

 

I described myself as not discounting because I've had no personal experiences. I've had secondary and tertiary experiences...

I was talking along the lines of these:

I did have one experience when I was a kid that suggests we don't know everything, but push comes to shove, I choose science. Real science by real scientists.

I, too, do not discount the possibility of their existence, and I too have had my fair share of strange experiences, but I still can't say that they definitely exist. I am still a skeptic.

Here's the way I see it:

"I saw a dead cat in the street this morning"
If I said this, you would likely not question whether I was telling the truth or not. If I saw this cat, I would not question whether or not I actually saw it; I wasn't stoned or half asleep, no reason to have hallucinated it.

"I saw a man lift a full grown horse and carry it no less that 100 ft."
If I said this, you would likely question whether I was telling the truth or not. If I saw this man carry the horse, I would not question whether or not I actually saw it; I wasn't stoned or half asleep, no reason to have hallucinated it.

"I saw a ghost leaning over my little brother's crib."
If I said this, you would likely question whether I was telling the truth or not. If I saw this ghost, I would not question whether or not I actually saw it; I wasn't stoned or half asleep, no reason to have hallucinated it. BUT, apparently if I were someone else, I might wait for science to confirm me seeing the ghost before I would accept it's existence.

 

OK. Today I have time for this.
I will tell a few.

I have a memory from before birth wherein I am floating in whiteness and I am asked telepathically if I will consent to be a living soul. Not in those words, just an image of a green and blue world with live creatures and people, and the idea of being drawn toward that or repulsed by it. Easy enough to dismiss as something I dreamed up from the nonsense that adults babble at babies.

Several times, I have dreamed a bit of a conversation, usually 2 or 3 sentences, and in the next day or two, I would find myself witnessing the exact same words spoken in the the same order while I was awake. This is common enough that people call it deja-vu. Still, easy enough to dismiss as coincidence or merely a mistaken feeling.

I arrived at a parking lot for a large gathering and I knew I had to find Jim. As I turned around from locking the car, I saw an imaginary line in the grass and I knew he was on that line. I walked exactly on that line for 300 feet and walked right up to Jim. Familiarity with the place? Knowing the habits of people I am acquainted with? It felt spooky to me!

My wife told me she was going 100 miles away to start a temporary job. I got a cramp in my guts that was so bad I went to the emergency room for treatment. I spent the night in the bathroom because it was easier to vomit in there. My wife never came back. Did I suspect she was really going to meet her lover? Did I know in my guts that my marriage was over? There is room to wonder.

This is the clincher for me. For six nights in a row, I dreamed I was wide awake, in bed, and could not get up. It was terrifying and persistent. I can usually locate something in my waking life that stimulates any particular dream, but I could not locate what was causing this repetitive nightmare. On the seventh night I was hit by a car on the way home from work. Four days later, I woke up. I was in a bed, wide awake, and I couldn't get up for 3 months. This convinces me that some things are predestined and, if the event is traumatic enough, some of the information leaks through and my mind or body knows something about it. This is where I get the belief that there is more to this existence than we can know, but it isn't ghosts.

 

Interviewer: Do you see ghosts of past presidents in the White House?

GWB: No. I stopped drinking 10 years ago.

 

@#12 - I have had dreams before that were so real that I just knew they were something more than a dream at the time. At least a half dozen times, I have called someone up and gave them very specific warning about something I dreamed. It's always been met with concern from the other person about me, and to date none of them ever came true. I don't know if that means that my warning changed the outcome or if my premonitions are 10 years early or if I just had a really bad dream, but I have to lean towards the really bad dream since there's no proof otherwise.

I had one recently about my daughter dying in my arms after I wrecked our car, and I was screaming and crying in my dream; I woke up still screaming and crying. When I realized it was a dream and I was awake, I stopped screaming but I continued crying for 5 or 10 minutes. It was just so real, the pain and the heartbreak of losing a child was real and it was there, and just the realization that it the loss itself wasn't real, wasn't enough to erase that heartache immediately. I had a depressing day the next day with that on mind, but I drove a lot safer that day, and I still do. Maybe that dream did actually save me a loss; I will never know.

 

So if you've seen or experienced things that make you not discount their existence, but you still don't believe, then what does that mean? You aren't sure you saw/experienced what you know that you saw/experienced? You don't trust yourself to interpret your experiences? You can say that you believe in ghosts; nobody here will criticize you... Or maybe they will.... Bad advice, carry on.

That's exactly it. You can't always trust your brain to interpret everything correctly. Your mind can play tricks on you, turn fog into a ghost, turn a mouse into a demon. With the right environmental stimuli, you might even be able to create a full haunted house without anything ever actually happening. So even when I think I've seen things, I don't even know if I saw what I think I saw. My mind may have just been playing tricks.

 

Here's the way I see it:

"I saw a dead cat in the street this morning"
If I said this, you would likely not question whether I was telling the truth or not. If I saw this cat, I would not question whether or not I actually saw it; I wasn't stoned or half asleep, no reason to have hallucinated it.

"I saw a man lift a full grown horse and carry it no less that 100 ft."
If I said this, you would likely question whether I was telling the truth or not. If I saw this man carry the horse, I would not question whether or not I actually saw it; I wasn't stoned or half asleep, no reason to have hallucinated it.

"I saw a ghost leaning over my little brother's crib."
If I said this, you would likely question whether I was telling the truth or not. If I saw this ghost, I would not question whether or not I actually saw it; I wasn't stoned or half asleep, no reason to have hallucinated it. BUT, apparently if I were someone else, I might wait for science to confirm me seeing the ghost before I would accept it's existence.

Do you agree that there are people with mental illnesses that hallucinate even when they aren't stoned or half asleep? Even if we allow for the possibility that some of them aren't hallucinating but are really seeing men carrying horses or ghosts bending over cribs, would you still also allow for the possibility that in other cases it is a result of hallucinations?

Do you agree that many/most people that have such hallucinations don't question whether or not what they saw was real. They saw it with their own eyes and they weren't stoned or half asleep.

I *think* that if I saw such things, I *would* wonder whether or not I might be suffering from some level of mental disorder. But I don't *know* that I would because *seeing* something for yourself is a very powerful thing, even if it is a hallucination and even if you recognize that if someone else claimed to have seen it you would assume that they were most likely hallucinating.

 

Do you agree that there are people with mental illnesses that hallucinate even when they aren't stoned or half asleep?

Personally, I do auditory hallucinations fairly often, and I don't believe I have any mental illness. (Examination of my posts on this site might tend to validate or invalidate this theory.) The most often occurrence is when I am in the bathroom. The noise of the ceiling fan is misinterpreted by my brain and I seem to hear voices or the phone ringing. I have located a certain overtone in the fan noise that matches the phone ringer frequency, so that is easily explained. The voices seem to be an extension of the same mistaken brain function.

Less often, I hear music. Always a familiar tune being played by my brain. I can squelch the sounds or enhance them. I find zero emotional distress in this, so I usually just enjoy the music.

However, the only way this is relevant to a ghost story is as a testimony to the brains ability to misinterpret ordinary stimuli.

 

Do you agree that there are people with mental illnesses that hallucinate even when they aren't stoned or half asleep? Even if we allow for the possibility that some of them aren't hallucinating but are really seeing men carrying horses or ghosts bending over cribs, would you still also allow for the possibility that in other cases it is a result of hallucinations?

Do you agree that many/most people that have such hallucinations don't question whether or not what they saw was real. They saw it with their own eyes and they weren't stoned or half asleep.

I *think* that if I saw such things, I *would* wonder whether or not I might be suffering from some level of mental disorder. But I don't *know* that I would because *seeing* something for yourself is a very powerful thing, even if it is a hallucination and even if you recognize that if someone else claimed to have seen it you would assume that they were most likely hallucinating.

Fair enough, I don't know much about mental illness, but I figure everybody is "mentally ill" to some small degree. Sure, these things could be attributed to hallucinations in single-party cases. I worded my scenarios in single-party form, so your point stands. I should have used multiple party scenarios, since that's where my experience lies. What would you say are the odds of four people having the exact same hallucination concurrently? I believe I've told my ghost story on this forum before. I will see if I can find it.

 

I remember from my time in the army. Then training at night. It was often the boys saw something at night that was not there at all. It is the way the brain work. It often try to fill in the missing parts. It is no coincidence that in folklore the mythical creature most often shows up at night

 

Some years back I spent a weekend with my then fiance and her parents in an old two-story refurbished farmhouse, nestled amid grain fields up in the hills a few miles from the English seaside town of Whitby. The nearest other residence was a good half mile away, and there was some really beautiful English countryside that was ideal for afternoon walks, just outside the front door.

I had vivid nightmares virtually every night that I slept in that house, and they usually involved being set upon by a hideous clawed creature that landed on my chest. One night I awoke with a start because I had lunged at my "assailant", and gouged quite deep scratches on my chest that took a good couple of weeks to heal.

I didn't think much of my nightmares in that house until I mentioned the experience to my hosts when I met up with them a while later, after they had sold off the farmhouse and moved. On hearing about my nightmare, they nodded knowingly and commented that the old farmhouse had indeed earned a reputation with a succession of former occupants as an "unsettled" building, in which people who normally slept soundly frequently jolted awake in the dead of night.

That, I suppose, was the closest thing I have ever experienced that could remotely be construed as spooky, and of course there is more than likely a perfectly rational explanation for whatever it was that encouraged successive buyers of that little two-storey farmouse to hurriedly sell and move out.

 

Some years back I spent a weekend with my then fiance and her parents in an old two-story refurbished farmhouse, nestled amid grain fields up in the hills a few miles from the English seaside town of Whitby. The nearest other residence was a good half mile away, and there was some really beautiful English countryside that was ideal for afternoon walks, just outside the front door.

I had vivid nightmares virtually every night that I slept in that house, and they usually involved being set upon by a hideous clawed creature that landed on my chest. One night I awoke with a start because I had lunged at my "assailant", and gouged quite deep scratches on my chest that took a good couple of weeks to heal.

I didn't think much of my nightmares in that house until I mentioned the experience to my hosts when I met up with them a while later, after they had sold off the farmhouse and moved. On hearing about my nightmare, they nodded knowingly and commented that the old farmhouse had indeed earned a reputation with a succession of former occupants as an "unsettled" building, in which people who normally slept soundly frequently jolted awake in the dead of night.

That, I suppose, was the closest thing I have ever experienced that could remotely be construed as spooky, and of course there is more than likely a perfectly rational explanation for whatever it was that encouraged successive buyers of that little two-storey farmouse to hurriedly sell and move out.

Ok, I'm in.

1. Are you alone.

2. If so, did you check your finger nails.

3. Upon arising from the bed it is still dark and when exactly did the scratches occur. Is it possible you brush against something?

Edit: 4. Could it have been a would be attacker.

 

I wasn't alone in the bed, but she slept peacefully though my little episode, and only got to see the results of my "self mutilation" in the morning. I've always kept my nails very short, so it did take a pretty frenzied lunge to make them dig in like they did. Never had that happen before or since.

 

Unless someone else can see what I don't well I'm not sure?

You did say self? Mutilation? Is "self mutilation" from act of confronting the unknown Person or Creature?

 

One night I awoke with a start because I had lunged at my "assailant", and gouged quite deep scratches on my chest.

I believe this sentence means, "Yes, I scratched myself".

 

"I saw a man lift a full grown horse and carry it no less that 100 ft."

Ok ... a full grown miniature horses can weigh as little as about 70 lbs. Without context, it is possible to carry a horse 100 ft.

 

I believe this sentence means, "Yes, I scratched myself".

That's what I was getting to, I thought maybe there was an English Translation Problem and he needed time to organize how to construct the incident. If he was actually using the sentence as it was created, then I see it as an incidental accident with an unknown object left out of the story.

Joe, I was thinking the same thing. There are some really small horses.

 

I believe this sentence means, "Yes, I scratched myself".

Precisely that #12. The monster was of course in my mind, so I guess what I was attempting to convey was that I was surprised when I awoke, at the force with which I scored my own skin while deep in that dream, having never experienced such an incident at any other time in my life.

My mind did go back to that odd incident when I much later heard about the reputation the building had earned over the years, though all told I remain a confirmed skeptic when it comes to just about all things hocus pocus.

 

I believe

My Father's mother killed herself in their Garage by letting the car run while the door is shut... This happened when he was 11yrs ... When he was about 50yrs he met a gentleman that was telling him about a house he just bought and there is a woman that floats around the garage and turns on an off the lights at night ... Well my dad asked where house was and the gentleman responded with the exact address that he grew up in and his mother killed herself in ...
This really shocked my dad but he never told the gentleman that was his mother in the garage...