I got to thinking about ghost encounters and experiences. When I was 5 years old I was sent to my room for being bad. I was laying down in my bed (the door to my room was open) and I saw a transparent figure walking in the hallway. It entered my room and stood in place for a few seconds and then walked away.

I wasn't scared but I was puzzled. I then ran to my dad and tried to tell him what I experienced, but he told me to go back to my room.

My friend told me a story about what he thinks was a haunting. When he lived in Connecticut he had lived in a two story house. His older brother bought a stick from some hippie lady and it was decorated and it had an actual human skull on it, or something like that.

So a few weeks later he is at his house watching tv when he hears who he thinks is his mom arriving home from work. He hears a door shut then footsteps walking up the stairs. He goes to see who it is, but no one is home. He has other experiences while laying in bed trying to sleep. He felt some force holding him down in his bed, he just closed his eyes and went to bed. This happened multiple times.

He had another encounter when he came home from school. He heard someone running towards him upstairs, and pounding sounds. He ran outside and waited 'till his parents arrived home. His brother threw the stick in a river. After that, all the happenings stopped. They called the totem "Jed".

I'm skeptical in a way but there are some freaky ghost encounters. Do you believe in ghosts?

Nope I don't, doesn't stop me from being scared of them though.

Nope. I think people sometimes see what they want to see though.

Wind could be a ghost moaning, smoke could be an apparition, a dream could be interpreted as reality.

If true I'd have gotten a few ghosts pregnant already.

Since I don't believe in an afterlife of any kind....no.

Don't trust your memory, especially if it's from when you were a vulnerable child with an overactive imagination. That aside, I'm on the fence. It would be cool if they were real, but I'm also very skeptical when people claim to have seen them. I've seen and heard very strange things myself, but I can almost always find a logical explanation for them. In the few cases that I can't, it's impossible to prove that what I saw or heard was paranormal.

Anyway, you'll find the vast majority of the members here sternly disbelieve in ghosts (Hey, it's less annoying than people who swear they "know" ghosts and/or demons exist), so don't expect much outside of that.

Watch out for the succubus. Eventually you'll die. Lol.

It's times like this I wish Stealthie still posted.

You know when I said skeptics are less annoying than believers? Well, exceptions exist.

That is known as "Sleep paralysis".

Lol People exaggerating over everything.

Yea I know. I've had it happen multiple times. I couldn't move and I saw a dark silhouette holding me down. But I was I was still in a dream state, but I was awake. So it was sleep paralysis. It's very icky.

I don't believe in ghosts, haunting houses, etc. I do, however, believe that you can speak to someone close to you who passed away. I'm not talking about chitchatting with them, of course, but for instance what you say at a funeral or in a cemetery will reach them, somehow.
Not as cool as haunting ghosts, I suppose.

To be fair, if I had experienced sleep paralysis without knowing beforehand what it was, I'd probably start babbling about demons and muttering prayers in my room, too. It sounds incredibly unpleasant.

I don't believe in ghosts. That said, I don't not believe in ghosts. I believe that there are things in this world that have not yet been explained. I do know that I ain't 'fraid of no ghosts, however.

I dunno: I try to keep an open mind, but I've honestly no idea. What I do know is that my gf's late father's house scares the crap out of me after dark: never seen any sort of apparition there but it has an extremely uncomfortable presence. Interesting that other people independently describe the same thing, and any house that's seen three separate suicides in living memory can't be a healthy place to be, whatever the cause (we found out about two of these some time after discussing what was "wrong" with it, rather than it being down to over-active imaginations.)

I did wake up one morning with blood all over... Either Aliens or a Succubus.

Not really. I only read a bit of the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1234644-the-lucid-dreaming-thread/

I do think people over exaggerate and it's all in their minds. The power of suggestion is another thing. But I think there have been encounters that really happened. But it's more complicated than we know.

No.

this has the explosive potential to become very religious... you've been warned

The last house I lived in had a terribly uncomfortable night time atmosphere as well. I think it may have been the presence of a staircase, which was positioned directly across from my room and adjacent to the bathroom and computer room. It was bad enough that the bathroom had a huge mirror in it (I hate mirrors in the dark), but then you have this stairway leading down into pitch blackness right nearby. The downstairs itself was piercingly quiet and impossible to see in. I actually feel more comfortable in my log cabin in the middle of the woods at night.

many times in the past, we have had this type of thread go down in flames, where people get all up in each other's faces over the non-binding debate about ghosts and such.

Don't do that here - feel free to disagree with each other, but be respectful, no personal attacks, yada yada yada.

I've always been curious, when people claim to have seen ghosts, many if not most times ghost are described as wearing clothes. So if ghosts have the clothes they died in on, does that mean if you died in a wheelchair and became a ghost, you'd have to roll around the afterlife?