Ok, maybe a ghost story... maybe not, but it is something that happened over 30 years ago, and I can still remember it clearly.

I'm up late one night, everyone else in the house is asleep. I decide to go to bed, and go to the bathroom to do the stuff people normally do before going to bed.
I'm in the bathroom for 3 or 4 minutes, and walk back to my bedroom, which is just off the kitchen. As I near my room, I hear a faint metallic "click-clack-click-clack".

In my room on a book shelf is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_cradle I had received as a gift.
I walk slowly into my room, and the thing is swinging full tilt, as if it had just been started.
No one had come out of my room before I went in, no one was hiding in my closet, and the thing didn't just start swinging on it's own.

=+=+=

The house I grew up in had a long (and somewhat tragic) history, and was very old (The core of it had been built sometime in the '30s, and had been added on to over the years).
My mom said she often heard what sounded like people walking around upstairs while she did laundry in the basemant, and was home alone.
Doors that were latched closed would often open on their own, and doors that were open would close on their own.
Drawers in the kitchen cabinets would open by themselves.
Things that had specific places to be kept would get moved to places they didn't belong.
Key rings hung on the hooks by the back door would fall to the floor at random times.
Cold drafts would breeze through the house on hot summer nights.

These were all things I had lived with all my life. My family just lived with the belief that we shared the house with something beyond our ability to comprehend.
No one made a fuss about the things that happened, we just corrected whatever our mischievous poltergeist did, and went on with our daily chores.

Believe whatever you wish. I know what I saw with my own eyes on almost a daily basis, and I know the things that happened defy rational explanation.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

I hear this a lot. People assume because it's printed by milton bradly on cardboard that it's harmless. The truth is you can make a ouija board out of paper and a shot glass...it's just a transmitter.



Tell me, what exactly is the difference between ghosts and demons? I've always considered demons just to be especially malevolent spirits. I can't imagine any belief system which would allow one and not the other. As far as Alaska goes...I'm guessing it has to do with snow, booze, and polar bears, the most likely of all bears to hunt humans and the ones who have an all meat diet.

Let me continue by saying that I consider myself a rational person. I'm an atheist, strictly because I see no philosophical reason for a "creator god," and have not seen any evidence which points to that conclusion. But I cannot discount the existence of ghosts because of my own experiences, the millions of others with similar experiences, and because there may very well be a scientific explanation.

Anyways. It sounds like you got it mostly figured out...you said it seems like it's repeating in a natural pattern. You also mentioned your friend has sleep paralysis.
For those of you who don't know, sleep paralysis is when you wake up in the middle of the night, fully conscious, but cannot move your limbs. You will consciously try, but you feel helpless, like all your strength is gone. Sometimes it's accompanied by strong feelings of another "person" in the room with you.

I've experienced it several times myself, the last time, just about a week ago. When it first happened, I wasn't sure what to think, I thought I was just dreaming, and fell back asleep. It happened again, soon after, and this time I felt for sure, actually saw, there was someone...something...standing beside my bed. Invisible but with a distinct outline. That coupled with the inability to move was one of the most frightening experiences ever. I seem to remember "asking" it to go away in my head. At some point I fell back asleep.

I did some research and found the "scientific" explanation, which makes quite a bit of sense. Basically, parts of your brain get turned off when you sleep. By accident, some parts will turn back on. The result is consciousness without the ability to move. I'm not sure where the feelings of "others" come in, although I can imagine you could "dream" with your eyes open.

It happened again sometime later. This time, I was determined to fight it. I struggled as hard as I could, mentally, willingly my arms and neck to move. It's one thing to experience this paralysis and give in to it, and fall back asleep. But when you realize how hard it is to do something as simple as turn your head when your eyes are wide open, is absolutely terrifying. What seems like forever is probably 30 seconds, and I was able to finally rouse myself. Instantly, the fog which you can feel hang over your consciousness is lifted.

Honestly though, reading about it and learning to fight it hasn't helped much. I'm even more scared now. Sometimes, when I'm fall asleep, especially in old houses, I worry about waking up and feeling stiff...about sensing someone in the room who shouldn't be there. The last couple nights I spent on my mom's downstairs couch, I was convinced it was going to happen. I just got that vibe. About a week ago, it did happen. I woke up. Couldn't move. I didn't see anything, but I could almost feel it, and shut my eyes. Luckily, I am mentally stronger now, and literally felt myself violently shake from the inside out and "broke the spell" about 5-10 secs after waking. But I couldn't fall back asleep. There was a lingering feeling like I was being watched.

So I don't know. Like I said, I try to be logical. There is an "explanation." But it's hard to rationalize an experience like that. Sometimes I think I'm more perceptive than other people, I've had other experiences with "ghosts." But maybe I'm just priming myself to believe something which isn't real. I don't know.

My brother's walkie talkies will occasionally pick up distorted police and taxi radio signals. Freaked me out hearing voices downstairs at 2AM. I think I recognised the voice of one of our local arab taxi drivers. Do you know, it's legal to listen to police radio, just not to act on anything you hear?


Ghosts are generally considered to be spectral forms of deceased humans, Demons are usually lifeforms that have no past existence as a human. In most modern western theologies, anyway. Non-European and ancient mythologies are less strict on the difference.





Am I the only one who wants to know what sort of freaky radio show is playing that sort of thing?

"And now, we return to our radio play adaptation of "The Blair Witch Project""

Well and that's the theological difference. But I'm looking for an actual explanation. The rationalist in me likes to think that ghosts are simply the resonating feedback of all the combined microelectric impulses given off by the brain. Whether than has any scientific merit or not, it sounds better than "demons are the angels that fell from heaven." I mean, where do these non-human life forms come from? I just find it easier to assume that there are some people who are so truly evil in life, that in death they take on a form which no longer resembles humanity, as regular spirits do. On the reverse, Angels are people who lived very moral lives and continue to help people after their death.

You want a rational scientific answer to a theological question? :blink:

Well as a matter of fact, I don't actually believe in ghosts and demons except as the result of the human mind, but I think it's strange to try to allow for certain types of supernatural being but bar other (more theologically popular) types on ideological grounds.

I want a rational explanation of Septim007's belief in demon's but not ghosts. Even if he is a Christian and his explanation for demons is that they are fallen angels, the Christian faith explicitly allows ghosts. Trying to communicate with them is off limits, but they're there.

*edit

"but I think it's strange to try to allow for certain types of supernatural being but bar other types on ideological grounds."

Exactly, that's what's weird to me.

Alright, your choice.

I can see that we should probably halt this conversation as per forum rules, and for that reason alone I will not continue this line of discussion.

I got a few strange tales, two at my old old house, three at my old house, and one at the current place I live.

Starting with the oldest, I was awake late at night playing Kingdom Hearts on my PS2. Everybody else was asleep and it was a very quiet night. I got up to go set my alarm for the following morning when my TV suddenly went static and my PS2 shut off. There was no power outage and everything was firmly plugged in. After a few seconds, my television blipped off completely. The strangest part is the PS2 turning off and my television displaying static; I played it on the AU channel, which is just a blank black screen, not static. Afterwards, I felt extremely paranoid and left the room for a while.

About a month or so later, I was laying in bed and staring up at my ceiling in pitch black darkness. I was doing what I sometimes liked to do when laying in bed, trying to get my eyes to focus on those floating orbs of light that you can sometimes see in the dark. It's a pretty neat effect. While I did that, something passed through my field of vision from the direction of my parents' bedroom towards the hallway with the bathroom and my sister's room (Yes, a bathroom right next to my room. It was as annoying as it sounds). Since I had a window directly to my right, I dismissed it as a passing person or vehicle.

But then I heard something. Something crawling around the left side of my bed. Now, during the few years I stayed at that place, we never had a rodent problem, and this sounded too heavy to be one. It sounded more like the shuffling of a small child - a baby, even - crawling over a carpeted floor. It slowly made its way down to the foot of my bed, then worked around to the right side. Then the noise stopped. I was too terrified to look over to my right, and managed to fall asleep eventually. I never heard it again.

We moved to another, much bigger place next. Not two days upon arrival, my sister claimed to hear footsteps upstairs as she was preparing a sandwich below. Me and the rest of the family were out getting some stuff to decorate the house with, as well as some groceries. She was absolutely alone in that house.

Fast forward a couple years, then I had an experience. I was up late again on the computer upstairs. To my left was the back of the staircase with a hallway leading along it passing a bathroom, my sister's room, my room, then finally curving around the front of the stairs into my parents' room. The bathroom light was on to give me some ambient light.

While listening to music, I saw a human-like shadow pass over the staircase, coming towards me. I assumed it was my dad, but nobody arrived. I waited a few seconds, but nothing. It's like whatever it was vanished just before arriving around the corner to the computer. After a few tense moments, I got up and went downstairs, only to find my dad asleep on the rocking chair in front of the television. Me and him were the only people in the house at the time.

One last experience happened a few months before we moved out of that place. I was, yet again, computing late at night when I suddenly heard a loud droning noise start from the front of the stairs and slowly head down them. It sounded like..an air conditioner. I'd never heard anything like it before. That is, until I watched an episode of Ghost Hunters. Now, I'll say that I don't think that show is anymore credible than any other paranormal series, but there's one episode where Jason is up in an attic and hears the exact same sound reverberate throughout it. Odd.

Now at my current place, I have had no experiences personally, but my sister again claims to have had one. One night, she comes out and tells me she was laying in bed, trying to get to sleep, when she heard her dresser begin to creak, as if being nudged. She then heard something like an animal whimper come from the foot of her bed. The following day, she went out and asked the neighbors if there was ever anything strange about this house or the past residents, and apparently one couple had slaughtered rabbits in her bedroom ( ) . That's weird, and I can't rule out the possibility of false rumors, but it's eerily consistent with that sound she claims to have heard. I myself have experienced nothing out of the ordinary in this house, nor do I feel uneasy during the night inside of it. The other two places...felt very strange at night. In this one, however, I can wander around any part of it in the dead of night and feel at peace.

Whew, that was a lot of typing. Hope you enjoy those stories, and just take them with a grain of salt. After all, most of them occurred at night, a time where most people are tired and are more prone to see and hear things that are not there.

Edit: Oh yeah, I'd also like to mention that the shadow I saw in the second place was also seen by my sister in broad daylight, passing by a sunlit wall opposite a window. That holds a little less credibility, IMO, since it could have been a passing person. However, and this is what bothers me, the person would have had to be nearly up against the window to display a realistically human sized shadow, as my sister claimed to have seen. Also, why would anybody be in our back yard near the window like that?

Heh, I have a bathroom on my right and one on my left as well. Like being in a toilet cubicle, especially when people are craping right on the other side of where I'm sitting. But on the upside, I never have to hear anyone's music.



The only real paranormal exoperience I've had was during a powercut, something knocked several times on my bedroom door. I opened in immediately as I was standing right next to it, but there was nobody there. In fact, there was nobody else on the entire floor but me.

We all considered my oldest house haunted, the realtor who sold it to us even mentioned it. Aside from creepy feelings, and an episode where my mother, sister, and cousin saw "fairy lights" dancing on the ceiling, this is something that happened to my mother twice.

We had a huge staircase from the entryway to the upstairs, divided into about 20 steps straight up, a landing, and five steps to the right. Those 5 steps at the top had a tendency to creak, and the rest would be silent.

Twice, my mom was home alone, both dogs sitting at her feet, and she distinctly heard the stairs creak one, two, three...just like someone was walking on them.

So much superstition in this thread, I don't even know how to respond.

Threads like these help keep the balance between superstition and all the scientific and media-related stuff we like to talk about. I don't claim to believe in ghosts or demons at all, I just find this stuff extremely fascinating and enjoy sharing my "experiences", be they paranormal or my brain giving me false signals. :shrug:

I'm never too sure what to think about this subject. Part of me is open-minded, part of me utterly sceptical. I've never had an actual experience of anything where I think "there's definitely no rational explanation for that", but what I do know is that my late father-in-law's house is somewhere I definitely do not want to be. Hard to sum up, just a profound feeling of "wrongness" about the place, but it's unpleasant. I've no idea whether there's a well grounded scientific explanation or if it is something weird, but it's a very uncomfortable place and it has a history of tragedy and other odd goings on. Just from a purely pragmatic point of view, I'd rather be elsewhere.

Well, if you were selling houses, would you mention it?


"Oh, but you might want to avoid this house, it's inhabited by a frightening entity" probably will lose you money.




Now I think about it, how the hell could my house be haunted? It was built for us! Unless someone died constructing it, or died previously on the spot of farmland it was built on. Maybe an animal? There are odd noises at night, but then I just attribute them to real animals.

It's scary enough when my dog happens to paw me or jump on me or open my door while I'm asleep.

...he did mention it. I've actually heard that some places have laws on the books that you have to disclose that kind of thing, usually only if people ask.



I really consider myself a logical person, I think science is as beautiful an explanation for existence and the universe as any mystical creation. But I've had experiences for which there are no scientific explanation. We didn't understand lightning 1000 years ago, and we don't understand ghosts today.

Sometimes that's a selling point. Depending on who the prospective buyer is, a haunted house can either make the value spike up or down in their eyes.

Actually, there are multiple running theories for "bad feelings". Some of them are plainly obvious, like electromagnetic fields; we humans naturally give off this field of energy ourselves, but so do most electronic devices. Thus, when alone in a house with said electric devices, you still feel like there are people in the house, but that's only because the two give off EMF.

Then there's the "The house is occupied by an entity" theory. Much less credible and harder to prove.

And then there's this:



Taken from http://thespiritguide.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/residual-energy-part-one/. Naturally, there will be a load of superstitious stuff mentioned as well, but I do believe in the theory that we give off different energies when in certain moods (IE, most people can tell if someone is pissed off or sad with few, if any, visual cues), and that we leave behind residual energy as well. There can also be other explanations for "feelings" as well, but I don't know of them. I just like to study why people claim to experience things like your "feelings", "sightings", "strange noises", etc. Most of them have a logical explanation, though it can be hard to pinpoint. Some of them evade explanation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the work of something paranormal.

"Paranormal" is such a difficult thing to research, and there are so many running theories, that it's quite impossible to come to one general conclusion. Unless, of course, you lean strongly on the scientific "It's impossible" or superstitious "It's my dead grandmother" side of the fence. People like me like to sit on top of it and puzzle all of it out.

Yeah, it's an odd 'un. We've wondered about similar theories and don't know what to think. The internal layout of the house is rather complex and odd, and one could certainly make a case for "bad feng shui": not even in any sort of "spiritual" sense, just that the awkwardness of some rooms promotes a somewhat uncomfortable feeling. Though actually, "bad vibe central" is in the neighbouring garden, which is a modern house with nothing especially notable about it. We did look into the history of the place and going back a long way, where the neighbour's house is now, there used to be a track leading up to the local woods that were notorious for nasty things going on, and we even found stuff in the papers back in the 1700s (they were early adopters of going online, apparently). However, as fascinating as this stuff is there's nothing useful to be concluded and certainly plenty of scope for flights of fancy. All I do know is, whatever the cause, I don't go there if I can help it.

There's also sound of certain frequencies affecting human vision and causing hallucinations.

Does not compute. :wacko:



:laugh:

The mind is a powerful tool and sometimes we think we see ghost or demons, but I′m far too skeptical too believe in any of that so I can quickly dismiss it if I feel like I′ve seen something paranormal or if I feel like I feel it, so I hardly ever experience that. However I do get the feeling you guys get because I′ve got a phobia of dogs and while I may not walk in the darkness outside thinking there is a ghost or a demon around every corner I get scared out of my willies that there may be a dog lurking around. Honestly it should be the same during days and nights but it′s scarier in the night because then I don′t see as well and it would be easier for a dog to sneak upon me from some dark corner.

I never feel uneasy, dark or not, while I′m inside but on the outside where all sorts of dogs may lurk I can get quite paranoid, sometimes I hear some noise and instantly think it′s a dogs growl only to find out it was the noise of my zipper, or I think I hear the collar of a dog when I′m jogging but then notice it′s just the sound of spare change in my pockets colliding as I jog. And many other noises and sometimes sights that may remind me of dogs can create a feel of paranoia, much like with those who believe in the supernatural.

But the paranormal itself ? Never get that.

Oh yes, our fears can easily manipulate our minds into thinking something is there, and even triggering the "fight or flight" response. I have a minor fear of the dark, so even in my current place where the night is so peaceful and inviting, I still get spooked when I turn my back on a dark part of the hallway, or look around a corner into that dark hallway. They're simply feelings stemming from my fear, nothing paranormal. Also, fear of the dark is far from the only thing that can make one feel uneasy and possibly jump to paranormal conclusions.

For example, there was one incident I didn't bring up because I know, for a fact, it was nothing at all. It was back in the second place and I was playing my Xbox 360 in my room. The lights were all off, but my closet door was wide open. The game flashed from light to dark a couple times, and due to my refocusing eyes, I saw a "shadow person" shoot into my closet. It made me jump like a mofo, but I immediately knew what had caused it.

That's what the answer is right there, and the demons are fallen angels. I have never heard of christians "allowing" ghosts if you stick to the Bible. I can't get more involved with this because it is quickly turning into a religious argument. I will see what I can come up with and send you a personal message.

Ghosts and demons exist...In video games.