Shadsie
Sage of Tales
A topic for the Halloween season!
I was just reading an article on a news site by one of the people who do the "Ghost Adventures" TV show - which, if you haven't seen it, is a Travel Channel show in which a bunch of guys run around in the dark with night vision cameras screaming at air and recording background noise that they play back and try to convince the audience is the voices of spirits.
I got to thinking about how I really should be hella-haunted myself, but gladly - or sadly - am not. I've been living next to an old-but-still-in-use cemetary for a couple of years now. I like the neighbors on that side a lot more than whoever it was that woke me up today by running a chainsaw. The cemetary-neighbors are quiet. I also have (animal) skulls hanging on my walls and resting on my shelves. (If you've been to my Deviant Art page, you know I do an unusual form of wildlife and livestock art - I like painting skulls and bones and sometimes making jewelry with them).
I find skulls in the woods sometimes in uncanny ways. People tell me they've been in the country / been on walks and never seen anything while I find them all the time. I have wondered "Do the spirits of the animals somehow know me and know that I will do good things to their bones so I'm guided?" An ex-friend of mine offered a more rational explaination - that I've just subconciously trained my brain to find them, to pick out the subtle visual cues of a skull hiding under leaf litter and such.
I've never had a supernatural experience. I've been facinated with things like ghosts and aliens and stuff ever since I was a kid. I was a big ol' "X-Files" fan back in the day... but I've never had anything happen to me. About the "closest thing" is my odd "ability" to find animal bones and, back when I was growing up in Arizona, my family saw "UFOs" over the mountains all the time due to the super-secret military base out near my old neighborhood that no one's supposed to know about. Missle tests and stuff! (The place is not so secret anymore since the Mythbusters visited it, but they still were not at liberty to disclose its location. I KNEW! Bawahaa).
It seems like I either have a weird enough life in the material realm and am "left alone" or have more than enough imagination to make up for a lack of the paranormal. In fact, I'm pretty well certain that if I ever have such an experience, my rationalism will kick in and I'll... you know... ask my psychatrist if I'm getting worse or need new medication. So, don't worry, folks - even though I'm "superstitous" enough to pray sometimes to help work myself out, if I heard a tangible voice from on high telling me to do bad things, I'd question it and get some damn help. And if I ever saw a "ghost" I'd probably dismiss it as something in my visual perephiery. Which, perhaps is why I haven't seen any...
I still have that wannabe science fiction / fantasy writer's "openness to possiblity," though.
This brings me to my ex-friend. She was an online friend (I haven't talked to her in a long time... lost touch...) I was telling her one time about the cemetary I live beside and how I saw mysterious lights in it at night. Suspecting them of being solar-lights people were leaving on the graves, I talked about going in there at night (the only wall is a hedge and the gates are always open) to investigate the cool little grave-lights. And, that's exactly what they were. It seems to be quite popular in that graveyard to put solar garden lights - very often ones that change colors - on the graves as a sweet rememberance. I found one grave with an actual (large, glass encased) lighted candle that seems to get replaced every now and again (on the grave of a girl who died a teenager). My friend was all "I wouldn't go into a cemetary at night! I'd be scared!"
At which point I reminded her that, as "logical" as I am, I am slightly "superstitious" in that I believe in the *possibility* of spiritual things / the afterlife and so forth, while she was an atheist-leaning agnostic rational skeptic. I was all "Hey, I actually hold *very mildly open* the possibility of being haunted for running around a cemetary at night while you are sure that there's nothing but bodies there and YOU'D BE AFRAID?"
So, in short, I've never seen a ghost, even though I've done about everything possible in the movies that would get a person haunted by poltergeists and remain in a state of being cautious about my brain, yet a little jealous of people who have weird experiences.
So, have you had one? Or at least done something like walk around a cemetary at night "hunting for Poes?"
I was just reading an article on a news site by one of the people who do the "Ghost Adventures" TV show - which, if you haven't seen it, is a Travel Channel show in which a bunch of guys run around in the dark with night vision cameras screaming at air and recording background noise that they play back and try to convince the audience is the voices of spirits.
I got to thinking about how I really should be hella-haunted myself, but gladly - or sadly - am not. I've been living next to an old-but-still-in-use cemetary for a couple of years now. I like the neighbors on that side a lot more than whoever it was that woke me up today by running a chainsaw. The cemetary-neighbors are quiet. I also have (animal) skulls hanging on my walls and resting on my shelves. (If you've been to my Deviant Art page, you know I do an unusual form of wildlife and livestock art - I like painting skulls and bones and sometimes making jewelry with them).
I find skulls in the woods sometimes in uncanny ways. People tell me they've been in the country / been on walks and never seen anything while I find them all the time. I have wondered "Do the spirits of the animals somehow know me and know that I will do good things to their bones so I'm guided?" An ex-friend of mine offered a more rational explaination - that I've just subconciously trained my brain to find them, to pick out the subtle visual cues of a skull hiding under leaf litter and such.
I've never had a supernatural experience. I've been facinated with things like ghosts and aliens and stuff ever since I was a kid. I was a big ol' "X-Files" fan back in the day... but I've never had anything happen to me. About the "closest thing" is my odd "ability" to find animal bones and, back when I was growing up in Arizona, my family saw "UFOs" over the mountains all the time due to the super-secret military base out near my old neighborhood that no one's supposed to know about. Missle tests and stuff! (The place is not so secret anymore since the Mythbusters visited it, but they still were not at liberty to disclose its location. I KNEW! Bawahaa).
It seems like I either have a weird enough life in the material realm and am "left alone" or have more than enough imagination to make up for a lack of the paranormal. In fact, I'm pretty well certain that if I ever have such an experience, my rationalism will kick in and I'll... you know... ask my psychatrist if I'm getting worse or need new medication. So, don't worry, folks - even though I'm "superstitous" enough to pray sometimes to help work myself out, if I heard a tangible voice from on high telling me to do bad things, I'd question it and get some damn help. And if I ever saw a "ghost" I'd probably dismiss it as something in my visual perephiery. Which, perhaps is why I haven't seen any...
I still have that wannabe science fiction / fantasy writer's "openness to possiblity," though.
This brings me to my ex-friend. She was an online friend (I haven't talked to her in a long time... lost touch...) I was telling her one time about the cemetary I live beside and how I saw mysterious lights in it at night. Suspecting them of being solar-lights people were leaving on the graves, I talked about going in there at night (the only wall is a hedge and the gates are always open) to investigate the cool little grave-lights. And, that's exactly what they were. It seems to be quite popular in that graveyard to put solar garden lights - very often ones that change colors - on the graves as a sweet rememberance. I found one grave with an actual (large, glass encased) lighted candle that seems to get replaced every now and again (on the grave of a girl who died a teenager). My friend was all "I wouldn't go into a cemetary at night! I'd be scared!"
At which point I reminded her that, as "logical" as I am, I am slightly "superstitious" in that I believe in the *possibility* of spiritual things / the afterlife and so forth, while she was an atheist-leaning agnostic rational skeptic. I was all "Hey, I actually hold *very mildly open* the possibility of being haunted for running around a cemetary at night while you are sure that there's nothing but bodies there and YOU'D BE AFRAID?"
So, in short, I've never seen a ghost, even though I've done about everything possible in the movies that would get a person haunted by poltergeists and remain in a state of being cautious about my brain, yet a little jealous of people who have weird experiences.
So, have you had one? Or at least done something like walk around a cemetary at night "hunting for Poes?"