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Ever Seen a Ghost?

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?"
 

Vanessa28

Angel of Darkness
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Yes I had and not once but more times.

In 1995 I was cleaning a school with my mother. I was upstairs and she was downstairs. The entrance was downstairs. So I saw this man coming upn the stairs. Dressed in a black suit, carrying a black suitcase and he said good evening and I said good evening back. My mom came a few moments later asking whom I was talking to. I told her this teacher came up and said Hi. She said there was no teache rotherwise she would have seen him. She was working a floor down the stairs and she would have seen people coming in and out. So this gave me goosebumps.

The second time I recall clearly was in 1995 as well. I was driving my car and my mom was in the passenger seat. I crossed a road and saw a blond woman with a child on a bike. I passed her and looked into my mirror and she was gone. I asked my mother where this woman went. She asked: What woman? I told her the blond woman we just passed. My mom said there was no woman.

I have encountered a bit more strange things but cannot explain it. Maybe just a coincidence?
 

Lord Vain

Dawn of a New Day
Joined
Nov 29, 2011
While I may not have seen it myself, my one cousin has a ghost, as in it literally follows her around and causes various things to happen wherever she is. Her husband has seen it and said it is a little boy, seems he has followed my cousin around since she was my age, and he never does anything extreme.

Back when she was younger, important things would go missing and mysteriously end up under her bed, of course there was no way to explain it...because the little boy did it. Even to this day it has happened to her with stuff in her own house, this little boy has also done other things, such as turning on water taps, blowing out candles, making photos fly off the walls and slide across the hallway, and even smashed some lights at one point.

Enough on that though, let me tell you about when my cousin's husband saw the little boy. You see, as usual my cousin had stayed up later than her husband, and eventually passed out while watching T.V on the couch in the living room. Soon her husband woke up in the middle of the night within thier bed room though, and this room is along the hallway that leads into the living room, so if he laid on the bed a certain way he could easily see down the hallway into this room. So anyways, he was lying whichever way, and in the living roon he saw this little boy standing in front of my cousin--he wasn't doing anything, just stading there, watching her sleep soundly. Thinking he was seeing things as most people would, he blinked a few times and rubbed his eyes, but yet the little boy remained in his sight. Not knowing how to react now, he just sat there in the darkness, his gaze fixated on the little boy watching over his wife. After awhile though, something in his mimd said to just slowly wave at the boy, and so with that he raised one hand and slowly waved amidst the darkness...in response the little boy turned around and waved back, disappearing right away afterwards.

Truly is a curious thing, creepy yet rather interesting, I may not have seen any Ghosts myself...but I do believe they exist, oh yes.
 
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Batman

Not all those who wander are lost...
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Would you be spooked to go into a graveyard at night, regardless, like my onetime friend? - I really did think that was funny.
I wouldn't be afraid of spirits or ghosts...but even I admit that graveyards are creepy places :P

But yeah, I'd definitely do it, but I would find it a little spooky. It's just an uncomfrontable atmosphere.
 

Shadsie

Sage of Tales
I love taking walks in the cemetary at night. No, really! It's especially cool on a midsummer night with a creepy sliver-moon or big full moon in the sky. People walk their dogs in the local cemetary all the time. I've met a few of them even in the dark.

I just find it a little facinating to see "touches of irrationality" in people who pride themselves on their reason. There have been psychology experiments on this - where even the most hardcore, analytical and logical people will have an attatchment to an object, or an varient answers after reading a short story designed to trigger a certain response, despite the logic. People who believe "dead is just dead" keeping a taboo about entering a cemetary at night because of the "creepy" atmosphere might be one of those things. This is no insult... it's just it seems like there are a lot of little hangups common to the human experience.

And I find it weird that I'm "open" yet have not only not had a weird experience, but am totally unafraid of creepy places.

Then again, my favorite temple in the Zelda series is the Shadow Temple... so maybe I'm just odd.
 

Batman

Not all those who wander are lost...
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I just find it a little facinating to see "touches of irrationality" in people who pride themselves on their reason.

That's very true. It is very unreasonable to fear a graveyard at night. But I, someone who does pride myself on my reason, do find it spooky, lol. Irrationality gets me sometimes :P I'm not perfect.
 

Shadsie

Sage of Tales
That's very true. It is very unreasonable to fear a graveyard at night. But I, someone who does pride myself on my reason, do find it spooky, lol. Irrationality gets me sometimes :P I'm not perfect.

It's nothing to be ashamed of, just something to be aware of. I think I am aware of a lot of my own irrationality and selectively reject and embrace it. As I say in my sig, I'm more interested in "What if" than What is."

I think one reason why I'm not spooked out is just... I'm almost irrationally comforted by thoughts of death. I've philosophized on this around my blog and my DA page. One of the reasons why I paint animal skulls is my facination with death - though, with bones, it's more like "these were sculptures created by life / creatures' living." As for stuff like the cemetary, I get this feeling of "equality" from it. I like to hope there's something after (or at least that my brain might give me a "good trip" as I'm going out), but even if there's not - it's the one thing that none of us can escape. - It doesn't matter how much "better" or "smarter" people are than me, both my "betters", elemetary school bullies, horrible bosses I've had, everyone who has ever condescened to me... and me... All tombstones in the end.

And if there's ghosts and I'm just not equipped to see or sense them right now, that's cool, too.
 

Violet Link

takumi was a mistake and so are the S supports
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Well yes. When 8 years old, I saw moving eyes on the school, the girls toilet. Last year I saw a white moving figure very fast and when I told my friends, they didn't believed me(the girl's changing room at school).

I heard a rumor that my school was used to be a hospital. The girl's changing room was the room for people who passed away and the toilet, idk.
 

SavageWizzrobe

Eating Link since 1987
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I've never seen a ghost, but I have had a paranormal experience recently. At a small concert, I get tapped on my left shoulder; I quickly look to the left, but there aren't any people standing close by on my left. I also know I wasn't tapped by any of my friends during this time, who were on my right. There was also no one behind me and I know my clothes didn't get caught on anything. Furthermore, I touched my left shoulder after this tapping happened and it felt noticeably colder than the rest of my body, which I linked to a ghost as I watched paranormal shows and knew of a theory that ghosts absorb energy to make something happen. Anyway, it didn't really scare me, but it did get my attention!
 

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