Encounters with the paranormal

Yes. I can bore you to death with some stories. I used to go ghosthunting in my spare time. Back when I had spare time. Send me a PM and if you're up for it, I'll send you my IM screen names.

So,

My friends and I were vacationing in Hawaii, three of us total. We grabbed some scooters, went for a ride out in the countryside, about 10 miles outside of the nearest town/village/suburb.

Its nighttime, the moon is full, and we pull off to the side of the road to get a look at the ocean.

We walk a couple of hundred yards away from the road, through some light wilderness into a clearing overlooking the ocean. The scene was one of the most beautiful scenes i've ever experienced.

At this point, it is worth noting that my friends and I are all military trained to include extensive 'survival' training. We were trained in EVERY environment on the planet: jungle, desert, mountain, forest, and even artic. It is also worth noting that we are all black.

o.k.

So, we are watching this scene, no one is talking because it is so beautiful. And then we heard a rustle in the bushes.

The sound could best be described as a 'synthesized growl', like a rabbit/hamster speaking into a microphone.

This sound came about 10 yards away from us and lasted for about 1/10th of a second.

Perhaps it lasted longer, we will never know because the 'instant' we heard that sound my friends and I bolted, sprinted, ran for our lives back to our scooters without saying a word to each other (this is were us being black comes in. Absolutely no curiousity to 'see what that was' in the heat of the moment).

We jumped on our scooters, and tore off at the scooter maximum of 70mph.

Once we got back into town we turned to each other and said, "What the fuck was that noise?"

We will never know. Could it have been someone playing a prank. Highly highly doubtful. We were in the middle of nowhere, 1:00am, way off any beaten path, and there was miles of coastline so it was no 'special' location in which to wait all night just to scare someone.

We all know animal sounds and none of us recognized that sound.

To this day, I have no idea what it was. The odds are it was some animal, maybe a cat or dog with vocal chord damage. That would be the 'logical' explanation. But again, we will never know.

<cue Twilight Zone music>

Mel...

When my son was a toddler he and I were living with my mother. We had to share a room. One night I had 3 people over to watch a movie. I put Draven to bed, and we put the movie in and sat on the couch in my room. We were in plain view of the toddler bed the whole time. About an hour into the movie, my three year-old son wakes up screaming and holding his arm. There were four long scratch marks down his right arm. He kept saying that "the girl did it". There was no other female in the house but me. We didn't own any pets, and he had not rolled over and scratched himself. We stopped the movie when he woke up and no one else was in the house. No other televisions were on, but we distinctly heard a girl giggle. Everyone heard it because we all turned to look in the direction of the sound at the same time. Nothing was there! To this day (8 years later), Draven still has a scar on his arm and swears that a little girl scratched him because he was in her room. He says he saw her many times, but that was the only physical evidence we ever saw.

Manix said:

Thank you for sharing this, Angel. I've heard stories, mostly benign, of paranormal activity, but it really sets me off when I hear about kids getting caught in the fray. I hear about this and I want to become the Terminator. I hope your son is okay now.

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Draven is fine now. We have since had that house torn down, and have put a new home in a different area on the property. There haven't been any more disturbances. We have learned that the original house had burned down, killing the family (father, mother, and daughter). My grandfather built his home on the old foundation and my room was right where the child's room had once been. It's amazing what a person can learn from county historical records.

When I was in college. They assigned everyone temporary dorms at first (It was a unique set-up where you got to visit all dorms and then choose your top picks for where you'd like to stay before they gave you an actual room).

We had all of our stuff still in boxes because no one was unpacking in a temporary room. Both my roomie and I had upper bunks with desks underneath them instead of lower bunks.

She swore she "slipped" on the ladder, but she flung the total width of the room, crashed into the wall leaving a roomie shaped scuff, and the box that held her clothes was crushed flat. (Big box, like 2 stacked together).

No one under their own momentum slips off a ladder and flies more than ten feet straight backward. And they certainly don't do it hard enough to leave their imprint on the wall.


(I have a not 1st person account that sort of ties in with Dark's burned house, but as it's 2nd hand information, I wasn't sure if you'd want it or not.)

I've had quite a few experiences... some of which I can't talk about. I'll give on a couple though.

I was asleep and dreaming. The dream was about me. I was a seal, swimming in the ocean (I know, I have some really weird dreams). So, there was no speaking, only ocean sounds.

I heard someone yelling "Nicholas! Nicholas!" which is my youngest son's name. I woke up, this was so loud.

I sat up in my bed. My bedroom light was on, my husband sleeping beside me. The house was quiet. I started to lay back down and when I did, the same voice started yelling again.

"Nicholas! Nicholas!" The sheer urgency in how they said the name got me up and out of bed. It was about 3:00-ish in the morning, give a few. Maybe 3:05 or so. I went through the house, waking my mother up in the process (she was asleep on the couch staying over), so she could verify this too. I went to his room to check on him.

I hadn't even touched him yet, but I could feel the heat coming off his body from a fever. When I took his temp. it was at 102.6. As soon as I touched him, he woke up and said he felt bad. I put him in a tepid bath and dosed him with ibuprofen. After about ten minutes, I took his temp. again and it had gone up to 104.3 and rising. I kept compressing him with cool cloths, fed him Popsicles, anything to get his fever down. The rearend had come out of our vehicle the evening before, so I couldn't go anywhere and I live about 35 minutes from a hospital. I was stuck. But I did get the fever down under 100 and let him go back to sleep.

I went back in my bedroom, not to go to sleep, but to watch TV so as not to wake anyone else up. I could still feel the tension in the room, too. I could feel that presence. I said out loud, "He's fine. I got his temperature down. Thank you." and just like that, it was gone. As soon as I said he was fine, it left.

The next one happened not to me, but to my oldest son. He was four or so.

He had been put to bed for the night. He got up and came to me and explained death in great detail. I asked him how he knew these things and he said,

"God told me, Mommy. He said that when we die, our empty shells go in the ground and our sprints (At the time, I took this to mean spirit, which he later confirmed as being what he meant) go back to him, where they belong."

I'm agnostic and my husband is an atheist. So, we sure as hell didn't tell him this stuff. What's strange is that my father died not long after. It makes me wonder if something did tell him this so he could deal with death. My son and my father were very close. They even look alike.

Then there's Alice. I've never told anyone besides my mother about Alice, so you are entitled to feel privileged. Back in the early 1900's, the area I now live in was a coal mining community. There was a typhoid outbreak among the miners' families and many young children died. The graveyard above my house is full of kids, ages ranging from 18 months to 7 years. Alice's grave is among them. And I see her in my house. She likes to look at the porcelain dolls I inherited from my grandmother. I've seen her four or five times. I asked her how old she was the first time I saw her and she held up her hand, all five fingers up. I thought she was real. I thought she was my daughter, actually, until I saw her face. She has brown hair and eyes, just like my daughter, so at first glance, I thought she was Savannah. She has on this dingy looking dress that has no real color, but might have been purple at one time. And this big, ugly scar across her forehead, running from her hairline to her eyebrow in a kind of curve. She doesn't scare me, and I wonder if it's her that woke me up and who spoke to my son. She's never spoken aloud when I've actually seen her, so I don't know.

Anyhow, those are the ones I'll talk about. There are others, but I just can't do it. Hope these help, though.

You're welcome. Are you looking for non-scarystories or more... not-so-benign encounters?

The not first person story came from a house in my hometown that burned down years ago (the tie in with Dark's story I was talking about), but it was the second time the house had caught fire. The first time (many years before) the whole family died, including the children.

Fast forward to fire #2. Middle of the night, kids home alone when big sister wakes up to find a man she's never met sitting on the end of her bed telling her to get up. Tells her to get her siblings up and get them out of the house. She didn't even know it was on fire until she had them outside, but the house was already compromised to the point that waiting any longer would have been fatal for all of them.

That time the house burned to the ground.

I'll have to gather up some courage to tell any of the more disturbing stuff. Telling about Alice gives me the creeps. She doesn't scare me, but I have a hard time talking about her. Most of what I've come upon seems to be nothing more than what some people call "residual" type stuff, kind of like an imprint. I'll tell you about the lady from my best friend's house when I was a kid, though. Nine other people saw her other than myself, so I'm pretty sure she was the real deal. All she ever did was walk from room to room, standing at the end of the bed and looking at whomever was laying down. She died giving birth in the upstairs bedroom. She was blonde, light eyed. Thin, but with a mommy-pouch. She smiled, seemed very sweet-natured and didn't bother anyone. She did get in bed with my best friend's mother one night while I was staying there (which I did a lot as a kid).

My best friend and I practically lived in each others' back pockets. You saw me, you saw Dena. If Dena was there, so was I. We don't even speak anymore... but that's a different story. If she was here, she'd tell you some crazy first hand accounts. From me, they'd be second hand and even though we were close, I could never quite believe some of it, even though I've seen ghosts myself, so I won't go there. But wow, she did have some creepy stories.

Cyia said:

The not first person story came from a house in my hometown that burned down years ago (the tie in with Dark's story I was talking about), but it was the second time the house had caught fire. The first time (many years before) the whole family died, including the children.

Fast forward to fire #2. Middle of the night, kids home alone when big sister wakes up to find a man she's never met sitting on the end of her bed telling her to get up. Tells her to get her siblings up and get them out of the house. She didn't even know it was on fire until she had them outside, but the house was already compromised to the point that waiting any longer would have been fatal for all of them.

That time the house burned to the ground.

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Jesus... just wow. That's freaky. I don't think anyone would want to rebuild on that site. Seems like some bad gunky on that property.

This is why I'm agnostic and not just all out atheistic. I can't say nothing's there, cause I've seen stuff with my own eyes. But something like that... I think it would put the fear in me. Really, that's wild. I'll say thanks for sharing, even though this isn't even my thread. So... thanks for sharing that.

EFCollins said:

Jesus... just wow. That's freaky. I don't think anyone would want to rebuild on that site. Seems like some bad gunky on that property.

This is why I'm agnostic and not just all out atheistic. I can't say nothing's there, cause I've seen stuff with my own eyes. But something like that... I think it would put the fear in me. Really, that's wild. I'll say thanks for sharing, even though this isn't even my thread. So... thanks for sharing that.

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I see it as the opposite; I think it was a good thing. He couldn't save his family the first time, so he did what he could the second. Unfinished business, I guess. (A new house is there now, but it's only one story)


*btw -- google the "Catfish Plantation" in Waxahachie, Texas. Never been there myself, but it's one of the most famous haunted sites around here

I've been a night Security person for over 20 years, 10 of them at a major trauma center.

My most significant experiance of this type occured while working as a guard at a major chemical company, in 1991. I was in an R&D building with no paranormal history (building or site) that I'm aware of, patrolling at about 3 am. One segment of the patrol involved turing a corner and looking directly at a long, high window that ran along a section of hallway. It was a period of considerable stress in my life and I was emotionally run down, but not actually upset at the time of the incident. If anything, my mind was largely blank, just trudging through the patrol ritual.

As I rounded the corner and looked toward the window, I felt an enormous surge of fear...raw, unreasoning terror that commanded an immediate response. Without thinking, I leaped back around the corner, not even really knowing why at the time. As my cognitive brain caught up with the reaction, I percieved a memory of seeing an inhuman face in the glass. It was more an impression than a clear memory, like an after-image on the retina when you see a bright light, but it didn't fade. It was roughly oval, virtically oriented and a kind of pale yellowish-orange in color. There was an impression of dark eyes and a nose, though nothing I could describe as a mouth and spikey protrusions all around.

Of course, when I looked, there was nothing, nor was there anything unusual outside. I had been looking directly at the window, perpendicular to it's plane and, as the building was at the edge of the property, the view beyond was open sky with no light sources in the line of sight. I didn't see any reasonable possibilities of a bizzare light reflection, as I have seen at other times.

Of interest is that, at that job, I befriended a rather strange young guard who turned out to be a spiritual/occult searcher. He claimed to be under active instruction as a sorcerer by a practicing one, who had trapped a 'demon' in a rock to learn things from. I made no effort to verify these claims and can't vouch for them. At the time I was studying Criminal Justice and considering a specialty in cult-related crime, so I had done some research and he seemed to at least have been seriously pursuing the topic.

I'm generally an open-minded skeptic, meaning I want to eliminate possible logical explainations before considering paranormal ones, but I'm not bothered by the possibility of the paranormal. There is a history of paranormal abilities in my family and, while I consider some of the claims inflated, I've seen enough evidence of unusual insights and perceptions not to discount the possibility.

I can think of several logical explainations myself for this, and have thought about it a lot over the years, but they never quite 'ring true' for me, based on the experiance. The think that makes this particualar incident stand out in my memory is the power of the subconcious impression. As I wrote, I don't remember 'seeing' anything prior to reacting. The reaction preceeded concious perception. I have since read that the part of the brain that controls those kind of fight or flight responses acts on only 10% of sensory input and frequently triggers responses before the other 90% can be processed by the cognitive center. That very closely matches my memory of the event.

Also, the emotional impact, though brief, was deep. It was weeks before I could turn that corner again without pausing and steeling myself and I can still feel the echoes of that moment of terror when close my eyes and focus on the memory. I've been frightened many times, including other incidents where I couldn't really identify what it was I percieved that startled me. Night patrol is full of weird perceptions. I've been threatened with blunt instruments and knives, in several instances having to disarm the attacker myself and have, once, looked right down the barrel of a gun at the hospital (an off duty cop in the waiiting room bailed me out of that one, bless him !). None of these experiances left the emotional impression of that split second impression of 'something' in that window.

I've heard that seeing odd things in mirrors or windows with darkness behind them is not uncommon in paranormal circles and that 'demons' (which I use for lack of a better term, intending no specific ideological bias) sometimes approach those in fragile emotional states. I've always wondered whether that wasn't what happened that night and whether some element of my family's paranormal heritage might have permitted me to 'see it coming'.

Also, I've wondered whether that other guard might have been closer to the truth than even he realized and my involvement with him might have influenced my experiance. He was fired about three months later when his uncle left the company and there was no one to cover for his slovenly appearance and casual indifference to his duties. Less than a year later I heard he was in prison for, for no apparant reason even he could quantify, jumping into the vehichle of a woman he didn't know stopped at a red light and stabbing her (non-fatally) 15 times with an icepick.

On a less personal side note, over my years at the hospital, I and others noticed odd cold spots in the lower level hallway that lead from the morgue to the loading dock, the various ER rooms, etc. Most significant was reports to me by several cleaners, apparantly unaware of the association of cold spots with paranormal activity, that the ER men's room where a man walked in and fatally shot himself was 'always cold'.

My story isn't so dramatic, but it happened twice. I was staing at my cousin's house while fixing up our newly purchasde home to make it liveable. She and her daughter were out and I had lain down to rest. After about 10 minutes I heard the front door open and close, heard footsteps and voices. I thought they had come home and got up, but there was no one there. The second time was about 3 minths later. By then I had moved into my own house, but was staying overnight at my cousin's to babysit her pets while she and her daughter went on a camping trip. I went to bed around 10:30, and again about 10 minutes later, the same thing. Front door opens, closes, footsteps, voices, no one there. Was I dreaming? I don't think so.

Okay, I have one to share. This is a bit different than the types of experiences that have already been posted.

We have a couple of dogs that we brought home as young puppies nearly two years ago. The dogs have been raised in the house, and spend much of their time inside, though they have an outside kennel that they use when my sons are at school or work. (The dogs are their dogs.) When the dogs come in the house, they are generally excited and run amok for a while, rough-housing and such. Though the Chocolate lab is a bigger, stronger dog than the Australian Shepherd, he seems to be the more sensitve of the two, and has proved himself sensitive even to the paranormal. At least that's the way I see it.

The first time I noticed it, he was running around the sofa in the great room, playing tag with the Aussie. He stopped near me for a head pat or two, panting. As I was fussing over him and stroking him on the head, he stopped panting suddenly, snapped his mough shut and raised his head and started tracking something with his eyes, turning his head as he followed it across the room. He snapped his vision to the upper corner of the room behind me, and thinking that my son had come in, I turned around. There was nobody there that I could see or feel, but Boomer saw it and his hackles stood on end and he growled. He stared at that spot for a good long while, growling, before he whined, tucked his tail and scooted away into another room. The corner he was worried about is beside the door to my son's bedroom, in which they both sleep at night. Later, as my son readied for bed, he could not get his dog to pass that spot and had to physically pick him up to get him into the bedroom for the night. They next morning he couldn't get him out of the bedroom, and had to repeat the process in reverse to get the dog downstairs for breakfast. He continued to have problems for about a week or so until one day he decided that whatever had been bothering him about that corner, seemed to have vanished. The other dog was not affected whatsovever, and I couldn't feel any kind of change in the house atmosphere myself. We forgot about it for several months and then it happened again, in a different part of the same room. Luckily, my son didn't have to carry him in and out of the bedroom, but the dog did have to pass the spot to get downstairs, and he would slink by it, growling, with his tail tucked. Again, he reacted that way to some invisible something for about a week or ten days. He has since had two more episodes, and it always gives me gooseflesh.

Oh, and as an aside, we built this house with our own hands, on bare land.

Hey Manix, because you're interested, these EVPs have a lot of interaction with the ghost hunters: http://www.ghostpix.com/index-5EVP.htm


Notables:

Undeniably the most distressing is a recording taken in an empty room in a building that hasn't had running water for 20 years. You hear a child moaning, "I can't breathe," and a man growl, "Murder." Then you hear splashing and a thud--as though someone's in a fit of drowning.

A ghost hunter drops his recorder and says, "That's not good." They catch an EVP of a voice saying, "I broke my neck!" in this snarky, "Oh, boo F CKIN' hoo," tone.

They talk of the majesty of an old theater, and a voice says, "I liked it the way it was." Apparently there was a fire there many years ago.

The list goes on and on--ghosts contributing to the conversation, responding to questions they weren't asked (like how many photos are on a camera and where the ghosts are and who was that guy?), children's voices questioning their strange equipment, female voices commenting on the men in the party, ghosts saying they'll murder the hunters. A lot of those, it seems.

They're interesting, to say the least.

dgiharris said:

The sound could best be described as a 'synthesized growl', like a rabbit/hamster speaking into a microphone.

This sound came about 10 yards away from us and lasted for about 1/10th of a second.Mel...

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It sounds like a wild pig, particularly a sow in heat. They have an astonishlingy wide range of vocalizations

quixote100104 said:

'demons' (which I use for lack of a better term, intending no specific ideological bias) .

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I'm interested. Did you smell anything odd? If so, please describe.

GeorgeK said:

It sounds like a wild pig, particularly a sow in heat. They have an astonishlingy wide range of vocalizations

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If this is true, then dgiharris and his friends might have actually had a pretty narrow escape. Wild pigs are dangerous.

And Hawaii does have wild pigs. In fact, I just found a site advertising boar hunting trips, which talks happily about wild pigs with nine inch tusks.

Izunya