Have you ever seen a ghost? Supernatural phenomena and weirdly inexplicable events from your own life...

THE END!!!!

GHOUL, n. A demon addicted to the reprehensible habit of devouring the dead. The existence of ghouls has been disputed by that class of controversialists who are more concerned to deprive the world of comforting beliefs than to give it anything good in their place. In 1640 Father Secchi saw one in a cemetery near Florence and frightened it away with the sign of the cross. He describes it as gifted with many heads an an uncommon allowance of limbs, and he saw it in more than one place at a time. The good man was coming away from dinner at the time and explains that if he had not been "heavy with eating" he would have seized the demon at all hazards. Atholston relates that a ghoul was caught by some sturdy peasants in a churchyard at Sudbury and ducked in a horsepond. (He appears to think that so distinguished a criminal should have been ducked in a tank of rosewater.) The water turned at once to blood "and so contynues unto ys daye." The pond has since been bled with a ditch. As late as the beginning of the fourteenth century a ghoul was cornered in the crypt of the cathedral at Amiens and the whole population surrounded the place. Twenty armed men with a priest at their head, bearing a crucifix, entered and captured the ghoul, which, thinking to escape by the stratagem, had transformed itself to the semblance of a well known citizen, but was nevertheless hanged, drawn and quartered in the midst of hideous popular orgies. The citizen whose shape the demon had assumed was so affected by the sinister occurrence that he never again showed himself in Amiens and his fate remains a mystery.

inevitable conclusion: mark sinker haunts lauren's apartment.

A year to the day later, this friend was driving to his house outside of Rockton. He had to drive across a flat expanse of cornfields, punctuated by stop signs and trees. It was about an eight mile drive, I've done it myself many times. Anyway, this particular night that he was driving was very foggy. It was around midnight. As he drove he saw a girl staggering along the side of the road. He slowed down to see if she was all right, and the girl turned around and apparently just stared at him right through the brights. IT WAS THE GIRL WHO HAD BEEN MURDERED!

My friend shouted out in horror, but the scream was not his own but rather A GIRL'S SHRIEK. He sped off home and didn't leave for about a week, apparently.

well the Boo Radley house's lawn did get mysteriously cut, that's true.

Apparently, I'm lauren's ghost.

anybody know where i can buy boo berry?

Every Wal-Mart I've been to always has it, for $1.98.

this isn't much of a ghost story, but in ≈2012 I was walking around the 'recent burials' section of a cemetery near my workplace, stopping here and there to read the headstones and make a mental catalog of the trinkets left on people's graves. one of the headstones stood out because there was a brass locket bolted to the center of the stone (kind of like this but with the hinge on the side). when I opened it I saw a ceramic color photo of an old couple posing with their young grandchild. the names and dates on the stone were something along the lines of

JOHN SMITH 1938 - 2009
JANE SMITH 1940 -

uh, RIP John. I left the Smith(s) alone and moved on to the next stone. once I had circumnavigated the entire cemetery, I decided to revisit their stone so I could open the cute little locket again. I walked back up to the Smiths' grave and it was exactly as I remembered it, except...wtf, there was no locket and no photo, just the names and the dates without any ornamentation. it was a good-sized photo, so it's not like somebody could have pried it off the stone without leaving a sizable mark (and I'm pretty sure there was nobody else in the cemetery at the time). even though I was absolutely certain that this was the same stone I'd visited earlier, I checked out a bunch of other stones and the vicinity, and none of them had locket-style memorial photos.

I left the cemetery and haven't been back there since because (1) it's a boring cemetery and (2) I didn't want to 'ruin the mystique'. the obvious explanation is that I had a brain fart and confused one headstone with another, but it didn't seem that way at the time. it's not often that I encounter irrational/~supernatural~ phenomena in everyday life, so as mundane as it seems in retrospect, it was really quite a jarring experience for me.

*in the vicinity

I wonder if luna's story is true, lol

mandee's story is super-creepy!

the old-lady-in-the-bathroom-stall one.

Years ago my aunt, her aunt, and mom were watching TV in the living room. There was no one else in the house. My aunt spotted a young woman walking slowly down the hall, as if she were lost; she even glanced with curiosity into the living room.

Blinking, my aunt looks around the living room. Her aunt touches her arm.

"Oh, you saw her too, eh?"

I dunno if I would call this a ghost story but it was super fucking weird and I have no rational explanation for it:

the wife and I are on vacation in Arizona. Sedona, to be exact, which is a notorious hippy-dippy tourist trap type place filled with New Age crystal shops and healing centers and publicity materials filled to the brim with references to mysterious "vortexes" of spiritual energy that permeate the area etc. We hike around during the day and it's all very pretty and cool but I am not impressed by any supernatural claims nor do we witness anything especially revelatory or unusual. Toward the evening we check into our hotel; for some reason I recall that the front-desk was being run by a one-armed man, who inquired as to whether we had been out to the "vortexes". I replied yes but that we didn't see anything particularly noteworthy.

Later on that night, after hate-watching that movie where Julia Styles learns to hip-hop dance during an insane thunderstorm that abruptly kicked up, we turn out the lights to go to sleep. Within a few minutes, I am awoken by a bright strobe-light flashing, David Lynch-style, which appears to be coming from underneath the bathroom sink. My wife stirs and sees it too. I turn the lights on, it stops. I go over and look, there's no lightbulb under the sink or anything - I can't determine where the flashing light was coming from. I think eh whatever and turn the lights off and get back into bed. Within minutes, the flashing starts again. Instead of turning the lights on, I sit up in bed and watch it for awhile, getting kind of freaked out. when I get out of bed to go over to the sink, the flashing stops. I get back in bed, it starts again. This goes on for like an hour. Every time I turn the lights on, it stops. Every time I go over to investigate, it stops. The wife and I are both super-irritated and perplexed at this point, eventually we go to sleep.

In the morning the one-armed man is not behind the desk, it's someone else. We tell them about the lights and they're like "eh must've been a ghost"

My cynical/paranoid explanation is that the hotel was rigged by the staff to fuck with the guests but idk. It was really bizarre.

otoh, my wife's family is quite superstitious (oh those eastern european catholics) and have tons of stories like this - usually involving strobing lights, glasses moving, lightbulbs breaking etc.

it kind of annoys me that i've never had any sort of supernatural encounter. literally everyone else in my family's got a story. some friends and i stayed in a supposedly haunted hotel room once and stayed up all night waiting for something spooky to happen -- nothing. hell, the building i currently work in is supposed to be haunted! (it used to be a funeral home.) i've been there late at night plenty of times -- nothing. maybe i just need to try harder.

my wife had an aunt who had diabetes pretty bad. it got to the point where she was on dialysis for hours nearly every day. this was when my wife was pregnant with our first child and she used to say that this kid was going to replace her in the world. anyway, when he was about 6 months old, we were putting him down for a nap and he started doing this strange thing where his eyes kept darting around the room, like he was following something. he also started laughing. I thought maybe there was a fly in the room but we didn't see anything. I remember my wife and I kept looking up and at each other like, "what is going on here?" it lasted like 30 seconds. half an hour later my wife got a phone call saying her aunt had died.

I never knew what to make of that and feel crazy even talking about it. but I was reminded of it on our last trip to Mexico because her grandma is still alive and in her house she has a framed photo of the boy as a baby that we sent to her aunt. apparently it was on her nightstand. I haven't really told people about this but I've recently learned that apparently a lot of people have stories like this?

The main difficulty I see with ghosts is that in order to have any effect at all on a physical level, such as creating an image on the retina or within the visual cortex (which seems necessary condition for them to be seen), they must embody some form of energy that simultaneously cannot be detected or measured by any known physical instruments or be accounted for by the standard models in physics. This makes them extremely unlikely to exist.

otoh, I hear enough weird stuff that can't be explained that I keep a small reserve of potentiality in my conclusions about how the universe works where such anomalies might be conceivable. However, I don't place any bets on ghosts stories being true.

In high school, my friend's band caught a ghost trumpet on reel-to-reel while recording a practice session. Like just a handful pf jaunty notes tootled directly into the mic while people were chatting between songs and no instruments were being played. I was there when it was recorded and played back and it was a trumpet (nb: there was no trumpet on the premises) being played clear as a bell on a brand-new reel of tape and there is no rational explanation for it that I can think of. The space (which at that point was the generally unused upper floor of a pizza place) was a music hall decades earlier. Needless to say, this encounter with the unknown freaked everyone who was there the complete fuck out.

It's only just now occurring to me to inquire whether that tape still exists. I don't know that they didn't burn the accursed thing.

This makes them extremely unlikely to exist.

There's a theory that only some people are able to perceive ghostly phenomenon, due perhaps to some enhanced sense that we don't all share, or perhaps their sense of perception is somehow boosted compared to others

Remember: it wasn't all that long ago that people thought whales were fish. I do like the Stone Tapes conjecture, that perhaps a kind of repetitive recording is being played on some yet undiscovered medium

But I've been a Fortean Times subscriber for 20+ years, I'm open to all kinds of weird goings-on

due perhaps to some enhanced sense that we don't all share

but those humans still must be detecting something that can directly affect them physically (aka 'on the material plane'), while being otherwise indetectible to sensitive instruments which are also on the 'material plane' and don't have a bias against detecting ghosts. seem like the physics of seeing ghosts or being affected by ghostly activities would still have to encompass the ordinary kinds of physical phenomenon at some stage, otherwise nothing would "happen".

ghosts and asparagus pee smell are similar phenomena then

ghostbusters pke meter except it detects whether or not you might like cilantro

but those humans still must be detecting something that can directly affect them physically (aka 'on the material plane'), 

maybe they experience it directly on the non material/psychic/conscious plane?

I have come to believe in the possibility that there is something beyond the material plane, something which may or may not be measurable with physical instruments. I mean there's still so much we don't know about the human brain, including some things that don't make sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Plus there are dozens of accounts of NDEs where somebody will hear or see something that it would be physically impossible for them to observe. Who knows maybe science will explain it all one day, for right now there's definitely some freaky things goin on

those humans still must be detecting something that can directly affect them physically (aka 'on the material plane'), while being otherwise indetectible to sensitive instruments

if you think webcams and oscilloscopes absorb and process as much or more of the universe as consciousness does you should prob be more bullish on "AI"

my friend's band caught a ghost trumpet on reel-to-reel while recording a practice session

I mean, was the tape brand new? Probably something already on there that they were recording on top of.

on frogbs' tip roger penrose and others have been going around the last few years saying that the brain is not a v fast logical computer but a different kind of machine built around "non-computational collapse of quantum superimpositions"-- controversial and what do i know obv but fun and provocative in its suggestion that the mind is freer than we think from linear time and space. which would explain a lot. lately of course we are trying to build machines around the non-computational collapse of quantum superimpositions ourselves! maybe the threads about people feeding 80s movies plots into those will be less dull. maybe they'll see ghosts.

i work in a famously haunted 1920s movie theater, sometimes late at night by myself, and i have never seen even a little bit of a ghost btw. everyone else sees one the week they're hired. it's just me, i tell them. traces of me.

My only experience with a collapse of superimpositions was when a friend who crashed at my place decided, blessedly, to leave a day early.

controversial and what do i know obv but fun and provocative in its suggestion that the mind is freer than we think from linear time and space.

well yeah anyone who's ever taken psychedelic drugs has made that observation

if you only read one james story make it "a collapse of superimpositions"

well yeah anyone who's ever taken psychedelic drugs has made that observation

sure and cf also hamlet "with such wide reason / looking before and after" but it would be interesting to actually connect this persistent vague sense that ~something's going on with us~ with the specific things we began to learn in the 20c about the fundamentally unstable/nonlinear/probabilistic nature of the "material plane" itself

(blinked and realized it's "large discourse", not wide reason-- but u know what i mean-- i must just be fleeing the word discourse)

I have the simple belief that most phenomena that are observed are the product of some combination of the physiological, the psychological, and the metaphysical.

So the ghost that you just saw could’ve been a trick of the light, or some kind of retinal anomaly. Or it could be because you took psychedelics, or you’re having a brain moment. Or it’s because there is a ghost in the room. I don’t think of these explanations as being mutually exclusive— they’re “ands” rather than “ors”.

It’s basically the same as my feeling about astrology. 1. The tendencies of starsigns are essentially universal human traits and could apply to anyone, 2. An individual who is told they are “Venus in Pisces” might start to believe the influence of this placement, and govern their behaviour as a result, 3. Astrology is real.

Allowing some level of acceptance in the metaphysical is fun and useful ime, and it need not disallow rational explanation for the observed phenomena!

Anyway I was working for a couple of weeks at the Shangri-La studio in Malibu. The clients were LA-based, and wanted to take weekends off. So, come the weekend, they fucked off back to LA and I had the full run of the place in Malibu. (I just relaxed and worked and swam a little.)

One of the clients owned a French bulldog who thought I was the fucking best. He was always coming to chill on my lap wherever I was working. Come the weekend, the dog’s owner asked me if I could dog sit for the weekend in Malibu so he could have a relaxing dog-free weekend. I loved that dog and so I agreed.

The dog was old and farty. I’d be sitting at the piano and he’d hop up on my lap while I composed. It was hot so my arms were bare. Every twenty minutes or so the dog would grunt and I’d feel a gentle gust of wind on my bare arm; the dog was farting on me.

It was Saturday night and I went down the street to the bar and had a couple of pints en seul. I went back to the studio and found my little bedroom. The dog loved to sleep with me and eagerly hopped up into bed. The place was dark except for a light on down the hallway, the door was open so the room was mostly dark, but not entirely dark.

I woke up in the middle of the night and felt a terrifying presence. There was something in the room with me.

I looked toward the hallway and could discern in my peripheral vision a figure in the corner of the room. It was unquestionably malevolent. It was slowly moving toward me.

I shifted my gaze directly toward the corner and the figure was nowhere to be seen. I looked back toward the hallway and there it was, again, this malevolent figure moving toward me, only visible when I viewed it out of my peripheral vision.

My mind raced. What could it be? The Shangri-La studio was originally owned by The Band. Levon Helm had died a few years prior, but the spirit didn’t have drummer energy. I didn’t know any of the names of the other members of the group, or whom among them were alive or dead, or which of them might have cause to haunt their former studio. But I felt rather certain that this spirit was somehow connected to The Band.

I looked toward the corner, nothing. I looked toward the hallway, the awful spirit approaching closer and closer out of the corner of my eye. I kept looking back and forth. I didn’t know what to do. I felt that if I closed my eyes and attempted to sleep, the spirit would approach and do something terrible to me.

Then the dog next to me, sleeping, sighed and let out a silent, long fart. The smell filled the room, it was extremely stinky. I saw the spirit keep its distance. I thought “there is no way this ghost is coming near me as long as this fart machine is protecting me.”

I fell back asleep next to the dog and lived to tell the tale.

The dog died a few years later. The client was kind enough to inform me of his passing, he knew how much I loved that dog.

you don't understand, Rick Danko Incubus is the name of my dog

For a debate class I had to argue against the existence of ghosts and the biggest thing for me was the difficulty of defining the darn things! It gets circular really quick.

sure and cf also hamlet "with such wide reason / looking before and after" but it would be interesting to actually connect this persistent vague sense that ~something's going on with us~ with the specific things we began to learn in the 20c about the fundamentally unstable/nonlinear/probabilistic nature of the "material plane" itself

my view has always been our consciousness relates to the totality of everything (or perhaps the "Akashic field", to borrow an Indian term) the way a two-dimensional object interacts with a three-dimensional one. certain things like drugs or dreaming or just getting older changes the angle at which we perceive that field. sometimes its subtle - I mean I sure don't *feel* like the same person I was 20 years ago - sometimes it's dramatic, where a 15 minute DMT trip feels like decades

ashes of American bands
xpost

looking forward to noping out of a ripe haunting due to dog farts in my post life thank you fgti

Here's the dog

https://www.instagram.com/p/8eKjJ3tnpm/

if you think webcams and oscilloscopes absorb and process as much or more of the universe as consciousness does

i'm glad you put an 'if' at the start of that sentence before dragging me into it

but the spirit didn’t have drummer energy.

lol

_well yeah anyone who's ever taken psychedelic drugs has made that observation_

When I was in high school, I went to a "retreat" up in Wyoming with a friend of mine and his family, who were all woo-woo types. One night, everyone sat around a big fire and started chanting "Ommmmmmm . . . ommmmmmmm . . . " Suddenly, one of the group started "channeling" some sort of "spirit." He spoke in this kind of Oscar the Grouch voice, and said all kinds of weird shit. I talked to the guy afterward, and he acted completely normal, seemingly with no memory of the experience. Looking back on it, I of course think it had to have been put on, but at the time I was completely convinced that I had heard someone from the other side.

Various children who visit/lived at our house have been convinced that our basement has ghosts for as long as I have lived here (since 2001). A while back, a woman who lived here as a teenager in the 1950's contacted us about a book she was writing, and, unprompted, mentioned how her and her sisters were sure there were ghosts, right down to the specific part of the basement.

For my part, there have been a few inexplicable loud bangs (like really loud, M80 firecracker style, with no visible source), but it's been many years since I heard one. I think we've made peace with whatever is here.

I don't know if mandela effect-style recollections count as supernatural, but I distinctly remember watching the finale of Cheers where Sam has an emotional breakdown and says, I... I... I... but watching it again, he never does this.

Ghost in the Sitcom Machine?

Paranormal experiences seem to me like the brain’s way of making sense of things we don’t yet understand. Like, imagine what is was like to experience earthquakes and thunderstorms before science had explanations. The events are mind boggling and terrifying but the mechanics of them are pretty mundane in comparison.

I used to think I knew what 'I don't believe in ghosts' meant - to the point where I think I was probably quite obnoxious and pompous about it whenever people brought it up.

Either way, I'm pretty sure I've seen a ghost. We used to go to an old Tudorbethan house on the seafront at Broadstairs, a fading town on the south coast of England where Dickens wrote *David Copperfield* and *Bleak House* (with the emphasis on bleak). We'd been at the beach and I came back to the house on my own. I was probably 10 or 11? The house was three storeys, on a cliff set back from the sea. It had a big lounge with a piano and from the piano, you could look out into the hallway onto the wide staircase leading up to the second floor. I was messing around on the piano and glanced out and up onto the staircase. There were huge vertical windows filling the whole southern wall, and I can still see, within that great basin of light, picked out in a grippable darkness and motes of dust, a figure gliding down the stairs. Moving three carpeted steps, maybe four. It's one of those moments so frozen and readily accessible in my memory that I can send out a kind of second self into the rest of the house; imagine the blank light of the conservatory, the parade of vacant rooms on the second floor; and where I can still ask myself why I wasn't scared and why I looked away and didn't engage. I guess I haven't really processed it, or am happy for it to remain unprocessed in some anterior chamber of the mind.

Two points of order: we didn't pay to go to the house - it was through a friend of my mum's, and by way of payment, the old boy that owned the house only asked for a donation to a local charity; I couldn't, and can't, play the piano.

A good buddy - who's definitely a believer in many things woo-woo - said that an older guy stopped outside his apartment (where's he's lived since the 90s) and claimed that he had lived in the same unit years ago (like in the 80s). They chatted about the building and the changes in the neighborhood for a few minutes, and then as he was departing, the stranger asked: "Do you ever see her, or hear her anymore?"

My buddy said he went pale, and said "Yeah.. yeah, we do hear her."

Apparently there been all kinds of 'manifestations' and missing objects, things falling off tables, stuff life that.. and this previous occupant seemed to confirm that it wasn't just odd happenings but the apartment had some kind of female presence

make of it what you will

was certain goon's post would end with a U87 catching a ghost trumpet dog fart

all ghost stories (true or false) are good to read, all scientific explanations/rationalisations/debunkings of ghost stories are bad to read is how i break it down to an extent

I mean, was the tape brand new? Probably something already on there that they were recording on top of.

My uncle once bought some blank CDRs and one turned out to have the video for Wyclef Jean's "Perfect Gentleman" on it, how's that for spooky?

i don't believe in ghosts and to my knowledge, have never experienced anything supernatural, but it's entirely possible that i've just learned to tune it all out lol

PSA for people visiting SEA

if you hear people playing marbles at night on your hotel ceiling, you hear nothing

if you're at top floor and you hear furnitures moving above you, you hear nothing

if you hear someone calling your name from above a tree, you hear nothing https://t.co/tOa5feQjHJ

— muta 🍒 store is open (@mutamakes) March 4, 2023

I did have an Australian colleague once who had done research in an Indonesian village who said she got a mysterious rash on her arm and would hear voices at night in the place where she was staying. medication/creams didn't help with the rash, and the voices were disruptive enough that she would often wake up in the middle of the night because she was hearing people speaking Indonesian in her ear. but both the voices and the rash went away after she told a neighbour, who gave her a copy of the Quran for protection.

I'd heard a lot of similar stories growing up, but that was the first time I'd heard one from a non-Muslim foreigner