While reading a copy of Weird Virginia today I couldn't help but recall some of the weirder experiences I've had in my own life. One happened when I was nine or so. I had woken up late at night, everyone else was in bed. I was thirsty, and I went to the kitchen to get something cold to drink.
I was shocked to see my mother sitting there in the darkness, her arms folded upon the kitchen table.
"Mom! What are you doing up?"
She turned around and looked at me. I immediately realized with a lurch that it wasn't Mom. It was a woman I'd never seen before.
She smiled at me, sitting there in the darkness. It was a nice smile, but I still felt a little scared.
"Who are you?"
Even as I asked, something...changed. The woman gradually...well...scattered into little pieces before my very eyes. It was the freakiest thing I had ever seen in my young life. It wasn't until years later, when the movies and TV shows in the mid-to-late 90s began showing that "dissolve to particles" effect a lot that I saw something similar.
Just like that, she was gone. As if she'd been wiped away.
Waking dream? Hallucination? Ghost? I have no idea. I've been unable to forget it ever since.
In other news, these Weird U.S. books are very cool. Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
Probably a waking dream. I had a similar experience around the age of five, when I fell asleep while reading a Richard Scarry book. All the characters first started moving along the page, cars whizzing down the roads and policemen waving them along -- until they noticed me and, apparently terrified by the giant who held their lives in his hands, came to "get" me. My dad shook me awake after I apparently started screaming.
Posted by Puffy Treat (Member # 7210) on :
I don't believe in "ghosts" per se, at least not in the way the term's normally used.
It's possible also that I was sleepwalking. That happened to me at Scout Camp, once. Came to in the middle of nowhere, barefoot, standing on prickers...no idea how I got there, what time it was, or where camp was.
Fun. Posted by Joldo (Member # 6991) on :
I was once very very tired after having been awake for 72 hours for various school projects, etc.
Around 1 AM I went downstairs to the kitchen. I got a glass of water. I leaned against the counter and drank it.
And then the demon Choronzon came billowing out of the stove in a great black cloud and charged into me.
I woke up at seven curled up beside the refridgerator.
What I find most interesting abotu this particular waking dream is that in that moment I was absolutely certain that it was the demon Choronzon, in that way of knowing things that we have in dreams.
I have not since attempted to stay awake for so long.
Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
In a similar vein, sometimes when I get sick and under the weather, time seems to speed up for me.
Everyone talks faster, I talk faster, it feels almost like I'm trapped in a faster world "speed." The only parallel I can think of is one of the stories in JMS's City of Dreams series except for the fact that my body has sped up too.
Posted by steven (Member # 8099) on :
After I read the first post, I started wondering, "how long will it take TomD to come on the thread and debunk/play the skeptic?"
hee hee. Not long it seems.
Posted by Scott R (Member # 567) on :
I have never seen a ghost.
The closest I got to the supernatural was when we played 'Heavy as a brick' when I was 12.
Posted by Noemon (Member # 1115) on :
When I was in my early teens, I was home by myself one day during the summer, playing a game on my C64, which sat on a desk that ran the length of the wall. I heard a succession of three very loud, very distinct knocks that I interpreted as coming from spots progressively closer to me on the desk. I shut down the computer and went upstairs. I was sitting, my elbows on my windowsill leaning into the window in my bedroom when I heard the same knocking noise, again a series of three knocks. They sounded to me as though they were coming from the shelf just next to the window. I drew back out of the window, which then slammed shut. The window was an old one, with window weights and pulleys keeping it up, and it didn't have a problem then or after with staying raised.
My bedroom was on the same end of the house as the family room where I'd been playing Jumpman, and I could believe that the knocking was something in the wall, or the attic (which was above the family room and adjacent to my bedroom), and that a desire to have experienced something paranormal caused me to perceive it as coming inexplicably from the desk and the shelf. The window slamming is harder to explain, simply because that wasn't something that that window ever did, other than that one time, but it could have just been some freak thing. I'd think that maybe a rat or something was in the wall and both caused the knocking somehow and then did something with the window weight that unbalanced the mechanism, but if window weights bump into things they cause a chime-like ringing, and I didn't hear anything like that.
These days I'm sure that there is a perfectly reasonable, natural explanation, but back then I was convinced that I'd had a brush with the paranormal (and was delighted in retrospect to have done so, although in the moment I was pretty freaked out).
I had an earlier experience that I classed pretty solidly as paranormal, which was also experienced by my mother and brother (though not my father, who was also there at the time). However, it happened when I was small enough that I really only remember the story that I told about it for years, and not the event itself.
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
My brother was a sleepwalker when he was a kid. When he was eight years old, I woke up in the middle of the night and found him peeing into the refrigerator because he was dreaming that he'd walked into the bathroom.
Posted by Noemon (Member # 1115) on :
Maybe you dreamed that you woke up in the middle of the night and found him peeing into the refrigerator.
Posted by baduffer (Member # 10469) on :
When I was in college we use to explore the local graveyards in the middle of the night. There were a number of folktales about ghosts and such that we just had to check out. We found this one graveyard back in the woods where all the graves were from around the turn of the century (19th). There was one headstone that when the moonlight would shine from a particular angle the shadows made it look like a picture of a young girl; a young girl was buried there. We also saw the ghost of the headless switchman in Crossett Ark. Now I know there are perfectly rational explanations but at the time it was pretty believable. When you are out in the middle of the woods on a railroad track in the middle of the night it doesn't take much to tweak your imagination.
Posted by Noemon (Member # 1115) on :
Yeah, if you're in a situation where you feel scared, and if you're predisposed to believe in paranormal explanations for things it's pretty easy to convince yourself that you've experienced the paranormal.
Posted by porcelain girl (Member # 1080) on :
Of course I think it was a ghost, Puffy, as I have had numerous weird and spooky experiences with the paranormal in our houses. Mostly the VA house. I think everyone in our family has had paranormal experiences, but Sam is the only one that refuses to admit believing in them - because he is too scared to. HAHAHAHA. Despite the fact that he was and is the worst tormentor when it comes to scaring eachother.
Haven't had any in my new apartment, I think probably it is so open and the energy flows straight through. However, when we lived in our apartment in West LA I definitely had a ghost or some elemental creature try to talk to me. ::shiver:: It's fine if no one believes me, and I know I'm a big weirdo, but was definitely the most specific and undeniable of all my experiences, not to mention the absolutely spookiest.
Posted by Puffy Treat (Member # 7210) on :
Yeah, this was in the VA house.
Personally, I believe "ghosts", if they exist at all, are like recordings a place made of people or events that deeply imprinted themselves. Some people can tune into these recordings at the right place and time.
(I believe in Eternal souls completely, but that goes under a different topic.)
Posted by Tara (Member # 10030) on :
While I was reading this thread, I heard the floor creak behind me and it totally freaked me out. (It was just the cat).
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