Paranormal Thread

[Róisín]

Hanging Rock was the place I was just talking about over on the memes/edits thread, with the mapping lady and the ridgeback dog. Weird place.

[OwlsG0]

Hanging Rock was the place I was just talking about over on the memes/edits thread, with the mapping lady and the ridgeback dog. Weird place.

In that case there might have been some other reason the dog was sitting on you. Pardon me, don't mind to make light of what was obviously a very difficult encounter, but I've known a few animals to act very strangely when something was off. For example, one of my parents' colleagues had a grandmother living on a Navajo reservation, and her dog was freaking out at one of her grandkids and wouldn't let them in the house.
The kid finally admitted that they had brushed something in the desert in the dark (vague details, much?) and thought it had been a Skinwalker. The grandmother makes them shower, and sure enough, the dog is pleased as punch to meet the grandkid the next time they try to get into the house.

[Róisín]

No insult taken. Yeah, that possibility did occur to me at the time, which was part of why I was so annoyed, because I might well have been able to do something about it, had the dog let me up. I had been in the area before, and had some idea of what it was like, which was part of why I had gone along.

Your gran's friend had a good dog! An animal that will alert humans so is always useful. Wouldn't have thought of a shower for something like a skinwalker touch, I'd have used smoke or fire or a wash of herbs. My old Greycat was good like that, though she mostly worried about my youngest son and one of my young cousins rather than me.

[Tr]

All credit for this idea goes to Juniper, who mentioned such a thread in the general discussion thread. 

Have you heard things go bump in the night? Seen strange things out of the corner of your eye? Does your piano mysteriously start playing itself in the middle of the night? Is your dark, creepy, spider-infested basement filled with humanoid shadows that look suspiciously like murderghosts? I know mine is!
This is a place to tell us all the weird supernatural things that happen to you.
If no one is interested, we can let it sink into oblivion.

Please, please do not post an incoherent plea for help saying that you are being attacked by murderghosts unless you are actually being attacked by murderghosts. Thank you.

[Lacunae Seff]

uhhh~ nice topic! that's part of the reason why both of Minna's comics are so appealing to me: they have a high content of spirituality(?), and I identify a bit with that. I have a *list* of paranormal events, but I want to share the most "obvious"(?) one.

Spoiler: show

We had to move when I was little, after my father died, because my mother couldn't take care of two little ones by herself on the big city, so she decided on her childhood town. Our uncle let us crash on his house for a bit, and my mother took to house hunt.
She found the perfect one, big but not overly so, close to everything but just slighty out for extra tranquility, and well, it was kind of awesome from my mother's perspective. I remember she went outside to talk prices in the backyard, and I was left alone in a room, I gave it one swept with my eyes, going in a circle, and went to my mother side to communicate her that we couldn't move there. She ignore me because all that moving around had made us slighty difficult, so I told her I wasn't staying in that room then. She brought up the fact that the other one had a window facing the street and the park, and it was dangerous for a small child. Wasn't her perfect town safe, uh? ¬¬
Fastforward many weird shit going down on that house in general (and years), but focused on our room, at the end of my bed :|
I think it may have been my fault? everything went worse after I tried astral projection without knowing what to do.
Anyway, I would get up in the wee hours of the night hearing my mother in the kitchen moving chairs and getting the stove on, wanting a little breakfast for myself, just to find the no one there. Dreaming of creepy blackeyed figures standing right next to my bed. Feeling something breathing outside the window. My sister dreamed she heard voices telling her to stay with them, to not call for help - she had a friend who was into spiritual things, they were telling her not to get in contact with this friend. Wich she did, eventually.
But first I started seeing a glowing orb by the door. I close the door, taped the keyhole, taped the light switch, but the orb would get closer to my bed each night. I was terrified, I would sleep with my covers up to my head, only my nose poking out to get some air. This happened for a while, until it was summer and I got tired of being afraid, of sleeping with a winter cover in the heat! So I kicked it off one night, and told the darkness "do what you want!"
I woke up in the middle of the night when the weight of an adult fell on me. I thought that it might have been my sister comming from a party, but it wouldn't move, wouldn't let me move. So I got scared, I strugled and cried, and finally founded the light switch. There was no one there. So I cried while with the light on, terrified to call for my mother, and waiting for daylight to come.
That's when my sister friend enters the scene. Apparently I made some really convincing arguments, and there wasn't really nothing to loose, so they got in touch with a Curandero (kinda like a witch healer) who was also a parapsychologist. They came in one morning, with a glass of water, burping over the energy of the house, and concluded that something had attached itself to me. In any case, they gave us a solution that kind of work. I mean, nothing really weird happened after that, but I can't sleep without the lights on in the house, and I have some serious night terrors, so much that if I expend more than two weeks there I start seriously doubting my existence when I get to my appartment.
That kind of made me interested in spiritual things, protections and the like... double edged sword. I can feel something trying to get my attention in that house sometimes, and I do not like it. On the other hand I got a visit from my father spirit after almost two decades, so there's that.
And talking about my father spirit, when he died my mother and me had the same dream, of him comming to say goodbye. My sister gets regular signs of his presence in dreams, as in waking world (dove feathers, and little doves hiding under her chair, lol).

Yeah, that's about my more interesting story on the paranormal, I guess. Long-ish, beware. Actually, there goes at least half my list. It was all kind of related.

Also, duendes (a type of elf // fae), my sister had managed to, maybe, attract some of them (by accident??) after visiting the south, I think. It's the only explanation I found for them eating only half of each ice cube on the tray, like someone had cut them in half (they may have been missing the cold). Around that time my sister jewelry would disappear and reappear on the closet, in the high part of it, where only sheats would be put away. There was really no reason for it to appear there. They also would get the door to stop working for my mother, so there was a couple of years where any time she visited, and she got mad at us, or too high energy, the door would lock her out. And in one ocassion a candle (wih a ceramic holder) just fell on her head, randomly and without reason. I think my sister may have gotten mad at them after that, because by the time I move in, there wasn't any type of thing like that going on.

[Juniper]

Ahhhh yeah I'm glad I could help inspire the idea for a neat thread, I look forward to reading hopefully plenty of spooky stories !

[Róisín]

Duende, hmm? What kind of duende do you have where you are? I know about the ones that are like trooping fae, the ones that are guardians/owners of particular buildings, homes or farmsteads, (similar to the Manx Fenodyree, or the Nisse or Tomte of Scandinavia); the ones that are attached to particular human families or tribes, and the solitary ones attached to particular mountains, lakes, rocks or forests, but I've only rarely heard of them following an individual.

In my culture, when they do that it can be because of something special about that person. They seem drawn to poets, musicians, artists, mages, people with serious passions about something (especially things they approve of), and to people who can actually see or otherwise perceive them. I wonder if your sister fits any of those categories?

[Purple Wyrm]

I have two tales to share...

Spoiler: A tale of Old Westminster • show

My mother trained as a nurse at the old Westminster Hospital in London in the 1950s. One night she was working on the children's wards and as part of her rounds had to check each ward every 15 minutes or so. In one of the wards - which she'd only checked shortly before - she found a tap turned on. She thought this was weird but figured one of the kids had got up for a drink, and she turned it off.

At the end of her shift she reported to the Matron who asked if she had anything notable to report, so she mentioned the tap being on. The Matron went pale and muttered "Oh no...". When my mother asked what was wrong, she explained that there was a ghost on that ward which always turned on the taps (apparently to "wash it's hands") when a child was about to die.

My mother thought this was ridiculous and pointed out that none of the children in the ward were seriously ill, but the Matron refused to cheer up. So she went home to bed.

When she came in for her next shift she found out that one of the boys in the ward had had a sudden seizure a few hours after she'd found the tap running and died.

Spoiler: A tale of the Kitchen • show

Many years ago when I still lived with my parents I found myself home alone for the evening. I was watching TV and during an ad break I headed into the kitchen to get a drink. I was walking back into the lounge room with said drink when out of the side of my eye I saw a semi-transparent, wrinkled up, goblin like thing leering at me through the serving hatch into the unlit dining room.

I yelped, and sprinted back into the lounge room where it took me several minutes to calm down. Once my heart rate had dropped to something approaching normal I headed back into the kitchen, grabbed a large knife, and proceeded into the dining room, just to be sure that there wasn't some kind of malicious elemental lurking in there.

I didn't find anything - even under the sideboard - so went back into the kitchen to search for rational explanations.

After about ten minutes I discovered that if I held my head at exactly the right angle the kitchen lights reflected off an ornate coffee jar in just the right way to bounce off the inside of my glasses and look like a wrinkled horror peering through the serving hatch 

[Lacunae Seff]

Duende, hmm? What kind of duende do you have where you are? I know about the ones that are like trooping fae, the ones that are guardians/owners of particular buildings, homes or farmsteads, (similar to the Manx Fenodyree, or the Nisse or Tomte of Scandinavia); the ones that are attached to particular human families or tribes, and the solitary ones attached to particular mountains, lakes, rocks or forests, but I've only rarely heard of them following an individual.

In my culture, when they do that it can be because of something special about that person. They seem drawn to poets, musicians, artists, mages, people with serious passions about something (especially things they approve of), and to people who can actually see or otherwise perceive them. I wonder if your sister fits any of those categories?

We have no real "distintion", so we call them all duendes, they look like brown wrinkled little people, like nature in little clothes (you can google Los peques, wich was a show made about them some years ago, to get a general idea of what they look like). They are more prominent in the south, where european folk settled down (and I'm convinced that they came with those families). My sister, like many others after finishing school - it's like a tradition, went to Bariloche, they went on walks through the woods at night, and they gave some offerings to the duendes living there for safe passage, a tale to promote tourism.  But she got home and a couple of years later her ice cubes got cut in half and they would play some harmless pranks, so that's the only reason to feel like there were duendes in the middle of a city. They also acted out against our mother because she and my sister fight, a lot. But leaving her locked outside and throwing things at her head are two different things.

And I would go with the mage category, because she never felt artisticly blessed (trauma-ish, she doesn't take kindly to hard critisism for something so personal, and mother is a really blunt person). When younger, and she got mad, she made her drinks fill with bubbles, the lightbulbs would burn out, and she when she used to play the Ouija she (and the group she played with) got to the point where they didn't need to touch the cup (we use a cup instead of the triangle thingy, Juego de la Copa) for it to move (and she was the one to force the spirit to say goodbye if it started to threaten them). But she felt that it wasn't the place where she wanted to be(?), so she "calm down" a lot. She only gets bubbles in her water when she goes to meet her boyfriends family and they test her patience x3 Her passion would be being a dentist(?) do the fae in general aprove of teeth and bones? She had a human skull for anatomy around that time, but it doesn't explains the ice cubs...

And Purple Wyrm, the first tale makes me wonder if the spirit wasn't a pediatric Dr (or nurse) going through the motions to prep, thinking that maybe they can help, only for the child to die anyways... It's kind of sad more than spooky. Kind of like the cat that lived in a hospital and would sleep with the patience that would pass away.

[OwlsG0]

My aunt regularly regales me and my cousin (her son) with tales of the messed up things she sees on late shifts

Spoiler: show

My aunt is a doctor in the Colorado area. One time she was coming home from a long, long shift in one of their major hospitals. She's alone on her way to the car park and in one of the dark hallways, notices a closet door is hanging open. Policy is to keep all janitorial supplies locked up in case someone tries to hurt themselves (they deal with a lot of suicide attempts before they're well enough to be processed onto institutions), so she goes to shut it, and sees something extremely messed up inside.
The way she describes it, there's a dude on this operating table. His legs are gone from the hips down and there are buckets placed all around him to catch his blood.
He reaches out to her with one shaking hand and rasps, quite audibly, "Help"
My aunt runs screaming to her car and dives into the Jeep for protection. She takes a few deep breaths and calls my uncle, and after they have talked it out they decide she's probably just hallucinating from her long shift. She went home. Needless to say, there was no discussion the next day about a legless man being found in one of the janitor's closets

[Ensilumi]

Moe !!

Once, when i was in Tallinn (capital of Estonia) with my friend, we did encounter a something "else". I am not sure, what it was, but as we did walk throug Viru gate to the old town, when we suddenly had this very strong feeling, that someone was walking with us. There wasn´t anybody near us, it was quite late at night and it wasn´t a bad feeling, as such.

We felt "it" walking along with us something about 100 metres, and then it was gone. This kind of feeling is so much different than any other feeling, when someone is near you, that we knew that is was some kind of ghost or something. But it wasn´t scary. This wasn´t the first time for us to experience such a precense, so we were quite sure about what happened.

Some of my friends have had similiar experiences and my mothers friend had seen some ghosts herself. She was working in some old hospital bulding, where they took care elder people and she told us, that the building was hounted. The new staff was advised not to be told, because they could get too scared for working nightshifts. Most of the spooky stuff IS in peoples mind, anyway.
I am told that one of the ghosts was an elderly person, whom appeared usually in some upper floor corridor, looking out of windows. My mothers friend told us, that it also left locks unlocked in doors in that same corridor.

Encountering a ghost can be frightening, but they usually do nothing, you probably do not even see it, so try not to freak out. Instead try to memorise what happened and write it down. 

[Róisín]

Lots of old places have those 'something else', both in cities and in wilderness. My general rule with them is that most of them are harmless, just curious. For the ones that aren't, most are insubstantial and can't touch you. For the ones that are substantial - well, so are you, and anything that can touch you can be touched right back. I've generally coped by not showing fear, (even if I'm actually scared) and by being polite and curious rather than running and screaming. Doesn't surprise me that Talinn has such things!

[OwlsG0]

On the subject of old places filled with 'other things', there's one near where I live. You can Google this, I think, but there's a derelict retirement home near to my house which was an asylum before that, and even before that, a P.O.W. camp for the Japanese during WW2. It's right on the Brisbane river. Of course we have stories about this place in the local community.

Some of my own friends have had weird experiences there. Two friends went in at night for obvious reasons (bored teens + derelict old building = fun times), were hanging around for a while, just talking about school and passing an energy drink back and forth, and when one of them turned to look over his shoulder, he saw that a van had appeared behind them. It was a modern model and had driven up silently. No lights on inside, so they couldn't see who was inside. They stared in shock for a few moments then, as logic caught up to them, booked it out of there. They never figured out anything about the encounter beyond that it was sublimely creepy.

As for me, I use the place during the day to walk my dog. If she sees ghosts while we're there, she doesn't mind frolicking among them.

[Purple Wyrm]

OwlsG0, your story reminded me of a paranormal(?) encounter of mine from years back. It's not a story that really goes anywhere, but for what it's worth here it is.

When I was about 13 my mother dragged my brother and I along to a picnic that was being held by some church group she was involved with. This was at a park by the river, and just next door was a half-constructed house - the walls and roof were up but there were no doors or windows or internal fittings. Naturally all the kids immediately went over to explore it.

It was quite big with two floors. We ran around for a bit, checking out the rooms and stuff and looking at all the graffiti that the local youths had helpfully decorated the place with.

Where things got weird though was in a big room on the ground floor that was probably destined to become the lounge or living room. It had big, wide open windows that were letting in plenty of sunlight, but something about the room just seemed "off". There was a noticeable sense of fear and menace in the place, which seemed to seep out of a small, dark cupboard space in one of the corners. No one was game enough to go into the cupboard and so after a quick look around the rest of the room we backed out and confined our running around like fools to the rest of the house.

Shortly afterwards a man turned up - probably alerted by the neighbours - and kicked us all out, and we went back to the picnic.

The house was eventually finished, you can see it (sort of) here. I sometimes still wonder if the inhabitants have any problems with their living room.

[Uinuvien]

I have had few ghost encounters, all in the same rowhouse. First was when I was a teen. My parents were out for a weekend, so obviously I stayed on a computer for the whole night. At some point I realized I was hungry and went to ground floor to make some noodles. While there, I felt presence of "something". I completely freaked out, and didn't sleep at all for the rest of the night. Later I realized it didn't feel evil at all, so I freaked out for nothing.

Next felt a lot more evil. I was, again, spending night on the computer, when I felt presence of something evil right outside my room, and I got the feeling it specifically wanted to harm ME. I got something warm from my wardrobe,a voiding going near my open door, and was about to jump from my window (my room was on second floor) to spend night outside. I was terrified of going outside during night at the time, but it felt better option than what was outside my room. Somehow, I managed to calm myself down before actually jumping, and went to sleep on my own bed. When i woke up, the thing was gone.

Third one was okay. I had gone to bed and was about to fall asleep when I felt something slithering  along my leg. It was long and felt like cold air. It stopped around my hip and stayed there. I didn't feel anything malicious about it, so I just let it be and fell asleep. Next morning it was gone and never came back. I suppose it was seeking for warmth

Fourth was few years later and was the nicest of all my encounters, and only one that visited more than once. It came usually when I had gone to bed and was waiting for sleep to come. It would stay by my side, petting my cheek until I fell asleep. It came almost every night for few weeks and somehow reminded me of my grandmother who had died bit earlier.

Funny thing is, the house where all these happened wasn't that old. nor was there any accidents during the construct that I know of. We were first tenants in that apartment, and we moved there when I was 2-3 years old.