Paranormal experiences

Paranormal experiences

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Derek Smith

45,514 posts

247 months

Friday 2nd December 2016
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I don't believe in ghosts or ghouls, although I'm open-minded about long leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night. However . . .

I was around 21, stone cold sober. I was with my fiancee, later wife, at a friends' home. It was the top two floors of a large house in Lordship Lane, E. Dulwich. The house had been in the family since it had been built in the 30s.

We were sitting in a little room in the converted loft, which had a large bedroom and en suite. I heard the front door close with a bit of a bang. My mate looked towards his wife and she shook her head slightly and started fussing with the tea things.

The next thing I heard was footsteps on wooden stairs coming towards the loft. I still didn't twig but after a few seconds my fiancee put her hand on my arm. I asked: 'What's the matter?' She replied: 'The stairs are carpeted.'

I was a bit twitchy after that.

The sound of footsteps got louder then they stopped. Then the clear sound of a creaking door opening. Here it got really spooky. The door was the one into the bedroom, that's the one that had been removed and a false wall put in.

My friend's wife started crying. Her mother then came up, we not hearing her as the stairs were carpeted, so the door to our room opening really made me and my fiancee jump.

It had happened before but never with 'outsiders' there. They were pleased someone else had heard it.

Their story was than the grandmother had been pushed into the loft, then not really made into living accommodation, by her eldest son. The poor woman had been treated badly. The chap died and the daughter moved in and they converted the loft properly. The grandmother then died.

The sounds occurred a number of times over the years, my friends hearing it 'at least a dozen times'.

I don't believe in ghosts. Never have, never will. There are convoluted explanations for the experience I shared with three others. We had not been told of the occurrence before.

I still don't believe it was a ghost but I'm damned if I can explain it satisfactorily.

I've had no other such experience, but I have been subject to two outrageous coincidences, both personal, to do with my father's death. The odds were over that of winning the Loto. Much greater. But coincidences happen, that's why we have a word for it.

Laugh if you want, but it happened.


anonymous-user

53 months

Friday 2nd December 2016
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I was sixteen and pissing about in the barns clearing out stuff it was very dusty and my dads car got covered. Next morning I went back to tidy up and on the bonnet was crow with a broken wing and 'Will Whyte' written in a slanty style in the dust. We thought it was one of the locals that wrote it but we knew them all and there was no one of that name and they can't get there without passing the house etc. I remember it because of the unusual spelling with a Y and we joked the crow wrote it.
25 years later we were refurbishing the barn and levering off ancient metal sheeting put on pre 1930 to protect the walls from livestock. We decided to leave a section on as it was a sod to remove but just as we said we'll leave it a crow flew into the barn and hit the board and flopped off injured. It was one of those WTF moments.
Anyway we had a laugh and decided to take the sheet off and there it was. Carved into the oak beam hidden behind the sheet: 'William Whyte yearon of 1841'



TwigtheWonderkid

43,248 posts

149 months

Friday 2nd December 2016
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About 10 yrs ago I dreamt about a kid I knew at primary school. I wasn't his friend at school, or his enemy. He was a total non entity, just another kid. In the dream he was my age, early 40s at the time. But looked the same as he did at school, just 30 yrs older! It was weird dreaming about him as I hadn't given the bloke a second thought since leaving primary school. He'd gone to a different secondary.

Then, about 2 days later I saw him in my local high st! He looked just like I thought he'd look in the dream. Just bizarre. Really freaked me out.

Now if the story ended there, it would be a great "there's more to this Earth than meets the eye" tale. Or "there's no way that's a coincidence." But.......

About a week later I saw him again. This time I went to speak to him. He didn't really remember me from school. Turns out he'd moved into my area about a month before I first saw him.

So what must've happened is that I saw him before I had the dream, out of the corner of my eye or something, and it didn't register with me, but obviously registered with my subconscious. That then triggered the dream. Then I saw him 2 days after the dream and assumed it was a weird coincidence, but it wasn't at all.

The only coincidence is that a kid from my primary school should move to my area, but I only live about 10 miles away and there were hundreds of kids, so it's hardly front page news.

Every woo event, no matter how bizarre, has a rational explanation. I found out what mine was. Had I not found out, the explanation would still be the same, I just wouldn't know about it.

Derek Smith

45,514 posts

247 months

Friday 2nd December 2016
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Halb said:
Thanks for sharing v6, also thanks to; seany87, Hainey, boobles and ruggedscotty.

Derek Smith said:
I don't believe in ghosts. Never have, never will. There are convoluted explanations for the experience I shared with three others. We had not been told of the occurrence before.

I still don't believe it was a ghost but I'm damned if I can explain it satisfactorily.
It is something that happened in reality, that both you and your then partner experienced? You don't think it was the grandmother? Did the owners definitely think it was?
Our friend, the female, began to obsess over it, going to a medium and a seance. She reported other things happening, such as cupboard doors opening with no one else in the room, this was the kitchen on the mezzanine. We didn't see that and the bloke took me out for a long chat over a meal, his thoughts being that his wife was hallucinating. He exerted pressure to see a psychiatrist, and she came to see my fiancee for help. Then something happened where he experienced something scary. Instead of bringing them together, it broke them. They split just after my wedding and just disappeared. None of our old friends heard from them.

We went to the house and saw my friend's mother. She was high up in the civil service, just about to retire, but was a bit weird. She told stories that were fantastical and we decided to leave well along. She said that her mother had been ill-treated when in the room and had 'impregnated' the house with her pain. We decided not to return. My wife felt a bit nervous around her, so that meant two of us.

We both heard the noises. We chatted about them afterwards and my then fiancee told me to write down what I heard and she would do the same. They were more or less identical.

Our female friend was rich, well rich for a bloke born between the gas works and a British Oxygen plant in east London, albeit in a house. I did wonder if that was relevant. She was an electronics engineer, and did a lot of computer programming and such.

The coincidence: my father was going to be christened, this during WWI. As everyone was getting ready, a bloke from the merchant navy came to the house to tell my gran that she might receive a telegram to say that her eldest boy's ship had been torpedoed but not to worry as he'd been picked up by a RN ship. His condition was unknown but he must have been well enough to give his name and NoK. So they added the name of the ship which had rescued the chap to my dad's name.

Unknown to everyone at the christening, earlier that morning the ship had also been sunk, with just six survivors, none of whom was my uncle.

My elder brother was given the name of the ship, after my dad.

Fast forward to the storm in October 1987. My youngest was born and as my father had died since our last child, I named him after the ship that took my uncle to the bottom.

The telephone lines to my brother were down due to the storm and I couldn't contact him for two days. When I got through, my sister in law answered and I told her of her new nephew. I then told her what name I was giving him, and was going to explain it was after my dad rather than her husband, but she sort of screamed and dropped the phone.

Eventually my brother came to the phone to explain.

The pair of them had been helping those who'd suffered damage during the storm, particularly an old people's home nearby. It was in a lot of the news programmes as a corner of the roof had lifted off. She was helping one old boy with the damage, he wanting to ensure his pictures of his service in the RN were safe. My s-i-l told him that her husband's family on his father's side had almost all been in the navy or merchant marine and told her the story of the genesis of her husband's name.

The poor old boy nearly had a heart attack as he was the sole surviving survivor of the ship. He couldn't remember much about the rescue but obviously remembered the sinking. Straight back from that coincidence, still shaking a bit, I come on the phone.

Nothing ghostly of course, but notable. However, this followed on from another and more remarkable coincidence the day of my father's death, too personal to put on here. It was all but impossible to believe, but it happened. I thought I must have been hallucinating, I loved my old man and his death really got to me. However, once I had convinced myself I'd dreamed it all, my cousin brought it up at the funeral, saying that he could hardly believe it had happened and wanted me to confirm it to his mrs as she didn't believe him.

Now that was spooky. Not ghostly, but really, really odd.

I went years before actually 'admitting' I'd experienced the ghostly happenings with the noise on the stairs. I'd almost pushed it out of my mind - not the most sensible response I know. My wife though had told a friend of hers in strictest confidence, and you know how some women treat those. At a little get-together it was mentioned and two people in the group of 8 or so had also heard things, one seeing a hairbrush move without any force on it after hearing what she thought was a person dragging a chair across the room she was in, again on bare floorboards, but there being a carpet.

I read a lot on group hallucinations and there does seem to be something that can be transferred between people, especially, it seems, in a group. But there's a lot of books written by the terminally bewildered and it started to get silly. I'm unaware of any university researching such happenings so I'll never know if that's what occurred. Nothing about brushes though.



Eric Mc

121,779 posts

264 months

Friday 2nd December 2016
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Thank you, thank you, thank you.

mybrainhurts

90,809 posts

254 months

Friday 2nd December 2016
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Eric Mc said:
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Nasty stutter you've got there, Eric. Must be the drizzle...

BigLion

1,497 posts

98 months

Friday 2nd December 2016
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All in the mind...why would someone go to the afterlife and do bullst like walking up stairs in a terrace house built in the 20s? Everyone's house on urban connotations probably has a dead body or two underneath it - every house would be 'haunted'...

Edited by BigLion on Friday 2nd December 22:34

Eric Mc

121,779 posts

264 months

Friday 2nd December 2016
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mybrainhurts said:
Eric Mc said:
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Nasty stutter you've got there, Eric. Must be the drizzle...
No - my mind's been taken over by an evil spirit.

yellowtang

1,772 posts

137 months

Saturday 3rd December 2016
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Back in 2009 I purchased an old cottage in the village of Holt, Wiltshire (Pickwick Cottage, The Gravel, Holt - to be precise!) the property is a grade 2 listed building and although appears late 17th century in origin it actually dates to the late medieval period. So, plenty of history!

Anyhow, one afternoon I was working at the cottage, taking up concrete in the back garden, when the next door neighbour peers over the fence and warns me that I may discover a well somewhere in the garden. He couldn't be sure, but family legend he said, has it that there was a well there somewhere. The neighbour (Jonathan) was the guy whom sold me the house as it used to belong to his parents and before that, his grandparents.

Anyhow, I carried on with the somewhat arduous task of concrete breaking until I got to the old coal bunker base. This appeared to be cast separately but more importantly it was bonkers strong! The breaker had a hard time getting through it and it transpired that there were iron bars of various sizes set within the bonkers strength concrete. Struck me as being a bit overkill for a DIY concrete coal bunker base.........

After spending a good hour chipping away at this coal bunker base, removing a few iron bars as I went, I suddenly became aware of a splashing sound. I stopped, pondered, then resumed (assuming that I was hearing things!) when all of a sudden there was an almighty cascade of splashing sounds as the concrete finally gave way and the breaker with me attached nearly disappeared into the now very obvious big black hole!

I was absolutely overwhelmed by a feeling of dread, not fear as such (I had no reason to be scared) but just a sickening feeling of dread and depression. It really did stop me in my tracks.

Anyway, still feeling slightly uneasy, I ventured next door to tell Jonathan that I had indeed discovered a well. Upon hearing my news, rather than looking excited as I'd anticipated (he's almost as excited by old houses as I am and it was after all his childhood home) he actually looked a bit nervous. This didn't appease my feelings of dread which I still hadn't quite recovered from. He then went on to explain that he sort of knew that there was a well there somewhere as his father had confirmed as much when he was a kid but would strangely say no more about it. His older brother had regaled stories (mostly unconvincing ones) of a drowning in this mysterious well and his Grandmother, who lived in the house with them when he was growing up used to get quite upset when he and his brother quizzed her about it. It was something that they never properly discussed as the conversation was always immediately shut down. At this point Jonathan told me that although his grandparents owned the house prior to his parents living there, they didn't actually live at the property themselves - they rented another house in the village. His grandmother only moved into the property after becoming widowed and his father pleading with her to agree to them all living there rather than renting two other houses in the same village. Now, nearly 60 years later, he was beginning to suspect that well and drowning were real and indeed the reason that his grandmother had chosen not to live in a house she owned for so many years but had no idea quite what had happened.

Jonathan's brother could shed no light on the matter other than he vaguely recalled as a kid, overhearing something about a drowning in the garden. And that's how the mystery remained until 2014. By this time I'd become good friends with Jonathan as he is a cabinet maker and I had employed him on various other projects.

Anyway, one Sunday afternoon he called me up to tell me about the extraordinary encounter he'd had earlier in the day.....

While taking his usual Sunday morning stroll around the village he'd bumped into a fellow villager that he'd known since childhood. She'd moved away from the area but was back that day to celebrate her mothers 100th birthday. Jonathan duly accepted the invitation to join them for a slice of birthday cake. He got chatting to the old girl and it turned out that during the war she had lived in Pickwick cottage! It had been provided by the RAF as accommodation for her but she'd moved out after the war because she didn't like the house......she went on to explain that old Joe Bloggs* had committed suicide there in the 1930's by throwing himself headfirst down the well in the back garden!

Jonathan said his blood ran cold when she said this, not least because he recognised the name - Bloggs* was his grandmothers maiden name!

It seems that Jonathan's grandmother's brother committed suicide down the well in his garden, his grandmother then inherited the house but couldn't bring herself to live there until circumstances forced her to and the well had been comprehensively covered over with reinforced concrete.

I'm not superstitious generally but I really cannot explain the reason for my sickening feeling of dread when I uncovered that well. I find the chain of events intriguing though and can't help wondering if it's somehow possible for negative energy/incidents to be recorded in the physical fabric of a place.

I sound like a daft bloody hippy now!

I'm off to pour myself another whisky.

  • Bloggs - not the actual name! I can't remember it.

ruggedscotty

5,606 posts

208 months

Saturday 3rd December 2016
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whiskey ? - take solace in the spirit.....

everyeggabird

351 posts

105 months

Saturday 3rd December 2016
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My wife only shows a mild interest in such things (if it wasn't for me being a true believer she would probably never talk about it at all). Even though....................

Our house is old so has had a few occupiers over the last century. The way it is set out you walk out of the kitchen. through the dining room and either turn left to go into the living room, straight on to go down the hallway to the front door or double back to go upstairs.
One day when she came out of the kitchen she saw the shape of someone go upstairs. Just for a fraction of a second, a mere glimpse out of the corner of her eye.
She never thought anything of it just thought it was either me or my son until she came into the living room to find us both sat there.

When we first moved here we had a cat, the cat used to sit on the stairs making the most awful moaning noises. Was the cat sensing something?
The cat died suddenly one day, jumped off the bed with a loud bang and dropped dead.

yellowtang

1,772 posts

137 months

Saturday 3rd December 2016
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ruggedscotty said:
whiskey ? - take solace in the spirit.....
No, I had Whisky. I'm not American wink

anonymous-user

53 months

Saturday 3rd December 2016
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There's a pub near me where the landlord has the right runaround. At the end of the evening he goes to bed upstairs and overnight all the glasses get moved, there's a figure that walks past the kitchen window - that's a regular one, and the flat washing machine powder tray is always being opened so he's got duct tape over it. All inexplicable happenings.
On the drawer type of thing a guy I work with has a door that always opens overnight. It's opened 5 nights out of 7 and he's investigated and can't figure out why. He's recently moved in and makes excuses to his wife as she's noticed and didn't want to move there as she said there was a strong smell of fancy perfume in the kitchen when they looked originally, they looked upstairs and when they came down the perfume smell was gone and a strong smell of dog crap had replaced it, and the place had been unoccupied for some months.

anonymous-user

53 months

Saturday 3rd December 2016
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Ps they had someone exorcise the pub it got so bad, apparently there was a child sitting on a stool upstairs it was all something to do with that. I don't know if it's continuing as the landlord left shortly after he told me this and the place is about to reopen for Christmas after a refurb.

Robbo 27

3,605 posts

98 months

Saturday 3rd December 2016
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I often hear the curtains being drawn in my sitting room, I go into the room and the curtains are open, wine glasses have been seen to move, sometimes moving arse over tip as they fall to the ground.

I brought some shopping home 2 weeks ago, because there were eggs in the carriers I put them on floor to stop any chance of them falling on the floor, went for a pee, I came back into the kitchen and the eggs, just the eggs, were on the work top.

Came home from travelling, unpacked my case in the kitchen to put the washing in the machine, put a wash bag to one side. The phone rang, as I was on the phone I saw the bag move around 12 inches.

No sense of dread or fear, no wierd noises, its fine.

anonymous-user

53 months

Saturday 3rd December 2016
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ash73 said:
For the love of God it's 2016 not the middle ages. Get an education.
I think in the Middle Ages they understood these things better, we've lost the thread a bit nowadays as it doesn't fit with what we perceive.

djc206

12,245 posts

124 months

Saturday 3rd December 2016
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I honestly don't know what to believe.

I worked in a pub that was built a few hundred years ago which had a "ghost". "She" used to slam doors, stomp up and down the stairs and break glasses in the bar occasionally.

When my parents had the conservatory built on their old house we used to lock both the external and internal doors, no one else had a key and yet every day for months one of the chairs at the dining table was pulled out when someone got home. Very odd.

My dad is as atheist as they come but he believes in ghosts. He did his firearms training in an old hospital. The idea being to use a mirror to identify the occupied room, storm it and occupy or disable the target I guess. All of his colleagues outside saw in the mirror a man hunched up in the corner of the room, stormed in and found no one. Not just a white figure a full colour lifelike man.

Dad was taking my mum and a friend to Gatwick one morning and a young kid stepped out in front of them, he braked but too late, stopped checked around for the kid, no sign of him, no damage to the car. All 3 in the car saw the kid. When he got home he googled it and found he's regularly seen around there, sometimes in the field near by swinging on a rope swing sometimes in the road. Weird.

Often experiences can be explained by draughts or tricks of the light but some are a little harder.

jmorgan

36,010 posts

283 months

Saturday 3rd December 2016
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V6Pushfit said:
ash73 said:
For the love of God it's 2016 not the middle ages. Get an education.
I think in the Middle Ages they understood these things better, we've lost the thread a bit nowadays as it doesn't fit with what we perceive.
Yeah, witches and all that. Trial by ordeal, must god whot did the Black Death......

Ace-T

7,688 posts

254 months

Saturday 3rd December 2016
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http://www.strangerdimensions.com/2013/06/21/infra...

A short article on infrasound and its effects on the human body.

BigLion

1,497 posts

98 months

Saturday 3rd December 2016
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This thread is funny...for example, a ghost that everyday pulls a chair out from the dining table in the conservatory - I mean ffs why would the ghost want a chair. Why doesn't the ghost go the full hog and make a fry up.

You guys need to have a word with yourselves.