Are ghosts real?

[mrnoodle]

A cold draft in a closed room, footsteps in an empty house, a tugging on your shirt tail...you know the drill. Are these occurrences messages from beyond the grave, or hyperactive imaginations with nothing better to do?

Time for ghost stories. Second- and third-hand accounts are cool, too, but if you're pulling them out of your butt, at least make em believable....


edit: Never did a poll before...forgot the "I don't know" option and can't fix it. Anyhow, make up your mind, you fence-sitter.

[Bullitt]

My buddies and I went up to the old TB ward back at school one night and took a bunch of pictures of the numbered graves and the boarded up building. These glowing ball looking things kept appearing in some of the pictures, and not in others, and the lense was spotlessly clean. Not really that spooky, just wierd.
I don't own any of the glowing looking things, but I have a few of just.. stuff

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...t/DSCN0432.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...t/DSCN0397.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...t/DSCN0391.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v6...t/DSCN0379.jpg

[BigV]

BOOOoooooooooooooooo

[Hobbs]

When hinges creak in doorless chambers, and strange and freightening sounds echo through the hall. When candlelights flicker where the air is deathly still. That is the time when ghosts are present, practicing their terror with...ghoulish delight. Welcome foolish mortals, to the haunted cellar.


Muuhaaawwwhahahahahahah!

For those who....dare....follow me.....

http://www.ghoststudy.com/gallery.html

[Trilby]

Ghosts are the real energy of people who have died, usually in traumatic, highly emotional or unsavory ways--murders, suicides, that kind of thing. The spirit is confused and is unaware that it has moved to another plane. Everybody knows this!

My grandfather is very attached to my mom. Even though he has died he still helps her with all kinds of things--he finds lost items, etc. My mom has seen him a few times, too. He's still around.

I used to live in a house where the the former owner had died in one of the rooms. That room always felt cold to me and creeped me out if I went in there at night alone, but I think this was just because I'd been informed of her death there. It would have been interesting if I had experienced the same feelings without knowing someone had died in that room.

Oh, and when my father died, I had a premonition about it the day before. I was driving him back to his home after having him over to my place for dinner when suddenly this chill came over me and I looked at him and I KNEW. I tried to shake the feeling off and put it down to some stress I was going through at the time. The next morning I got a phone call from the assisted living place where he'd been staying and they told me he had slipped the night before and broken his hip and had been taken to the hospital for surgery. He never came out of the anesthetic.

That's the sum total of my "paranormal encounters" to date.

Oh, yeah, almost forgot. I "died" once for about a minute or two when I was in a very bad car wreck and had broken ribs and punctured lungs and a bunch of other fun injuries. I don't remember any of it, except for the part when I came around in the ER and asked what happened. They told me I'd been in a car wreck. I asked if anyone else had been injured and they said, "No." I said "Thank God," and I stopped breathing and my heart stopped beating. It was very peaceful and I felt this great sense of at one-ness and calm - very hard to explain. I knew somehow the ER prople were working to make me come back and I wanted to tell them not to be so concerned. Everything was perfectly alright. Then I realized I was going to have come back which I didn't want to do because I knew the pain would be terrible. It was, too.

[wolf]

There's more than one kind of manifestation ... some are ghosts, some are other kinds of spiritual entities (the elves, faeries, and demons option on the poll.)

My hospital has ghosts.

There's the one who is fighting against restraints or a cold pack in the ambulance crew quarters on a nightly basis (and keeps the crew from sleeping) and the medical records porch ghosts who move stuff (both furniture and smaller items) around, as well as a bunch of others. They don't screw with the patients, which is nice of them, only staff.

There are female staff who refuse to go to medical records after dark.

I, on the other hand, have to reassure the medical records ghosts that I'm just there for a chart and I'm not there to evict them.

[plthijinx]

not long ago after my last roommate moved out, just got another one middle of last month, i would keep the door to the spare room closed and the air vent closed as well to conserve energy. some how, some way, i came home and they were both open.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Bullitt

These glowing ball looking things kept appearing in some of the pictures, and not in others, and the lense was spotlessly clean. Not really that spooky, just wierd.

Like These? (First and second shelves from the top left, near the middle) Those aren't from the lens, they're dust in the air reflecting the flash.

[Queen of the Ryche]

Old boyfriend's brother died in a car wreck at 18 - he used to come wake us up - cat would attack walls, saw his shadow, felt him sit on the bed -
Last house hubby and I lived in, while we were gone during the day pictures would jump off walls, chair moved from one end of room to the other - yes, I believe in many different manifestations for many different reasons.

[Troubleshooter]

And yet they are still not credibly proven.

[lookout123]

i've witnessed (first hand) a couple of things, but one event still makes my skin crawl. this is the short version with some of the freakier events left out.

friend, who we'll call Rocco, was having marital problems with his wife, who we'll call Gladys.

Rocco is driving home from work and gets run off of road by a car no one else saw. it looked like the police car from The Andy Griffith show, so everyone thought he was stupid, drunk, or both. Rocco falls down in shower, splitting head open - swears he felt like he was pushed. Rocco sees the same police car driving next to him on road. old time mexican cop, not looking too healthy is driving. Rocco has come to me after each event and i think he is losing his freaking mind. drugs are an absolute impossibility, so he has to be going nuts i figure. all this stupid crap in the period of a couple days?

i get phone call at 3 am from "gladys" telling me to come quick - it's the baby and she is afraid of Rocco. i get dressed and drive over afraid that my friend got drunk and did something stupid. i get there and gladys lets me in.

neither she nor Rocco had called me as they had just woken up.

Rocco is sitting in corner shaking and incoherent. turns out that Gladys woke up with Rocco screaming, gasping, and physically trying to push someone/thing off his chest. she sees "something" leave him and go into the crib next to the bed. Rocco hysterically explains that the crazy looking cop from earlier was choking him and swearing that he was going to kill Rocco.
and then i knocked on the door.

they go into the other room to get the dazed Rocco cleaned up so i am alone with sleeping baby on couch across the room from me. i have not been drinking, don't do drugs, and am only vaguely confused, not really buying the story - not freaked out. until this 2 month old child goes from sound asleep on his back to sitting straight up without using his arms (which a 2 month old couldn't do anyway) and turns his head and just stares at me. the moment Rocco and Gladys walk back into the room the little bambino falls right back into the previous sleeping position, sound asleep. my jaw is on the floor.

things got a bit freakier from there with various noises, items moving, shaking, no access back into bedroom where the crib. an unlocked door that just won't budge. not an inch. not a milimeter. it may as well have been rock. sounds of a violent argument in spanish from behind the door. and three adults sitting speechless staring at a baby sleeping peacefully.

daylight rolls around and i go to work just dumbstruck. they called their family priest over. i don't know what all happened from there, but here is the gist of what they found out over the next few days.

gladys's (birth) father was a cop who'd been gunned down years before in mexico. Rocco didn't know about this. old mexico story, didn't exactly get passed out to people who didn't already know. Gladys didn't even know the whole story. or the fact that her grandmother was a self described "witch" who had taken the time to pray and speak with her dead son through the last photograph taken of him(in his police uniform) for 20 years before giving it to Gladys as wedding gift.

grandmother threatened to rain hell down upon rocco, gladys, and family if they destroyed the picture. she was satisfied to remove the photo back to her home. they let her, under the condition that she tells dead daddy to leave Rocco alone. apparently it worked out because there were never any repeats of the strange events.

yep, i know it sounds like a campfire story. i wouldn't believe it either if i hadn't been there. it wasn't imagined or exaggerated.

skin crawling now. that was 10-12 years ago, and it is all still crystal clear in my memory.

[plthijinx]

now that's spooky

[mrnoodle]

wow, lookout. good story. reminds me of the story my boss told me when I was doing my internship. Can't remember the details, but she was visiting her ex-husband's father (i think) in the hospital as he lay dying of cancer. The guy hadn't moved an inch in days, was only hours from death. Was still breathing on his own, but on oxygen. He'd also been up to his eyeballs in morphine for the past night or two. Anyway, she found herself alone with him momentarily while the ex-hubby went to get a soda or something.

The guy sat up, locked eyes with her, and reached for her throat with both hands.

She was between the bed and the wall, and had to go around him to escape. She did so, trying unsuccessfully to scream as she went. She ran to the nurse's station and said only that the patient was awake and had tried to attack her. When the nurses went to check, however, the guy was lying down as though he had never moved, except that the nose thing that delivered his oxygen had fallen down to his neck. He died later that night.

She vows that it actually happened, and that the malevolence she saw in the guy's eyes was something that she had never experienced or imagined could be possible from a human being. She had nightmares for weeks, too.

To me, this story could easily be explained by stress, fear, chemical imbalances, or other factors that are non-weird. But it sounds kind of like lookout's story...

Lookout's story is just plain spooky, so is Mr. Noodle's but his I could hazard an explanation for. The old dude is morphined out to the max and after a while people do develope a tolerance for the stuff. I was on a morphine drip for three weeks in critical care after my car wreck (above), and that stuff does very wierd things to your head after you've been on it for a while - nice sort of semi-hallucinatory state for me. So I can imagine the old man having some horrible vision brought on by the morphine and the fact that he's on his way out. He opens his eyes and sees his daughter in law as the angel of death or something, and in one last desperate effort to survive, he reaches out his hands to strangle her, then subsides back into his comatose state after this final expenditure of effort.