So since signing up here I've browsed and read a few threads on horror. This got me thinking about horror and paranormal experiences. Has anyone here experiences terror or something you'd call paranormal in real life? I think first hand paranormal experiences are more common than most people think.
I had a particularly terrifying nightmare one night. I woke up at 4:00 am, shaken, to find a ghost girl in my room. Her colors were off, though. Pinks, purples and greens. She was young, smoke-like, and had her hair in a ponytail. I didn't go back to sleep after that.
"Real" "paranormal" experiences, it seems to me we have a contradiction on our hands right there. I think first hand Paranormal experiences don't happen at all. What happens is that our brains make mistakes, severe mistakes even. I highly recommend you watch some Derren Brown, the mind can easily be tricked into seeing and believing all manners of things that aren't even there. Anyway, sorry to jump into your thread without really answering your request but I thought you raised an interesting point, especially since I believe the contrary to be true.
Did you there was a report made fairly recently that the universe could be a simulation? Just one theory among many. I think it's too soon for us to decide we know everything about the nature of reality. http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/multiverse.html Students enrolling at the college of Pythagoras were made to stand before their peers and make a statement they held to be unassailable, which would then be demolished with relative ease. The only statement made that silenced the auditorium was: 'I believe everything changes.' Just some story I heard.
I suffer from spates of sleep paralysis. It feels very much like a paranormal experience but is really just my brain experiencing a glitch. Sleep Paralysis
Definitely not paranormal, there is no evidence of any such things, but I have had a fun experience that I only have an hypothesis as to what happened. So, I love Halloween and all the ghost things, even though I don't believe any real ghosts exist. But it's fun stuff. So one year, can't remember if it was on Halloween or just near Halloween, I took my son (he was about 10 give or take) to the Manresa Castle to stay in the haunted turret room. My son took his Ghostbuster toys to play with, we had a great time. The lights flickered, the room was a perfect room for Halloween. There was a guest book with lots of entries from people who did or didn't have any ghostly experiences. We read them out loud. I took it out and xeroxed it and also managed to copy another similar guest book from the other reportedly haunted room down the hall. So far, fun but nothing weird. In the hall was a stair to the attic and I went up and checked the door, (couldn't resist) it was locked. It was extremely unlikely anyone would be above us in the attic. Shortly before we went to bed we heard very loud and very distinct footsteps overhead. It's wasn't some noise that we maybe heard, it was clear and loud. And it was much too loud to have been raccoons, rats, or squirrels or any other attic critters. I know quite well what animals in the attic sounds like. It wasn't air in rattling pipes, I also know that sound well. But it was very short lived, whatever it was came and went in only a few seconds. And we didn't hear it again, including when we stayed in the same room a decade later. To my recollection none of the guest entries in the book described anything similar. My hypothesis: Spoiler I think it was sound carried from some other location in the building through the wood. That's the best explanation I can come up with. I don't believe in ghosts, but I can see why this experience would lead other people to believe in them. What I can't figure out is why the noise never repeated.
I don't know about seeing ghosts or that kind of thing, but what about hunches? Hunches, that tell you something has happened, will happen, or explain something that has already happened? Hunches that can't be explained by the subconscious mind going "EUREKA," after working overtime on a problem. I suspect these kinds of paranormal happenings are very common. Sometimes they appear as hindsight—and you only understand their significance after you hear of an event through normal channels. Other times they are strong enough to warn you off something bad, or put you in the path of something good. They can incite you to do something unusual, which turns out to be exactly what you needed to do. Or they can presage the arrival of something or someone you didn't expect. I've had these kinds of experiences many times, and I've learned to pay attention to them. They've never led me wrong. Animals have these kinds of premonitions all the time—even to the extent that wild animals often don't die during natural disasters like tsunamis, because 'something' tells them to head for higher ground in time to escape. We call it instinct. I suspect we humans have these instincts too, but our rational mind tells us to ignore them. However, if you've ever had a premonition like this, you KNOW it. It's different from ordinary day-to-day predictions based on empirical evidence or past experience. It's a solid, sure, knowing. It's not actually scary, though. More helpful than scary. Mind you, if the premonition was of approaching disaster or loss, it probably would be scary.
I often see some huge spider on my pillow or crawling up the drapes. I'm not paralyzed but I think it's sort of a half dream. I freak out, wake up, turn on the lights and hunt for the spider but never find it. It's happened so many times without ever finding the spider I'm convinced it's some sort of wake-dream hallucination. It's a good thing spiders don't freak me out unless they are moving fast, and then I mostly just don't like them. So I do have to get up and turn on the light, but I don't scream or anything.
With billions of perceived premonitions every year in the world, some of them are bound to be true solely because of coincidence. It's human nature to remember the hits and forget all the misses, thus making the hits seem too close for coincidence. It's not my rational mind telling me to ignore anything, it's my rational mind seeking a rational assessment of the evidence.
when i was 12 i started really geting inrested in paranormal wikka and all those supernatural stuff but no matter how much i believed that supernatural is out there (even though i never troed to hoax anyone) nothing special happened but all those things that i learned came to be really helpfull with my book. BOOOOOooooOOOOOooooo
Yeah, I get that. And the rational mind likes to say 'coincidence.' But sometimes you just know. I'm not in any position to say how, or to come up with some silly explanation. It's just that you know. It probably has some scientific explanation we've just not got to yet! Does that help?
I've taken so many walks on graveyards at night, that I've lost all hope of bumping into a real ghost by now (yeah, real gothic, but the reason me and my hubby stroll there is because it's quiet there and we can plan our writing in peace while having a little exercise and fresh air). It can get creepy though, like when passing the candle memorial of stillborn babies or babies who've died shortly after birth. I also find the "Plague Park" in the center of Helsinki a creepy spot cos they used to bury plague victims there and some headstones from the 18th century still stand in the grass. At night the mind could easily play tricks on a person there. @: the "foot steps" in your attic sounds kinda creepy. I wouldn't have slept too well that night
terror, no... paranormal, yes... quite a bit, actually... though i've been a world class skeptic nearly from birth, what i've experienced first hand even i can't possibly laugh off as imagination, or anything but some kind of 'paranormal' activity/power... is that enough for you, jdawg?
Here is your explanation(s): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98OTsYfTt-c I don't doubt the legitimacy of what people have experienced but I do think they severly underestimate the power of their own imagination. People can be tricked into accepting blank pieces of paper as money (Derren Brown did that), the human mind searches for patterns, seeing faces, spiders, stools, crowns, hammers, shovels etc where none exist. There are instances were people are presented with a closeup of a piece of ham and asked to tell what they see, you wouldn't believe the numerous things that people came up with, raning from elephants to loved ones, to jesus. You have to take into account that the brain works with what it already knows as a point of comparison. If you've read and watched alot about paranormal activities, no wonder that the ones you experience are highly similar to the ones you've informed yourself about. Here is a little experiment. Take thirty seconds and count all things red around you. Do it. Done? Good. Now tell me, how many blue things did you count? Probably none, or very few. Your focus was on red. In a similar fashion people who read about paranormal stuff are focused on seeing precisely stuff like that, even when it isn't there. This happens all the time with much more mundane things. For example you buy a nice red ferrari and suddenly you see that car everywhere. You break an arm, suddenly you see alot more people with broken arms. Focus might even help explain why two people sometimes think of calling each other at the same time. But now I am getting into the grounds of that video I posted.
Yup. My partner often knows it's happening because I can sometimes get control enough to speak and he hears me saying, "wake me up, wake me up." He says I sound like someone who's had a stroke. He already has instructions to shake me, and hard, otherwise I just fall back into the same state. Sometimes I laugh involuntarily while he's trying to wake me.
Maybe our 5 senses add to a greater number. Call it a 6th sense if you will but doubt there's a paranormal factor. I stopped on the middle of a bridge with Cindy, a good friend's girl friend. We were headed for a high school graduation party just a few miles ahead at an old mill. There, an old mill dammed the East Fork of the Choctawhatchee River and just below the dam was an iron trestle bridge perfect for jumping and diving into the deep water about 30 feet below. A perfect place for teenagers to drink beer and swim, secluded deep in the woods on a dirt road. But the bridge I stopped on was wooden and without side rails, only raised planks on the bridge's road bed to line-up tires and drive across. The river was shallow here, no deeper than 3 feet but mostly more shallow as water flowed over a rocky bottom. This bridge was perhaps 50 feet above the water. Okay...Teenagers, beer drinking and a bridge with no side rails, what comes to mind? I told Cindy what came to mind. We stopped for a maybe a minute and then I drove on. The party was great, 20-30 people. Hours later, I'm waiting for the car in front of me to go. Four friends, all headed for Panama City. Jimmy, his family owned the land, the old mill that was no longer used and the small town's newspaper. A great kid who came from a well-to-family but you would have never guessed it. He held his breaks on the bridge, smoked the tires and hollered out the window, "See you in Panama City!" And then took off like a bat outa hell. I reached the bridge and saw 3 friends getting into another car, one was bloody and another limped. The car was upside down in the river below and Jimmy was not one of the three who got in the car. Knew they were headed for the hospital but no one answered when I hollered, "Where's Jimmy?" Made my way down though stickers like a dumb-ass because on the other side of the bridge was a trail. An ice chest and beer can floated downriver as I made it to the flatten car. Jimmy was crushed beyond recognition and his body was a pale white since he was partially submerged and upside down. All his blood had drained out of what used to be his head into the river. Cindy told her friends what I said to her on the bridge that day and they thought I was weird. Pretty sure her friends' 5 senses added to closer to zero. Never told them about seeing Jimmy body, guess they learned that from my 3 friends who survived and suffered only minor injuries. And that was our 1972 high school graduation party in Lower Alabama, in the woods on the Choctawhatchee River.
