Ghosts?

Ok, so this would be a more appropriate discussion in October, but what the heck.

So, last night, my mom went to her boyfriend's house for a little bit. He used to have an old, sweet black cat and her name was Aja. About two months ago, the cat had gotten very sick, had a stroke or something, and was in a lot of pain. So, instead of having her suffer, they had her put to sleep.

My mom, and Clu, (that's her boyfriend's name) walked her around outside afterwards, and I believe they had buried her by a tree or something.. I guess Clu was very sad.

Now we're back to last night. My mom had gotten back home from Clu's and I sat on the counter and talked to her in the kitchen. She told me a story, and this is roughly how it went. (Well excuse me for not remembering every exact word! ;])

"Want to hear something really crazy?" Mom asked me, and of course, I nodded. "Well, at Clu's, there's an archway by the door, and then there's a hallway leading into the kitchen. Well, I was standing by the door, and he was across from me, and we were saying goodnight. I was looking off towards the hallway, when all of a sudden, I saw something, and I was like this!" Mom was holding her hands at the sides of her head, eyes wide and slack-jawed.

"So, Clu asked 'What?! What happened?' You know what I saw?"

"What?!" I inquired excitedly.

"I saw Aja. I was looking right at her, and she had disappeared as soon as she came around the corner. I told Clu, and he said 'Oh, you did? I'm glad she's still here.' and he told me that he hadn't seen her in a while."

Being the big wuss I am, I started crying and laughing all at once.

"He's seen her before? No way.. Are you sure you weren't bot imagining it?" I blubbered, waiting for her to go "BUAHAHA!" and scare me, after getting me all wound up, with what I was pretty sure was a made up story.

"Emily, I wouldn't have told him if I had even thought for a minute I was imagining it! He says he sees her coming around the corners every once in a while. And you know what's weird? When I've been spending the night, I feel like she's laying between my legs, since I sleep my foot on my knee, like a figure four, like she used too, and Ollie and Lulu" our kittens "do."

"That's not right."

So, today, she doesn't think it's that big of a deal, but I'm still super excited, and terrified, and I dreamt about seeing Aja's ghost (who I never met when she was alive) all night, after reading a whole bunch of cat ghost stories. My mom's never claimed to believing in ghosts or anything, not the least bit superstitious, so it was quite shocking.

So, now the point of making this.. Do you think my mom and I are totally nuts? Do you have any real ghost stories? I really want to read them.. it's my new obsession.

Anyway, post them here, please! Oh, and if this is not in the right section or something like this has already been made, than oops, sorry! =D


Oh, and I forgot to add this, but, I've never seen a ghost and believed it was truly a ghost in my life, but now I think about it, I used to live in the basement of a building that used to be a church but turned into an apartment for two.. I saw a shadowy thing run into the bathroom. I thought it was my cat Murphy, and I was going to go get him, but then I had remembered that Murphy lived with my dad.. =P Doodoodoodoo.. I thought I was hallucinating. xD

I see ghost kitties a lot, so you're not alone, There's this one calico cat that I see at all random parts of our house once in a long while, and I've seen our cat Jam many times. I haven't seen Jam recently, but for like a month or so after he died I would see him as a shadow cat. Jam was a cat who always begged for food, especially when I would made my dad's lunch and I would always give him and Tiggy bits of roast beef. So, for a while after Jam died, I would be making lunch and I would see a shadow out of the corner of my eye, and I'd always feel sorry that I couldn't feed him anymore.

I've also seen angels once or twice. The first time I saw one was when I was in my room, writing in my journal. My bed faces part of my dresser and then my bookcase. And I just looked up from my journal and I saw this glowing, white, almost electric blue, figure walk two steps from my dresser to my bookcase. The freakiest thing about it was that it was an inch or two inside my bookcase. Of course, I saw that, practically shrugged, and went back to writing in my journal. It never freaked me out, honestly.

And, a month or so ago I saw another glowing figure, outside the kitchen door. I was making my dad's lunch, as well as my own lunch, and I was at the sink doing something. So, I glance over at the back door and I saw the upper half of this glowing, white figure. I wasn't quite sure if it was a reflection of this figure in the glass, or if it was actually outside, but I kind of figured that it was outside, or friendly enough because my cat didn't react to it.

And, then, I've seen a spirit before, one that looked a lot like one of my brothers. I was making my dad's lunch (I do that a lot), and my brother had been down a time or two, but I could usually hear him. And then one time I looked up and over to the hallway that leads out of the kitchen and into the main hallway. It's this corridor, that also has the basement door and the back door (different from the kitchen door) in the middle of the corridor. The basement door and back door face each other, and are always closed unless in use. So, I see this person that looks like my brother standing in the middle of the hallway. I look away for a second and then turn back and he was gone. Now, there's no way of getting out of the middle of that corridor in one second without making some noise. And I heard nothing. All of the doors were closed and locked, and they also make some noise when in use, plus the alarm was on. And, there's no way that he could have gone back the way he came without some noise in one second. So, yeah, I asked whoever was there to move aside when I passed to go scoop the kitty litter.

There's also this one phenomenon that happens when no one's downstairs and all of the lights are off (which is rare in this house at the moment.) But, when no one is downstairs and you walk down the stairs, it sounds like the TV is on in the living room. You can hear faint voices and the like as you walk down the stairs, but once you stop the noise cuts off. And then you get to the bottom of the stairs, and you can't see the light from the TV, you enter the room and no one is there. I think that's just a residual haunting type of thing, though.

My mom also sees a lot of things around the house, but I never want to really hear about it. I freak myself out sometimes at night, and then I'm like 'I don't want to see anything tonight.' The key is to look through all of the evidence before deciding that it's a ghost. You can't just see something out of the corner of your eye and say it's a ghost.

There's this great show on Scifi channel called Ghost Hunters that's a reality TV show about this team called TAPS: The Atlantic Paranormal Society. TAPS is amazing because they go in to disprove the mentions of haunting, they set up their equipment and investigate the place and pick through all of the evidence and try to debunk things before they bring what ever is back to the owner of the place. And, they never say that some place is haunted until they have amazing pieces of evidence. Right now Scifi channel is showing the spin off of the show, Ghost Hunters International, which is interesting. They never really catch all that much, but they did catch something on yesterday's episode.

Anyway, I think I've rambled on long enough. All of this stuff is fascinating, though. I mean, call it whatever you want, it is obvious that TAPS catches stuff that isn't normal.

That angel thing is really, really freaky.

I'd hate to see that kind of stuff; I'm so easily scared. But luckily I never see anything like that. I guess it's because I don't have the belief.

Woah, I never want to live in a house like yours! I'm already paranoid enough, I don't need to see glowing blue peope walking around! xD

I love TAPS! I actually have seen their old building, when I went to Massachusets two summers ago.

It's really not that bad at my house. This is all spread out through the years, so yeah. And, I never really freaked out too much over some of these, cause it was just there and gone. I'm glad that I don't really see some of the stranger stuff, though. I'll see what I can handle to see, and right now that's just cats and angels.

And TAPS is awesome, I always love it when they come to New Jersey. It's always so fun, even though it's never been real close to where I am. Although, I was so tempted to ask my dad to take me down to near where Fort Delaware is for Halloween, but then I would have missed out on both the live show and writing. Not that my dad would have taken me, anyway. But, yes, I'm obsessed with that show. And, I'm so glad that GHI finally caught something substantial. EVPs of 'yes' does not make a haunted place...

Tatra, you scare me.

I've only ever had one experience that is highly probable to be a ghost incident. When I was 9 or something, and I was in my brother's room. Then my mom called us down to set the table for lunch. My brother went down, but I stayed up for a short while.

Then someone called my name. In my own voice. I didn't freak out until about two seconds after. My sister's room was adjacent to my brother's, so I checked if she called me. She didn't.

I ran downstairs lickety-split.

And at night, (or is it morning? past twelve) you can hear a man groaning outside. My parents told me its the guard, presumably when he's constipated, patrolling the area.

There's this superstition that dogs can see ghosts, and if you take thier yucky eye-muck and smear it on your eyes, you can see 'em too. And dogs are supposed to howl when they see ghosts. Recently I've been hearing a lot of howls. Creepy.

I always see shadows at the corner of my eyes! It's frustrating.

You're lucky, Tatra, in that you seem to be okay with these... disturbances. My friend Beth sees these bright white lights (you know like when you set magnesium alight) and calls them orbs, but I don't know if they count as ghosts or just reflectinos of energy etc.

Myself, I'm open-minded but a bit sceptical. I believe there are ghosts, but not the sort that go bump in the night and have premeditation. Same as my mum, I believe that when you die, your energy must go somewhere and that that energy is what constitutes as the ghost.
I have experienced something paranormal, just at one short time in my childhood. I can't remember it because I was about two or three but my mum has told me. Apparently I used to tell them quite conversationally that there was an old woman who sat at the end of my bed at night and watched me and was basically like a guardian. That in itself means nothing, because the obvious explanation would be an invisible friend. However, my mum got really freaked out because around that age my sister (who is eight years my senior) experienced exactly the same, in that exact room.
On top of that, my parents were once decorating the house and sitting at the bottom of the staircase having a tea break, and then this coin just shot down the staircase. They swear down that it wasn't as if it fell down, but was thrown, at speed and powerfully.
We moved out of that hosue when I was four. Thinking it over, we should have done some research and seen whether there was on old woman there who died or something. But I have a feeling we'd have been sorely disappointed.

This is one of my obsessions, born from reading a lot of ghost stories and then discovering psychics. I just think it's so interesting that there's something out there, even if people haven't totally pinned down what it is. And, I'm not saying that everything is real, I do like TAPS's methodology, but I do believe in somethings. And then it gets late at night, and I tell myself that I don't want to see anything. There's still somethings that slip through, but generally, if you don't want to see them, you don't.

There are other things in this world besides ghosts. I mean, Sylvia Browne (World renowned psychic that used to be on Montel. I miss that show.) says that orbs are generally angels. The woman, lhighton, could have been a ghost, a spirit, or your spirit guide. And the coin could have been from a spirit. Ghosts are the energy of people still on this earth, generally. In most cases, they don't even know that they have died and can sometimes think that you are the ghost. Like that movie, The Others.

Spirits are people who have crossed over and have come back to visit. They aren't exactly ghosts and are generally your relatives. They can appear in your dreams as visits, dreams that seem super real while you're dreaming them. And they can also give you signs that they are okay and visiting, usually stuff like messing with electricity, lights, ringing the telephones, sending birds or butterflies, or leaving coins.

And then there are Spirit guides, spirits there to guide you as you go through life. They are basically spirits who are well experienced who come to advise you. You can have one spirit guide or many, it all depends on what stage in your life you're in.

And angels are separate from all of that, they are a whole different type of being. They are messengers and protectors. One is likely to have several angels surrounding them on a daily basis, and even more if they are needed.

Yes, I told you I was obsessed. It's just fascinating to me that there's is something out there and that more proof is being gathered every day. And, a lot of what I know comes from Sylvia Browne, because I have been watching her for years. But, I have heard things from other people.

I scared my parents with an imaginary friend before.. When I was like, 3, I walked up to my dad, and said "Hi dad, meet" and then in a scratchy voice, like that lady from Poltergeist "Gretchen."

Apparently, they thought I was possessed. =P

I remember having imaginary friends named Sarah and Michael.. never Gretchen. I've never met anybody named Gretchen! Lol

lmao Loozle, that's pretty funny... Were you fooling around with your parents, or were you serious?

The closest I've come to an encounter with a ghost was when my class started poking fun at a pretty dumb teacher. We all stopped in the middle of class, and started pointing to the ceiling, hiding under desks, and dementedly crying: "They're coming". After a while, my teacher just said: "It's okay, they've gone now."

I don't really believe in ghosts, but I don't really think that anyone does, unless they believe that they have seen one.

One time during a nervous breakdown, I was in my bed and I felt a hand touch my back and I could feel the warmth. I didn't look or anything since I couldn't (I like my room dark, lol) but it was definitely there. And then, shortly after, everything turned out all right in the end. I don't think it was a ghost though. But it was weird.

lmao Loozle, that's pretty funny... Were you fooling around with your parents, or were you serious?

I don't remember! I was so little, I hear this story and it cracks me up! I don't know how I could've come up with that as a toddler!