[OT]: Unexplained Occurrences & the Supernatural / Ghosts.

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RAE, how is this gun related. Well, let's see? The bag that fell off the table contained a gun cleaning kit and a few other gun related items which I bought at the shooting range. I know it's a strech but this is the General sub-forum and I thought that this might be an interesting topic to discuss. :)

I've heard other people talk about their encounter with the supernatural but since it never happened to me, I've always been interested in it. My father use to tell me a "ghost" story that happened to him when he was a young lad growing up in the old country that use to really scare me when I use to hear it as a boy ...

... It turns out that there was this empty house/shack on top of a hill. My father and a bunch of his friends stsrting talking about it one day and one of them said that the reason why it's empty is because the place was haunted. They all started laughing about it and wanting to show how brave they were to their classmates, deciced to spend the night there.

The way that I understand it, the place was relatively small with a kitchen area next to a family room/bedroom type of layout (remember, this was at the turn of the LAST century). Additionally, the place didn't have any windows -- it had the hole for the windows but no actual glass in the windows.

The brought a candle so that they could see and started to playing some cards to occupying their time. Through out the night, they kept joking and taunting the ghosts to come out and show themselves. At around midnight, the candle suddenly was knocked off the table. Everyone accused the other of knocking down the candle and started complaining that they were winning.

They lit a match to light the candle again but before they had a chance to do so, they saw some rags flying/being thrown their way. Being the only ones in this small shack, they jumped out the window (not bothering to even use the door) and ran for their lives.

As a young boy this story really scared me but thinking about it now, I would like to think of a more rational explanation. Maybe a bum or somebody wanted by the law was hiding out there in a hidden passage way (during WWI & WWII it was discovered that a lot of homes & buildings had hidden rooms in Europe). He waited for an opportunity when he wouldn't be seen and decided to scare off this gang of pre-teens.

As I said, since it never happened to me, I've always been interested in it and was hoping for a good ghost story, or two, when I started this topic. FUD.
 
I grew up in a house that had been built circa 1840 in Barnwell, SC (yes, I DO glow at night. :)) I never noticed anything particularly "ghostly" about it. One of the upstairs bedrooms had a portrait of one of my Mom's ancestors, and he was a creepy looking guy (my sister and I called him "Barnabus Collins".) As you walked around the room, his eyes would follow you. Of course, this is the sign of a truly gifted portrait artist.
At any rate, after my Mom and Grandpa died in '75, I inherited the house. My wife and our baby daughter moved in in 1980 and lived there for 4 years. On several occasions, in the middle of the night, I would hear the front door open and close, and then hear my Grandpa's (Mom's dad) "hello, I'm here" whistle which he always did when he visted while alive (he lived next door.)
My wife also swears that on several occasions after we had done some furniture rearanging, the portrait of my mother would be wearing a frown instead of a smile. I never saw this myself, so I can't say. That same portrait hangs today in my house, right over the Steinway Model P grand piano built in 1917 that was my Grandma's (Mom's mom) piano. Mom is still smiling.

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Shoot straight & make big holes, regards, Richard at The Shottist's Center

[This message has been edited by 45King (edited August 19, 2000).]
 
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by RAE:
Stop it already, you folks are giving me the creeps ;)
[/quote]
RAE............Look behind you! :D



[This message has been edited by jeffer (edited August 19, 2000).]
 
Alright! Now we're getting somewhere ... <BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by 45King: ... in the middle of the night, I would hear the front door open and close, and then hear my Grandpa's "hello, I'm here" whistle which he always did when he visted while alive ...[/quote]
 
FUD, it was a great house to grow up in; even had a "secret closet" that looked like a book case. However, I cannot for the life of me recall any partcularly "spooky" events occuring when I was a kid. Well, there was one somewhat unusual occurence.
When my parents bought the house in '44, they added a bedroom with adjoining bath. The bath connected to the last room on the original house (later to become my room) with doors at both ends. They also added a back hallway so that one could get to the bedroom without going through the bath. Later, in '63, they added another bedroom with bath off this hallway for my sister.
At any rate, I would sometimes wake up in the night at around 3:00AM, and I would hear a moderately loud "knock" coming from what seemed to be the top of a built-in set of bookshelves in my room. I didn't hear this every night, but when I did hear it, it always seemed to happen at the same time-3:00AM. House settling? Perhaps. Who knows?
I'd just roll over and go back to sleep. If there were any ghosts there, they were benign and didn't bother me.
My biggest fear living there as an adult was not supernatural; it was fire. When we moved in, we had a termite inspection done, and they discovered a couple of joists which had some. They cut out two infested sections, each about 2.5 feet long. These were solid timbers that measured 10"X12"! Each piece weighed about 80 to 90 lbs. The entire house was built of heart pine (small pieces of heart pine are what is commonly sold as kindling wood for fireplaces; very resin soaked, catch almost immediatley, and burn fast and hot.) Had a fire started, I seriously doubt it would have taken more than 10 minute to reduce 3500 square feet of two story antebellum plantation style house to a pile of smoking embers. I instructed my wife that if we ever woke up and the house was on fire, she was to take a chair and throw it through a window and then dive out immediately. (The house didn't have a basemement, but was built about 5 feet off the ground. It would be about an eight foot drop to the ground from a bedroom window.) I would go from the MB down the short distance of the hallway into my daughter's BR and do the same with her in my arms, and then we'd meet on the stree in front of the house.
The firehouse was only half a block away, and I still don't think they would have been able to get there in time to do anything other than make sure the fire didn't spread to other houses. Now THAT was spooky.

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Shoot straight & make big holes, regards, Richard at The Shottist's Center
 
"Eyes would follow you...the sign of a truly gifted portrait artist..."

Actually, it's more a function of how the person is posed. If the eyes are looking straight forward, at a 90 degree angle to the plane of the portrait or photograph, the eyes will appear to follow you all around the room.

In my parents house (the haunted one) years ago I got some beer and a friend and I decided to watch a movie. Being 16 or 17 at the time, and knowing that the world would end as I knew it if my parents found out I was drinking, I was VERY self-conscious.

In the TV room there hung a photoportrait of my father's great-grandparents, circa 1880. VERY VERY VERY stern looking people, and looking STRAIGHT out of the photo.

Yep, you guessed it. I was so uptight about drinking in the house, and having "them" watch me, that my friend and I moved the TV into the living room!

No haunting there, just bad conscience! :)

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Beware the man with the S&W .357 Mag.
Chances are he knows how to use it.
 
YIKES!!! It's a RENO!!! And it's behind me. And,, ;) Never mind this is a famaily oriented board and Polter-Reno's are rated R for violent subject content.
Hey, as far as the gun content goes, well, stretch or not the subject of unexplained phenomona(sp) has interested me since I found out about the Lake Erie graveyard. The Bermuda Triangle gets all the publicity, but the Great Lakes have a tradition of spooky happenenings that go way back before the Europeans set foot here, and in reality have almost four times the unexplained disappearances. Living on the shores of Erie, I read a lot of stuff about strange happenings here. I don't mind telling you, every time I fly in or out of Cleveland, and the plane swings over the lake, I get more than a bit uncomfortable. The original tale of Hiawatha was based on I believe a Detroit or Shawnee legend about a saishe(sp) wave. A saishe wave is a freak wave that forms, who knows how, and can travel a couple hundred miles per.Freaky stuff happens on those puddles. My best friend was a deck hand on an ore freighter for 2 years. Right before he was killed in a MC accident, he told me about some of the wierd stuff he had seen,,,lights in the middle of nowhere, boats that would just pop in and out of thin air. Yada, yada.99% of that stuff has a natural cause, such as temerature inversion, or just a juiced up bored hand standing watch on watch, but the 1% is still enough to give you a giant case of the willies. Ghosts and goblins-yep gotta believe in 'em. Hey, we have a saytr and an incubus on Penna Ave right? one look at Bill's coven,,,er, I mean cabinet, and you have to wonder,,,

Spooky stuff folks! I don't know about you, but I'm going to lock and load. hehe, reminds me of watching a Helter Skelter/In Cold Blood twin feature on TV. Man, by the third commercial, I was ready for WWIII

Gun content may be minimal, by what the hey, it's a good topic.( Might fit better in October though ;))

BOO!
 
When I was a youngster we lived on a mountain in the sticks. We had a ghost in our house that didn't like us too much. I remember appliances turning on/off for no reason and other weird stuff. The scariest was when my older brother and I were listening to tapes in his room. Something moved his doorstop and slammed the bedroom door shut. He and I were the only ones in the house at the time and we both remember putting the doorstop in place. We gave each other the did you do that look and he grabbed me and we RAN outside to wait for Dad. Pretty creepy. That room was the worst of the house, stuff would fly off of shelves, wind would blow through for no reason, and my other brother swore something attacked him one night while he was in bed. Needless to say, I was glad when we moved.
 
I can give you two examples of haunted houses.
I used to live in Georgia which, like a lot of southern states, has quite a few old houses sitting empty and deteriorating. The state of Georgia was selling those old houses for one dollar with a contract that bound the owners to renovate the place and live there for some number of years. Some friends of the family took a contract on a farm south of Atlanta with a barn and several acres of fields.
It turns out that two people died in the house. One was a miserly old guy who was sitting in the living room doing his taxes when a robber broke into the place and popped him in the back. The other was a little girl who was playing in the same room. She was tottering around one night, tripped on the edge of the hearth, and burned to death in the fireplace.
From the living room were stairs to the upper floor where the master bedroom was located. SOmetimes in the dark from the master bedroom you could see, I swear, it looked like firelight coming from downstairs. When you got up and went out to the upstair railing it was darker than the devil's hoof downstairs. The couple swore that in addition to this sometimes they could hear a child's running footsteps before the light blinked out.

The other case was a story told by one of my teachers. He was a nice, easygoing guy who had bought an old house with his wife from an older couple. One night as they were in bed they heard a noise at the front door, then footsteps coming into the house and walking up the stairs. They seemed to wander around until they came to the master bedroom where the door was ajar. The guy said he and his wife huddled in bed while the sound of someone moving entered and wandered around the room. Once in a while it would stop and he could almost see a vague, faint light as if someone was checking the time with a light-up watch. Then the noise left the room and wandered down the hall.
For the next year or two on occassion the couple would find things out of place. Drawers would be left open, stacks of records would be scattered on the floor... that sort of thing. At the end of that time on a stormy night like before they heard the footsteps again. This time they started upstairs and made their way down the stairs and out the front door. That as the last time they had a problem.
Just for laughs on night near Halloween the couple went to a spiritualist and asked about the 'ghost'. The woman nodded and told them that sometimes when someone dies and they have lost something during life that was important to them they go looking for it before they pass on to the next world. When they find where they left it then they stop bothering things.
After a little research they found the obituary of the son of the couple who sold them the house. He had died about the time the commmotion began.

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Those who use arms well cultivate the Way and keep the rules.Thus they can govern in such a way as to prevail over the corrupt- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

[This message has been edited by Apple a Day (edited August 19, 2000).]
 
I am also well educated, science based and a sober individual. No drugs or alcohol.
This past January we had 4 incidents in 3 weeks (and none since -which is fine with me!)
I was working at the desk in my den late when someone shook me by the arm. First thought was that my wife had gotten up from bed and somehow snuck in behind me (wouldn't be like her at all). I turned and saw a petite woman in a long wool dress and a bonnet leaving the room. The dog was laying in the doorway and went on alert and watched her pass, then moved over and sat in front of me facing the doorway. The other 3 times were similar with no visible "haint" but definitely a sensation of being "shook" by the arm, in different parts of the house. Stopped just like it started.
My UFO encounter was Oct 1998. Just a red/orange sphere over my truck. It had a pulsing glow that intensified then it suddenly shot straight west with a loud 'pop' (vacuume?)-sounded like the world's biggest champaigne cork. stopped in the sky very suddenly a couple miles west, then went north at extremely high speed.
[Hey! I was probably abducted- since I don't remember any creatures or experiments or being raped by aliens. Folks who say they remember that stuff are making it up.]
 
My brother-in-law lived in a haunted house as a kid. They would smell cigar/pipesmoke on occasion (no family member smoked), and an old spinning wheel they kept in a front room would spin by itself once in a while. You could stop the spinning with your hand, let go, and it would start up again by itself. The kicker was, one night the family was in a front room watching T.V. and heard a huge crash from the kitchen. They all ran in to find a pan left on the stove on fire, and a large jar of dried beans kept on a shelf smashed against the opposite wall. They figured the "ghost" was trying to alert them about the stove fire, and smashed the bean jar to do it.

I've never actually seen anything weird, but when my wife and I were living in Havelock, N.C. we awoke one sunny Saturday morning to find the front door ajar, and the hatch to the attic crawlspace moved aside. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing straight up as I cleared every closet and room, including the crawlspace, baseball bat in hand. Found nada. Big gust of wind could've blown the front door open, if we forgot to lock it for the night, but how to explain the heavy crawlspace hatch... Dunno.

My wife (long before we met) was buzzed by a brightly lit "object" one night while driving home. She was with a girlfriend, they thought an airplane had crashed. They stopped the car and got out to look for the "plane"; Nuttin' but crickets.

"The Truth is Out There" Da dee da dee da doo.... :)

[This message has been edited by DocH (edited August 20, 2000).]
 
My parents bought a house out in the country in 1962 for a steal. It was an old farm house built in the 1850's. Growing up as a kid there were two closets upstairs that I could never force myself to open, or be around when they were opened. I never heard anything or ever saw anything that caused me to feel that way I was just an erie sensation. Years later I found out why my dad got such a "good" deal on the house. A mother had killed and butchered her kids and stuffed their bodies in the hall closets upstairs before killing herself.
 
I'm going to chime in just to suggest that us gun onwers are nut-cases! :D

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God, Guns and Guts made this country a great country!
 
First ,let me say that I don't care who believes in what, and that I am not sure what I truly believe in BUT - I do know what I have seen and heard. If these things were in my mind as Rikwriter believes, then they were in the mind of my wife, kids and other family members at the same time, and different times as well.
I bought a house three years ago. It is about 15 years old (no spooky old place)but it is a strange place at times. Not long after we moved in, my wife and I noticed strong perfume and tobacco odors at times. We joked about a ghost, but being professional scientific types, we only joked about it. Then the interior doors began to open and close, often slamming in the middle of the night. It is a two story house with noisy floors and we often heard footsteps. Last winter was especially active with lights,ceiling fans and the kids battery operated toys going off and on at will. It's a pretty strange feeling to be relaxing on the couch late at night and have the ceiling fan above you roar to life at full speed.
My 72 year old mother stayed with us a few weeks ago (I never mentioned any of this to her). She came up to me one morning and said "I have something really strange to tell you. She told me that my 4 year old daughter was scared of a monster in the spare bedroom (I told her that I knew of her fear) Then she said "Yeah, but I saw it to, it was standing next to the bed when I woke up." She described it as a shadowy human form. THAT bothered me. That was a month ago. Yesterday I spent the day painting the basement walls while the wife and kids were at the mall. I heard a loud banging noise upstairs like something fell on the floor, and then footsteps. I keep my gun safe in the basement, so I grabbed a .45 and slowly climbed the stairs to investigate (now it's a gun related story). I stood still and listened for a minute or two and heard nothing so I called my wifes name and checked the garage for her car just in case. I couldn't find anything wrong in the house so I returned to my painting. Then I heard a loud voice upstairs and thought that someone was leaving a message on our answering machine. I didn't hear the phone ring though, and went upstairs to play back the message just in case the wife was having car problems or something. Surprise..no new messages on the machine..oh well another mystery. Before going to bed last night I, checked all of the windows to make sure they were closed. The one in the spare bedroom (2nd floor) had been cranked out so far that it was at 90 degrees to the house (something we never do) and was jammed. I had to remove the screen and pull on the window, while cranking to close it. I didn't open it and my wife swears she didn't either. As I lay in bed last night the phrase "who ya gonna call...Ghostbusters", didn't seem so damn silly anymore. I've lived in a lot of different places and never had anything happen like this before. I find it disturbing but kind of interesting also. This may sound nuts, but I've gotten to the point where I tell our "ghost" to behave, or like yesterday, to leave me the "F" alone. That's my story, I don't care who reads it, or believes it, but that's what I've been dealing with off and on for a few years.
 
I have to admit -- I find it rather interesting that as a culture we're so ingrained with this "if I can't see it or reproduce it on command it can't be real" idea that folks with stories like this ever have cause to doubt their sanity -- or to expect others will. It's an odd form of cultural egotism I think, to decide that every other society with an awareness of what we call "the spirit world" was simply strung out on herbal hallucinogens or outright jumping at shadows.

I think in a way, the "gun culture" is one of the worst in this regard, just because we're so grounded in well -- "practical" solutions to daily problems. And besides that, it's comforting to think that a .45 (or 9mm or .40, if you prefer) really *will* handle everything that goes bump in the night.

The truth is -- encounters like these, while not as common, have been with humanity every bit as long as the highway brigand. And just as we've developed tools for dealing with the brigand (thank you Mr. Colt, Mr. Ruger, Mr. Beretta, etc) we've also developed tools for dealing with the.. well -- "bumps." The techniques, and their practitioners, are still alive and well, even in 21st century America. It's just a matter of finding them, and separating the real thing out from the nutcases and charlatans. Which granted is not easy if you haven't the experience, just as the grade school child of an anti-gunner won't know the difference between a Kimber and a "Ring of Fire" POS pistol.

In short -- if you feel something there, there's likely something there. Maybe its a "spirit," maybe not.. but whatever the reason, your nervous system is trying to get a message across to you. If it's a serious, recurring problem, there are quite a few folks out there who know how to help you. Whether a Christian exorcism, or a cleansing ritual from another path, it’s quite possible to remedy the situation. Or at the very least, better understand it.

On a side note… it strikes me that the original injunctions not to meddle in what we call the “supernatural” were similar in intent to modern gun control… an attempt to prevent a potentially dangerous tool from being used by “the wrong people.” And it was so successful that now, centuries later, many people even doubt the power ever existed. Hrmm.. something to ponder, I reckon.

-K

(as to my own experiences, a few, mostly in the "felt something there, later got corraboration" vein -- not half so interesting as some of these!)
 
Once, when we had moved into a new house, it was late at night and I had to go to the bathroom. As I looked into the mirror, I saw a little blond girl in a long nightdress in back of me. Turned and she was gone.

A dream fragment or the supernatural. don't want to really know.

One thing, if I hear howling and chains, I ain't going into the basement to check it with a Glock 21 and a Surefire in Harries position. I am beating feet down the road.

I've seen to many movies to do that trick.
 
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