Paranormal

[BiggDick]

so the girl's still a mess about her dog. In that uber spiritual kinda way, claims he's still dwelling in her house.

So we're sitting there on the couch finishing Superbad when, in the kitchen, on its own, his leash just kinda falls off the back of the chair...

She insists it's him still dwelling. I tend toward more empirical explanations to things, but still get some pretty serious goosebumps either way.

Anywho who's got a good paranormal story? For spooky season and what not.

Come on Japhy, this thread is teed up for ya!

[pdub]

I have never really had a paranormal experience that couldn't be explained by more likely factors.

[shindig]

In my downstairs' bathroom I have always had issues with towels falling off the hook for no reason ever since I bought the house. It's weird. These are solid hooks with a white ball or such on the end. I'll walk into the bathroom and the towel is just lying there on the floor. Yesterday my 4ft step ladder fell off a hook in my basement when I was watching a movie, haven't used the ladder in months. My house was built in 1928.

[twocoach]

I used to bartend at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs and some of the old timers had stories about lots of "paranormal activity". I never experience anything other than a creaky old building but who knows.

https://frightfind.com/the-broadmoor/

https://www.fox21news.com/fox21-news-we ... oor-hotel/

[Sparko]

Rice Auditorium and Yates Hall on Baker's campus used to freak me out. Rice was built in the 60s, but something there would mess with people at night. Yates you could hear doors opening and closing. I believe that there is something there that exists and needs to be studied and understood. I had a drawer open and shut at Gettyburg in a hotel built on the site of the Union's large hospital. Something also screamed my ear. Some of us seem to be more perceptive. Wish I wasn't.

[BiggDick]

yeah, some seem to be more perceptive, even if that itself is explainable in some empirical self-fulfilling kinda way.

If you go into a dark old building expecting to be spooked, you're more likely to be spooked.

I don't particularly enjoy it. Some people do enjoy that shit. "OMG this dark old building just made a noise OMG that was so cool let's do this all night OMG!"

Then again, some people enjoy scary movies too.

I prefer funny movies. Like the Scary Movies, not to be confused with actual scary movies.

[japhy]

My current home in KC, it's not dark or spooky. It was built in 1946 by a mafia guy. He ran a restaurant. The house has 16 inch thick masonry walls on the exterior and the first floor is 2.5” concrete slab on steel bar joists. All of the walls have expanded metal mesh on the studs and joists and about an inch of plaster on top of that. It is a bomb shelter.

When the plumber was here a couple of weeks ago he looked at the construction and immediately knew it was a mafia house. He had worked on older homes like this before.

We have John (the dad), Rose (mom) and “the boys” that wander the house and the yard. Our bedroom is on the second floor. At around 6:00 AM someone walks up the wood stairs to our bedroom and walks across the floor to our bed. This happens off and on. No rhyme or reason to the activity that we can figure out.

My wife has a sleep app on her phone that records tossing and turning and snoring. The volume of the steps varies. One morning it was pretty loud. My wife checked her sleep app and she has a recording, it was picked up on the app. You can clearly hear someone walking up the bedroom stairs in hard soled shoes and then walk across the bedroom to our bed. You can hear the footsteps and the floor creaking as if there was weight to the thing. If I look up when the steps come, I never see anything, just the floor sounds. We have both been awake at times when our visitor comes up the steps. Neither of us have ever seen anything.

There is a door onto a patio, off the kitchen in the house. We put a very secure latch on the door. It is spring loaded, you pull it sideways and then it pivots inward to unlock, and then it snaps back when locked open. When we are out of town Claus stays at our place with our livestock herd. Our older dog Stella was getting up at night and looking around the kitchen. Claus wanted to know what was going on so he put a camera up on the kitchen counter to record events. For background, Claus is a retired German electrical/computer/software engineer, very pragmatic. He firmly believes ghosts don’t exist.

We got a text from Claus early one morning with a video attached. The camera is pointed at the patio door. At around 2:00 AM you can see the latch open itself up. You can see the mechanism move, pivot and then spring into “open” with a sound we know well. The door knob then turns and the door opens maybe 6”-8”. Then there is a white “cloud” that comes through the door and passes into the stairway up to our bedroom. Right after that Stella comes into the kitchen and starts looking around. Once she gets in the kitchen there are dozens of small round lights that appear and swirl around her the whole time she is there. Claus calls her and she goes back to the room where he is sleeping. As soon as she leaves the room the lights disappear. Later she walks back into the kitchen again and the lights start swirling around her again until she leaves.

Claus was rattled when he sent us the video, what the hell was that? We reminded him that the house is haunted. He is a convert now.

John passed away in 1976, Rose lived here until 2007. One of the boys died just before her, by suicide, not in the house. The other surviving son was institutionalized and died a couple years later of liver disease. The house sat vacant until 2009, when a family bought it and subsequently moved out a year later and let it go into foreclosure. We bought it in 2011 and have been here ever since.

The boys slam closet doors at night in one of the bedrooms. They also sit out on the back porch and smoke cigarettes at night. Occasionally they freak the dogs or the cats out. Annie once saw John standing in our back room in his work clothes looking at her in the kitchen. I have never seen them but I feel them when they are around.

[BiggDick]

top that, Wayans brothers!

[ChalkRocker]

That's a fascinating story, japhy. Good stuff.

[japhy]

Some people seem naturally predisposed to feel these things when they are around. If you want to test your senses there is a public spot in KC that is pretty active. Go to the River Market Antique mall at 5th and Wyandotte. Go up to the third floor and walk around. We usually run into something in the northwest corner of that floor. It moves around though.

The last time we were in there was several months ago. There is a book section on the third floor. As we were walking through I said to Annie, "I don't think it is here." Right then a book flew off a bookshelf and went about 4 feet and landed at my feet. We laughed and I said, " I stand corrected."

[pdub]

I guess ghosts and I aren’t a thing.
I’ve tried.
It’s probably me.

[japhy]

I do suspect there is a genetic component to it. My daughter's mom and I both have it. Both of my daughters have it. My mom even in her current state of dementia has some aspects of it.

The night my aunt died, my mom was in a rehab facility trying to recover from a fall that broke her pelvis. She sat up in bed and told my sister, "we need to call Rosella, she fell." My sister said, "no mom, you fell and are confused, they gave you pain meds, we already called Rosella and she knows you fell." Mom said, " not, you don't understand, Rosella fell and she is hurt."

The next morning my cousin walked into his mom's house on the south side of Chicago and found her dead from a fall.

The day my mom fell we were in the Empire preparing for Solstice. My sister texted me about my mom's fall the night before. I told my daughter when she got to town later the afternoon. She said, "I sorta knew that happened, I had a dream about Nanny falling last night."

I tried to introduce Dr Pepper's daughter and her friend to our resident ghost in the Empire, Joe. Joe didn't seem interested. Joe also spends time in the grocery cross the street from our studio building. Joe lived in the back of our building and managed the grocery across the street back in the 1960's-70's.

The two young women wanted to meet the resident thing at the old house in Conejos when we visited but I nixed that idea. That thing can ruin your day. The barracks in Fort Garland has something nasty in it as well. These malevolent things can attach themselves to you and leave with you for a period of time, it is very unpleasant.

[BiggDick]

my grandpa was apparently a raging alcoholic.

After he died, my auntie insisted she could hear glass bottles clanking in the cabinet where he kept his booze. Auntie was gonna move into that house, but the fam since sold it instead.

When we were wee young lads my little brother had two imaginary friends, Chachi and Booboo. He would randomly insist they were present with us in random places, and start talking to them.

I also had a friend in HS who did way too much acid her freshman year at KU. Like, several doses a day for like a month straight, plus whatever other drugs she could get her hands on.

One night, as the party dies down and everyone starts passing out, and she stayed up in the kitchen, sitting in a chair, staring vacantly at the wall. Next morning, she was still there just staring. This went on all weekend. Initially no one thought much of it, til it became more and more concerning. Eventually she ran out of the house and ran around town and caused some ruckus in traffic. Cops arrived to bring order to the situation, and she ended up biting one and going to jail. It became clear this was less just partying too hard and more some sorta psychosis. For a while after that she'd act more and more normal, but would still bounce back into these weird ass states.

Another buddy's mother passed from cancer in HS. The girl randomly calls him up one day, they're just chatting normally, as they were friends either way. Suddenly outta the blue, she asks, "how's your mother doing?" The buddy replies, wtf, my mom's been dead for several years, you know that. To that the girl replies,"oh, well I brought her back."

I dunno if that last story belongs in the paranormal thread or maybe in the dark star thread.

[pdub]

I do suspect there is a genetic component to it. My daughter's mom and I both have it. Both of my daughters have it. My mom even in her current state of dementia has some aspects of it.

I've always been fascinated by it and love horror and scares.

In college I took ENGL 351 - Fiction Writing - and one of my short stories was about a for-hire physician in the late 1800s who travelled cross country to Seattle to help determine why two sisters were seeing ghosts. Of course, as a man of science he didn't believe what the parents, cast out from the church for saying God had abandoned them, and the very sickly ( their bodies twisted, sometimes walking like crabs/insects ) girls were actually being tormented by spirits. During his investigations he finds a cave with a swimming hole that the girls would frequent before being "possessed" and has to wade across to find Suquamish markings. Not soon after he begins to see and hear things and eventually fully formed figures begin to speak with him. He kinda just looses his shit and accepts that he was wrong all along - there is more than just science and for believing otherwise he now knows he's been cursed for eternity.

But then I had some postscript:

"There was little known of the disease septicemia, or blood poisoning, at the turn of the 19th century. The bacteria can easily be spread by contact with the germ-usually through absorption of the septic material. In some cases, septicemia can be present and living in rotting food, flesh, or contaminated water. Some symptoms of the disease include delirium, loss of movement in the spine, and epileptic seizure. Septicemia also tends to coincide with osteomyelitis, or an infection of the bones. Treatment was dangerous then, and included the removal of the toxins that contaminated various organs. This could only be done through surgery and blood letting. These words come from Louis Pasteur, one of the largest contributors to modern science,
“It is a terrifying thought that life is at the mercy of the multiplication of these minute bodies…it is a consoling hope that science will not always remain powerless before such enemies” (1878, Germ Theory and Its Applications to Medicine and Surgery)."

[japhy]

I think ghosts are a form of energy we just don't understand or have a scientific way to explain/measure at this point in time. They can push on a floor and make it creak, they can throw a book in response to a comment, they can open doors. It is more than a visual anomaly.

Long ago I decided it's a rabbit hole I had no interest in going down. I don't look for them, they seem to seek me out.

[TDub]

I believe they exist. I dont understand why they exist or what they are exactly. But something exists.

I've been working renovating buildings from the 1800s and early 1900s and had my tools move clear across the room without a sound being made. power tools turn on randomly, batteries go from full charge to dead in seconds. I dont know....theres more around than we can currently explain.

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

I don't know if this is "paranormal".
I am pretty sure I already shared this story in here.
When my Grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer my mother bought her a bracelet. It was a thin gold bracelet with a little diamond. When my grandmother died my mother took the bracelet off my grandmother's wrist and put it on her wrist. About a year later on my grandmother's (or mother's?) birthday, my father heard my mother scream in the bathroom. She was in the shower and apparently my mother snagged the bracelet on a washcloth or loofa and it went down the shower drain. They called a plumber. No luck. Gone. About a year later, on my mother's (or grandmother's?) birthday, my father hears my mother with the identical scream he heard when the bracelet fell down the shower drain. Only two times he ever heard her scream like that. He runs to the bathroom and wonders wtf? My mother points to the toilet. In the toilet is the bracelet. I accused my father of buying an identical bracelet and asked him why he would put it in the toilet. He swore he didn't. My mother 100% believes it was "a sign" of some sort and not just coincidental.

On a semi related side note - My grandmother lived with us when she was sick and going through chemo. We had a dog. Before my grandmother lived with us our dog often slept in the "back" (spare) bedroom at night. On the floor. When my grandmother moved in to our house my grandmother slept in the "back" (spare) bedroom and then our dog, on her own free will, "moved" in to my sister's bedroom to sleep. My sister had moved out and was in college. After my grandmother died our dog would still sleep on the floor in my sister's bedroom, or on a rare occasion in our dining room on the rug. We didn't know why sometimes she would occasionally sleep in the dining room but she didn't sleep in the "back" (spare) bedroom. I don't recall if it was my dog's, or my grandmother's birthday, or a night in-between their birthdays (their birthdays were 10 days apart) but there was a significance to the date. My father woke up and something told him to check on the dog. He walked in to my sister's bedroom. Dog wasn't there. He walked in to the dining room. Dog wasn't there. He couldn't figure out where she was. He walked in to the "back" (spare) bedroom. The dog was sleeping on the bed. Not on the floor. The same bed my grandmother slept on. BIZARRE being that our dog was old. Couldn't jump up on the couch, or a bed, or anything. Never had slept on the bed in the past. I didn't put the dog on the bed. My mother didn't put the dog on the bed. My father didn't put the dog on the bed. Who/what did?

[BiggDick]

A lot of bridges in, Birmingham

A lot of ghosts!

A lot of houses!

Look over there! A dry ice factory!

Good, place, to,

Get some thinking done!

[BiggDick]

Wait, what the fuck is that YouTube?

It’s supposed to be PhIsh covering the Talking Heads.
If the link doesn’t work, I blame some energy we just don’t understand. You know, paranormal.

Either that or YouTube being a punk and linking some advertisement instead of the tunes.

Either that or this should all be in the dark star thread.

[japhy]

I believe they exist. I dont understand why they exist or what they are exactly. But something exists.

I've been working renovating buildings from the 1800s and early 1900s and had my tools move clear across the room without a sound being made. power tools turn on randomly, batteries go from full charge to dead in seconds. I dont know....theres more around than we can currently explain.

Annie has a theory that renovation work stirs them up. I have lived in a total of four old buildings while renovating them. In each case things happened during the process. In our current KC house Annie swears Rose shows up and watches her every time she changes something. After we tore down Joe's apartment on the back of our studio building in Colorado, he seems to have moved into the grocery store across the street, but not before knocking shit over in the middle of the night.

My friend Ron was working on his old haunted building soon after he purchased it. It was late in the day and he came upon a box of photos. He sat down on the floor and realized there was a mix of photos from the Ute Indian Agency building which he was in, and the adjacent Catholic Church. He started sorting the photos into two piles. He was most of the way through when he heard a loud squawk. He turned and there was crow sitting on a ceiling rafter and it flew straight at him. He ducked and it went past him and out a broken window. He said it scared the shit out of him. He turned around and what had been two piles of photos, was now one pile of photos. He got up and left the building, locked the door and didn't come back for awhile.

He is unsure what to do with the place. The thing in there has attached itself to people. He rarely lets anyone inside. The only time I went in, it attached itself to me. He brought a Ute "medicine" person there once to see if they could get rid of it. They went inside the building for a bit and the medicine person walked out and said they did not want to mess with the thing.

It's a conundrum. It is one of the most historically significant buildings in the Empire, but it may be unwise to let the public inside. The previous owner took a bulldozer to the building and pushed 2/3 of the building down and then hung himself from the ceiling rafters. It was used as a slave quarters for Ute children sold into slavery to Spanish and Anglo families. There are people buried on the property in unmarked graves. It was the home of the first Lieutenant Governor of Colorado and the first grist mill in the State.

It is the creepiest building I have ever been inside.