The Paranormal

[Lurkin' 'n' Jerkin']

I never had a full one but I did almost induce one. All you kids at home, try this!

This is 100% a real phenomenon that I have also experienced. I tend to just think of it as species of lucid dreaming, but it is experientially pretty different and a lot more vivid that the standard "realize mid-dream that you're dreaming" kind of thing, and "out of body experience" describes what it feels like a lot better. Some of the experiences I've had in this state lead me to be open to the idea that it really does involve entering some sort of out-of-body, free-floating consciousness state quite distinct from dreaming. I had a friend with epilepsy once; when I described my experiences entering this dream state, she said it sounded similar to her experiences with the onset of an epileptic fit. My technique was basically the same as yours:

1. Go to sleep normally and wake up earlier than usual
2. Wake up and stay awake for a few minutes
3. Go back to sleep for a couple hours with the intention of inducing an out-of-body experience
4. As you soon as you begin to feel or realize that you're waking up, keep your body perfectly still (including not moving or opening your eyes), and imagine yourself exiting your physical body. I would cycle through a few different imagined sensations: falling, rolling, jumping, or wiggling out of my body; or focusing on an image in the distance that would grow larger and more vivid if I were succeeding. I'd shift from one thing to the other after a few seconds, and if I cycled through all of them a few times unsuccessfully, I'd just wake up. I'd say you have about a minute window to work with, and you'll have to experiment with what visualizations work for you.
5. If you don't succeed in exiting your body and inducing the experience, you'll wake up, and which point you can reaffirm you intentions and go back to sleep to try next time. When I did succeed, I'd feel myself sort of being pulled out of my body while a pinpoint of light in the distance would come toward me growing larger and larger (very much a tunnel of light kind of thing), and as it passed the plane of my vision and enveloped me, I would be free from my body and off to explore wherever. You might experience hypnic jerks, or spasms your body undergoes while you fall asleep, that can shake you out of the vision. I felt like I had to surf over them like waves as I was approaching the light.

 

[skol]

Reading your stories is interesting and it reminded me about one event that was at least a bit odd, so I’ll share it so you too can have a read.

So to start, when I was in the late teens I switched rooms in my family house when one of my older siblings moved out. It was much bigger and nicer, even though our place was rather old with mid-quality Soviet or post Soviet furniture.

In this new room I would sometimes hear noises. You know the stuff, creak of wood, some other easily explainable stuff. I was kind of afraid of the dark till pretty late, so I always explained it to myself as „yeah it’s just your imagination, just get over it.

It wouldn’t help either that later I would occasionally experience sleep paralysis after moving there. And it would all feel like /x/ creepypastas. You feel like you woke up, yet there is some shadowy creature above you and you can’t wake up. Or you feel like you’re getting strangled and you can’t even try to scream. All fun. For this my explanation was that the bed was kinda shit and I probably block my air tract when I turn at night.

Anyways, the main story. In early 20’s I had my, now ex, girlfriend over and she was staying the night. It was just us at the house. We were sleeping in my bed and suddenly her words woke me up. „Something is knocking in the wardrobe”. And there was this loud knock. As if you’d knock with your knuckles against a plank. Weird part is that I just turned on the nightstand lamp and went to check the wardrobe - it was all packed with clothes so no chance of hanger starting to swing because of draft or mouse etc. Besides, that wasn’t the sound, it really sounded like a knock, slow, heavy, about 5-6 times.

We kinda slept normally, with the lamp on, through the rest of the night. I asked her in the morning, thinking it maybe was a dream. She confirmed it wasn’t just my dream.
Usually I prefer to be skeptical, yet this one event makes me scratch my head. When I was very little, one of my parents died and this room used to be their main bedroom. It was many many years before I used that room, so moving there didn’t seem weird due to sentiments, yet it adds some layer of mystery to it in my mind.

 

[The Taco Santo!]

This is interesting. You know I read once that people apparently used to have a more biphasic sleep pattern? They’d sleep, wake up for an hour or two and do stuff that was chill and then go back to sleep.

I do this very often, at least once a week.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

A lot of paranormal acceptance seemingly stems from whether you consider spirits evil or not. Like really, why would someone who got murdered in a house be so fucking seething they'd linger for 88 years and terrorize everyone else? Are spirits autistic and intensely simple-minded? If you're a spirit unable to move on, and you're at full mental capacity, you'd have other shit to do than "my murderer died 150 years ago! Im so angyy!!!".

Smosh, which is a very pro-lgbtq2s+ type company, had a spooky stories podcast and most of it actually angled more on a mildly upset spirit who always hung out in the corner of the eye. Many of these cases they'd do some kind of sage burning cleanout and it worked. Of course, 5 gay weeders living together can hype each other up to believe there's a spirit instead of their 80 year old house making noises.

It's the same as seeing rational adult widows being like "nah my wife wouldn't want me to move on and get a new family; she'd prefer I die single, seething!". Nigga why would spirits want aimless pain onto everyone? If anything, a dead murderer would want that. Victim? Nah. The whole paranormal debate is always so infantile because of this one point. Start out assuming spirits aren't evil and it suddenly becomes a very dull concept.

Same with mythological creatures like gnomes who eat your porridge and fix your shoes and disappear. You know, actual "real life" mythos from hundreds of years ago.

 

[BurntBlinis]

Would experiences of the recently deceased visiting the living in the form of butterflies fit here ? Got a few to share.

 

[Taco Salad]

Been lurking the thread for a while, figured I'd finally share my experiences.
I have several, so I'm going to spoiler them to prevent posting a massive wall of text.

Spoiler: Full-bodied Apparition in a Drainage Pipe

Age 10, was exploring a forest area near my house with a classmate. We came across a river that had a large metal drainage pipe running into its side. My friend walks into the pipe for a minute, then comes out looking concerned and says he "heard a gunshot in there." Being the daring, adventurous type, I decide to walk into the pipe myself and check it out. As soon as I step foot in there, I see a fully formed human figure that is completely white, self-illuminating, and otherwise featureless. The shape makes me assume that it's a man, although I can't make out any hair or clothing. I instantly recognize, "Oh shit, that's a ghost" but force myself to stare at it. "He" is walking around in circles as if disoriented, leaning down towards the ground as if trying to find something. I continue to stare at him as this behavior repeats for about a minute, before it finally sinks in that this thing isn't human and maybe I should run away because he seems to gradually be getting closer. So I step out, tell my friend what I saw, and we run the fuck out of the forest.

Spoiler: Minor weird shit in grandma's kitchen

My maternal grandma lived in an older house, and from an early age I felt like it was haunted - it just had general weird/bad vibes. Two weird things happened in the kitchen a few years apart: One, I heard the voice of a young-teenage girl whisper in my right ear. It sounded like human language, but the few words spoken were incomprehensible. It even felt like someone whispered into my ear because there was a slight tingling sensation. Two, a plastic bag full of trash flew off the pantry door handle and landed on the floor 1-2 feet away... immediately afterwards the dog started barking aggressively towards the pantry. The handles on the bag were not broken at all, and that was the first time the dog ever barked at a moving object.

Spoiler: Poltergeist activity after dad died

At 18, my dad passed away from a stroke. I continued to live alone in his house for a few months after that before moving in with a friend. During these months, I recall two instances of paranormal activity, one very minor and one not so minor. Minor one: Around 3 a.m, I heard a loud crash in the kitchen outside my room, like a frying pan had been knocked over and fallen to the ground. I immediately went to look and saw nothing. Not so minor: One night, I was laying in bed facing my closed bedroom door trying to fall asleep. At some point, I felt a presence enter my room through the door. My eyes immediately shot all the way open and I was on high alert, staring forward, just knowing that something was in the room with me. It didn't feel either good or bad... just this hair-raising feeling of "something that I can't see is definitely in here right now." Now, I was being a bit messy at this time and had two piles of clothes laying around my room - one on top of my computer desk right next to my bed, and the other on the floor in front of my bookshelves. A few moments after the presence entered the room, I watched as a few pieces of clothing from on top of the pile atop my desk were lightly knocked over to the ground. I was staring right at it as it happened, since the desk was immediately in front of me. I wasn't even surprised because I knew an entity was in there with me and felt like it was going to do something... but I was still thinking "ohshitohshit." Moments after that, the exact same thing happened with the second pile of clothing that was on my floor - a few pieces on top got knocked to the ground. (There was no vibration or wind or anything) After that, the presence left.

Spoiler: Rock throwing & Growl at a haunted spot

While living with a small group of friends who were all into the paranormal, we went to check out a famous, haunted collapsed bridge outside the city where a woman had allegedly crashed and died in the early 1900s. The first time we visited, we all noted that it felt very peaceful, like there were just "good spirits" around - we wished any spirits in the area well, and went home uneventfully. The second time, about a week later, everything was different. As soon as we started along the short path to the bridge, we all noticed that the energy felt "off." Unlike last time, there was this general feeling of unwelcomeness in the air. Approaching the bridge, it was like pushing through invisible walls of bad energy. Immediately upon reaching the bridge, we started hearing the sound of tiny rocks/pebbles being thrown at the ground around us underneath the bridge. We saw the pebbles being knocked off from the top of the bridge down towards us. We all knew this was totally unnatural - there was no wind, or anything to cause the little rocks to be thrown off. Not to mention this area was totally silent one week ago. It started getting more intense to the point where we felt unsafe and unable to walk around underneath the bridge at all without risking being hit. We all decided to get the fuck out, and as we were run-walking out of there, myself and the girl in front of me heard an unnatural-sounding growl coming from the grassy area next to the path. I turned around and hissed back at it like a weirdo, and also immediately went into the grass to look for any potential animals that could have made the sound to rule out that possibility. I saw nothing, and neither did my friend who heard the sound and was also looking for any potential animal who could have made it. We told the other 2 friends, and then we all ran back to the car lol. There may have been something that followed us home after that, which was upsetting the dogs at night, but after I tried doing a "ritual" and demanded it to leave, it stopped.

Spoiler: Demon(?) Attack & Spiritually Transformative Experience (STE)

This happened when I was 15. Not going to spell out my life story for the background info here, but basically I was a very depressed, self-hating autistic kid whose explanation for why I struggled to make and keep friends was "I'm some invisible ghost or secretly a demon who everyone hates." One night I was taking a shower and was having intensely emotional, dark suicidal thoughts that were somewhat worse than usual. I got out of the shower and while I was getting dressed I hear an unearthly HISSSSS come from right next to me (note: I was standing next to the toilet and I can't totally rule out that it wasn't the toilet, but the subsequent events challenge that explanation imo). I'm completely freaked out, my mind goes into total "I'm in danger" mode, and I run into my room. I sit at my desk and I remember reading about some weird New Age "spell" years ago that says to think about happy, light, heavenly things if you're ever being attacked by malevolent forces. So I close my eyes and repeat the words "Heaven, Angel, Wings, Light" over and over again, trying to imagine some generic clouds of light or some shit (I wasn't religious and had no idea about that stuff for the most part). After 1-2 minutes, I opened my eyes, and it's like I was a different person. If you've ever read accounts of positive NDE (Near Death Experiences), I felt that absolute, unconditional, overpowering feeling of love & peace completely overtake me... it's hard to explain but it's like my entire sense of self/personality was "overwritten" by this new.... feeling(?). All of the dark shit I had been thinking/feeling now felt completely unimportant and "silly" even. I was shrugging it off like it was nothing, and it was replaced by unconditional love I was feeling for everyone/everything (despite the fact that I hated humanity as an angsty autistic person literally minutes beforehand). I heard footsteps walking through the living room down the hallway, and the sound of a pile of magazines being knocked over. After allowing myself a minute to adjust to this new... sense of self... I walked into my mom's room and asked her if she just walked through the living room and she said no. No one else was home. Also, no magazines or books had been knocked over that I could see. I then walked back to my room, where I soon heard footsteps walking in the grass right outside my window. I looked outside, and though it was dark, I couldn't see anything. After that nothing else happened, and I was just soaking in the blissful feelings until I went to sleep. I was never entirely the same person after that... though I continued to struggle with the same depression and self-hatred, sometimes it's like a switch would turn on and I would become that same "self" I was on that night and not give a shit about the bad stuff anymore.... until the switch turned back off. Over time, it became more integrated into my personality as a whole... but to this day I don't know what to make of it. I wish I could be like those NDErs who are like "omfg this shit changed my life forever and now i'm so happy yay!!!" but the truth is... while it did permanently alter the core of who I am, it didn't erase the darkness, and I continued to make absolutely stupid life choices afterwards... and I still do.

Spoiler: Mom's Story of a Ghost Haunting her friend's townhouse (poltergeist activity & full-body apparition)

This is my mom's experience that she shared with me multiple times throughout my life before she passed away. This happened in the 1970s when my mom was a graduate student. My mom was secular, agnostic, and high-functioning autistic, so she was always very literal about things and in fact was quite lacking on the imaginative/creative side so I don't see much of a possibility that she made this up. So my mom had a friend who lived in a townhouse nearby hers. Her friend claimed the townhouse was haunted by a ghost, and frequently when my mom would visit there would be poltergeist activity like the TV changing channels, drawers opening/closing, and the sink turning on/off. The friend wasn't too bothered by it and came to think of the ghost as being like a friend, naming him "Charlie." One night as my mom was driving home from the place, she felt a presence in her car with her. That night, she woke up in the middle of the night to see an older man dressed in a mid 1800s suit and hat standing over her bedside looking down at her. She screamed and he disappeared, then she slept with the light on for weeks afterwards. She and her friend later learned that the townhouse was built in the 1800s and was owned by a man named Charles - they were shown a picture of him, and he looked exactly like the man my mom had seen. She told me that after her friend moved away to another state, the friend began to be haunted again by this same ghost once she started openly talking about him again. This led my mom to believe that talking about a ghost attracts them to you.

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

Testing out some large doses of lithium orotate lately and I can say it leads to some weird, remarkable dreams. Nightmares aren't really a thing, you seem to get control over things when they get scary. Some of this recent one involved uprooting a mailbox in the neighborhood I grew up in 30 years ago because I'm now part of their HOA and we need to put up a speed limit sign.

This was followed by my family going shopping in an underground mall next to an amusement park/zoo. My dad jumped into the alligator pond for some reason towards the end but I went in to rescue him. Large alligator was just sunning on the edge and didn't give a shit.

The more I think about it there are really a lot of issues with others and my own sense of self-worth that were revealed in this dream.

Would experiences of the recently deceased visiting the living in the form of butterflies fit here ? Got a few to share.

Of course, I have a story about this myself but it involves a fox.

 

[The Purple Ghost]

Only just found this thread. But I have to believe there is something out there beyond our understanding
since I have had two different people who are staunch anti-spirital, very soyence people tell me about their unexplainable events.
- My dad working in a very old house had a full, heavy bottle of whiteboard liquid get thrown on the floor when there was no one else around
- My boss's wife is able to consistently somewhat heal people? Something about her hands getting hot when she treats sick people vs when treating others.
To the point that her clients always make comments about it... or something like that would need more details
And this is on top of the zillions of strange stories I have heard from my grandfather who grew up in the middle east
(stories about Djinns and people with goat legs and shadowy figures)

Happy to share more and I will try and re-probe my boss about his wife, cause that one was very strange...

 

[Otterly]

My boss's wife is able to consistently somewhat heal people?

Someone once told me they’d had a really bad headache, and their kid, who was maybe 3-4 or so had told her he’d fix it. She humoured him, and he put her hand on her head and she said ooh that’s much better thank you you are sweet. She said she felt his hands were really warm and she was worried that he and her were coming down with something. She then realised the headache was just gone.
She rationalised it as maybe she’d changed position or stretched or just been relaxed by him doing it but you could tell it had stuck with her. Same kid used to ‘talk’ to people who weren’t in the room as a baby, and is now a very grumpy but rather nice teenager with no apparent supernatural powers other than the usual ability to make more mess than a poltergeist.

 

[The Purple Ghost]

Someone once told me they’d had a really bad headache, and their kid, who was maybe 3-4 or so had told her he’d fix it. She humoured him, and he put her hand on her head and she said ooh that’s much better thank you you are sweet. She said she felt his hands were really warm and she was worried that he and her were coming down with something. She then realised the headache was just gone.
She rationalised it as maybe she’d changed position or stretched or just been relaxed by him doing it but you could tell it had stuck with her. Same kid used to ‘talk’ to people who weren’t in the room as a baby, and is now a very grumpy but rather nice teenager with no apparent supernatural powers other than the usual ability to make more mess than a poltergeist.

Yeah, like I don't remember exactly what it was that she could apparently do, I just know it was enough that they do NOT want to talk about it and I only even found out cause my boss can't stop talking lol
I'll get the conversation over there and see if I can get more info, cause it sounded very interesting.

Could him or his wife be full of crap? Or could it be reading into coincidences?
Maybe, but nevertheless it is interesting!

 

[Fek]

A lot of notable traits and memories vanish in children once they typically age beyond 6-8. I'm sure many have seen less "paranormal" iterations of this with small children who can just naturally play a piano at an expert level, etc. The memories do seem to vanish into thin air, but the traits? I'd wager the traits are still there and either dormant or blotted out by the..conditions of modernity, let's say.

 

[TheRedChair]

Same with mythological creatures like gnomes who eat your porridge and fix your shoes and disappear. You know, actual "real life" mythos from hundreds of years ago.

Many of the myths are based on facts. The Cyclops of ancient lore is based on fossilized bones of a species of Triceratops found on Cyprus.

Troy was a myth until it was found.

Legends and myths of the past are an interesting subject but I do understand where you are coming from.

 

[Romulus augustulus]

one of my friends, who is a elderly Appalachian mountain man type, is a water witch. He uses some bent metal rods and can find buried water lines and where its best to drill a well (nearly all houses here use well water). its pretty neat to watch him do it. He doesn't make any money off it so he's got no reason to fake it.

My great great grandmother is what i'd guess you call a medicine woman. She has little "spells" to help soothe common ailments and such. they're not really spells per-se but instead are very specific prayers. one quirk i remember was that if she was not going to be the one to do the prayer she had to write it down in her handwriting and give it directly to the person who was going to say it, and if that person was to ever need to pass the prayer along they had to also write it in their own handwriting and so on. This kind of folk medicine used to be really common (and i think it has some merit) but now that medical technology and access has improved so much here in the last 50 years the need for it has basically ended and the tradition is too. She's 90 and it will die in our family with her.

Some other folklore/magic i've heard off:

• The blood of a black chicken can treat shingles disease.
• the seventh son of a seventh son can talk to the dead.
• some people can see events in the future.
• planting by the signs. e.g canning when the signs are in the bowels will taint what's being canned
• haints
• keeping a onion slice near your bed will keep the flu away on a winter night

unfortunately a lot of the folklore has been hijacked by the cringe childless cat lady wiccan types to try to justify their believe in weird paganism and healing crystals. when you actually talk to the people who were raised in it the heydey its all deeply rooted in cristianity and belief in god. My great great grandmother mentioned above has went to church twice a week for her entire life.

 

[Count Grishnackh]

Would experiences of the recently deceased visiting the living in the form of butterflies fit here ? Got a few to share.

Here in Texas, and possibly other places, we look at cardinals as a visitation from loved ones gone.

 

[The Taco Santo!]

Pigeons, here in Louisiana. Pigeons and whipporwills. Sometimes Owls. All of them, of course, are psychopomps.

 

[Zhores Medvedev]

1. Go to sleep normally and wake up earlier than usual
2. Wake up and stay awake for a few minutes
3. Go back to sleep for a couple hours with the intention of inducing an out-of-body experience

I inadvertently did many of the steps you outlined in my youth, I was able to have many out of body experiences. The chief one was absolutely terrifying

Spoiler: Creepy shit

So was I very clearly was asleep and I was perfectly aware and lucid of this, but also very much aware of my surroundings and I wanted to explore my house at night I was fairly young (Early Teens) at the time, so doing so would have gotten me in trouble. I was walking around house and was marveling at house absolutely silent everything was, no ticking of clocks or sounds of AC or electronics running everything was completely and utterly silent. That was when I got to my living room and saw a tall human male figure holding my dog who had died many years before me having this experience. Some context, I'm not an animal person, I never cared for this dog particularly, I grew up with it and liked it, but when he died I happened to be at friends house and I wasn't really beat up about him dying, life for me just kinda went on and I never though about him again. But I look closer at the man, his face is entirely static, a constantly moving and shifting blob. He was sitting on the rocking chair absently petting the dog when all of a sudden he turns to face me. (his face didn't "look" at me, he had no discernable features, He just became seemingly aware of me and I felt like I was being stared at) My dog also then notice me and runs up to me wagging his tale and began to run between all of the couches in the room. He always did that when he was excited, even when he got very old. So he runs around licks me a bit but then returns to the static mans lap. My dog sits there for a moment and then falls asleep in in the figures arms and he starts petting my dog again. Then this voice as soft as a whisper, yet still very loud in the silence said. "You don't miss him, but he misses you" My dog then perks up and just stares at me from the mans lap. The voice then said. "How are you going to react when those you think you love are gone?" They both just stood there staring at me. I felt this hot guilt rush over me and I went to speak to the man and I as I spoke I woke up in my bed perfectly awake about to respond to the man "I'm Sorry I...." I then stopped because I was clearly in my bed and It was starting to be light outside. I was sweating profusely and had a weird feeling that stuck with me a long time.

It would have been maybe 5 years since this dog had died and I in no way thought or cared about it at all, so to have an experience so vivid like this was insane. I lucid dream all the time and never have I experienced the sheer presence of the "Static man" again. I really think something was trying to tell me something and for what its worth the lesson stuck. I'm much kinder in my dealings with everyone and everything in my life

Edit: grammar

 

[Lurkin' 'n' Jerkin']

I really think something was trying to tell me something and for what its worth the lesson stuck.

I met somebody like that once in one of my experiences, although his face and demeanor were very different. It wasn't frightening (in fact he was downright friendly), but it was utterly confusing, and I had no idea how to respond to him properly. It's had a profound impact on my life, although I have yet to figure out what exactly it was he was trying to tell to me. Sorry for being vague, but it's too personal to go into detail. I can say that after meeting him, I am humbler about the limits of my own knowledge and preconceptions, more open to the spiritual life, and I am much more inclined than before toward the idea that matter is a projection of consciousness, rather than consciousness being an emergent property of matter. Like you, I really do think somebody or something beyond my own imagination was trying to tell me something.

 

[Fek]

I love it when people have more to share in this thread. Easily one of my favorites.

I really think something was trying to tell me something and for what its worth the lesson stuck.

I met somebody like that once in one of my experiences

Very cool that both of you figured out you were being taught something instead of freaking out and having the message lost entirely to the dark forgotten recesses of the mind. Fear is the obstacle to many precious experiences in life.

I am much more inclined than before toward the idea that matter is a projection of consciousness

I'm fond of one way it is put by someone long-since passed on: The whole wide world is yourself pushed out.

Seems contradictory and can absolutely outrage the intellect, but it's true. Typically, all it takes is for someone to have one single experience of 'connecting' via a dream, entheogens, a "hallucination" brought on by sensory/food deprivation, a near death experience, etc. Once that realization is made, one's life is seen quite differently moving forward.

 

[The Taco Santo!]

I have recurring dreams about a city. It's not at all unlike New Orleans, where I grew up, but it's not New Orleans. I've dreamed about this place so often and consistently that I could draw a map. It's not a scary place, but there are a couple of 'iffy' areas. Anyway, it's very peaceful there. Should I go on a dream-quest to find my own unknown Kadath or what?

 

[The Taco Santo!]

I was in a neighborhood last night that's a bunch of above-ground tombs turned into small houses people live in, like in Cairo.