I don't know if this counts as a ghost story at all, but it's really truly true.
Once when I was in college I was broke and agreed to go with a friend and we'd both get tested for psychic abilities for some absurdly tiny amount of money, like $10 or something. Yes, pitiful, but I wanted a burger and was BROKE.
I did the test and it took FOREVER, much longer than they said it'd take. Turns out I was apparently scoring off the charts. Seriously. Only, this is me, and I was scoring off the charts THE WRONG WAY. Yes, I was missing EVERYTHING, far more than you're supposed to miss, and the poor graduate student didn't have a protocol for what to do when someone MASSIVELY FLUNKS THE PSYCHIC TEST.
I sat and waited and waited and they finally came out, confused, and trying to come up with some explanation or something to test further, (note I had no clue what was going on - they weren't excited like you'd expect if I'd blown away the test, but something was clearly up.
They were apparently of the opinion the tests proved that I had really repressed my psychic abilities or some such thing. Being from a "hard science" background, I informed them that the tests instead proved that no matter how small the sample size, there always exists the possibility of a statistical outlier, and that no, I was not interested in testing further how WRONG I could be most of the time or how bad a guesser I was.
The other day I left a pair of chopsticks next to the sink to be washed, went away for five or ten minutes, came back to wash them, and ... one of them was gone.
Minor, but strange.
I've found several things in the past year that made me think, "I have to save this to show to Michelle!" Now if only I could find them.
I have that sleep paralysis every once in a while - more when I was younger. I used to freak out about it, trying to move and so on, but finally I started just rolling with it. When it happens I just try and go back to sleep. It started happening a lot less once I started doing that.
I've had one episode of sleep paralysis, maybe ten years ago, and even though I knew exactly what it was, it was still terrifying. I saw (hallucinated) a black form gathering up by the ceiling of my bedroom and then swooping down at me. Our minds get up to some weird shit.
Back in grad school (in an article on the old hag that was actually on the syllabus) I read that it happens most often when you sleep on your back, so I trained myself to sleep on my side. And now I can't sleep any other way. Hmph.
Yeah, I'd have it mostly while on my back. And often I'd hear loud rushing wind sounds or maybe voices. But it could happen while I was on my side too. It seemed to happen most when I was really tired.
Not only do I get sleep paralysis, it carries over into my dreams. So inevitably I am trying to run from the BIG!SCARY!MONSTER! and I can't move. I can usually strive so hard to move that I break the paralysis and I wake up. Still, disturbing.
Just this afternoon I took a nap and dreamed myself into an episode of Doctor Who. Not a particular episode, just one my brain made up. We were running from a nameless thing, the TARDIS was about to run out of power (yeah, I know), and... I woke up.
Strange noises upstairs when no one is sleeping up there, I once saw a weird white and opaque figure in one of the bedrooms upstairs - THE SAME BEDROOM that the dogs like to sleep in. And a weird dripping tap that used to come on in the bathroom even after I turned it off.
If you ask most flight attendants they will tell you about haunted hotels and motels. A lot of us have also had experiences on planes...Here's mine! Last month I was working in the front galley of the plane, a boeing 67, with another flight attendant. Halfway through the flight we hear a door slam, footsteps with heavy breathing coming from the flight deck. Thinking it's one of the pilots we start asking if they need anything but no one answers. We head towards the door and no one is there, not even in the washroom next to the flight deck. Most pilots think they have a sense of humor and often play tricks on us. Not these guys, they are known to be by the book and keep to themselves.
Turns out, after we called them to make sure it was not them, that they never left their seats! We told the In-Charge about the noise and she pointed out this plane was known for the unexplained noises and to let it be!
They were staying in a B&B on Catalina island and my step-mom (Terry) was taking a shower. When she got out, "I love you, Terry" was written in the steam on the mirror. She came out and said to my dad, "You're so sweet!" He said, "Why; what'd I do?" "In the mirror...You wrote that sweet message." "What?" So she shows him and he says "I didn't write that." For a while she was convinced he was playing a prank, but my father has never played a prank in his life. Then, when the steam dissipated, my father looked hard for the streaks that should be present had someone wrote on the mirror. There were none. He steamed up the room again to see if there would be remnants of the message, which, again, there should be had someone written on the mirror. There was just a straight mat of fog as if there had never been any message at all. Later, when the checked out, the discovered that that room had a reputation for being haunted. I forget what the said the ghost's name was rumored to be, but they always tell that story.
I don't know if I really consider this a "ghost" story...but well, I might as well share it anyway.
A little background: my aunt Barbara, my Mom's oldest sister, died as a result of injuries sustained from a car accident in January of 1986. The irony is, it wasn't a serious accident, but she'd fallen asleep in the back seat of the car (my then-16-year-old cousin was driving) and had slumped down so that her seatbelt was right over the vulnerable area between her ribs and her hips. When the car jerked to a stop, it cut into her internal organs and she bled to death internally. (Safety tip learned as a result of this: ALWAYS keep your belt around your hips. :-o )
This same aunt and her family loved to travel, and had more than once in the past given us crafts or other souvenirs from their travels as birthday/Christmas gifts. One of them was a little wooden Christmas carousel from Germany (link is not an exact match, but close enough to give the general idea: when the candles in the candlesticks are lit, the heat makes the air move enough to turn the wheel). We would pull this out and light it only at Christmas time. The rest of the time it stayed in a closed cabinet (with a glass door) in my parents' bedroom.
I was in that bedroom, crying with my Mother, not long after we got the news that they couldn't save my aunt. Since it was January, the carousel was in the cabinet, with the door closed. All the windows and all the doors in the bedroom were closed. But when Mom and I happened to glance over at the carousel (I don't remember exactly why), to our shock we both saw it turn all the way around once before stopping. Almost as if it were...well, as sentimental as it probably sounds, we like to think it was Aunt Barbara saying goodbye.
It's never turned since.
Oh, I imagine it probably would if we took it down and put new candles in it, but we've never been able to bring ourselves to. If I remember right, it still has the partly-burned candles in it that we'd left in after that Christmas. It's still sitting on the same shelf in the same cabinet, and every time I look at it I remember my aunt and that little miracle we feel we were granted to ease her loss.
Thanks. And thanks also, quite frankly, for bumping the story back up to the forefront of my memory. It's always been in there, I hadn't forgotten it, but I hadn't really paid a whole lot of attention to it in recent years, so it was nice to have an excuse to take it out and re-examine it for the first time in a while. :-)
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http://fiona.conn.googlepages.com/FionaConn--AHalloweenTale.mp3
(Fear my accent =P)
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Once when I was in college I was broke and agreed to go with a friend and we'd both get tested for psychic abilities for some absurdly tiny amount of money, like $10 or something. Yes, pitiful, but I wanted a burger and was BROKE.
I did the test and it took FOREVER, much longer than they said it'd take. Turns out I was apparently scoring off the charts. Seriously. Only, this is me, and I was scoring off the charts THE WRONG WAY. Yes, I was missing EVERYTHING, far more than you're supposed to miss, and the poor graduate student didn't have a protocol for what to do when someone MASSIVELY FLUNKS THE PSYCHIC TEST.
I sat and waited and waited and they finally came out, confused, and trying to come up with some explanation or something to test further, (note I had no clue what was going on - they weren't excited like you'd expect if I'd blown away the test, but something was clearly up.
They were apparently of the opinion the tests proved that I had really repressed my psychic abilities or some such thing. Being from a "hard science" background, I informed them that the tests instead proved that no matter how small the sample size, there always exists the possibility of a statistical outlier, and that no, I was not interested in testing further how WRONG I could be most of the time or how bad a guesser I was.
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Minor, but strange.
I've found several things in the past year that made me think, "I have to save this to show to Michelle!" Now if only I could find them.
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And if you do find them, send them my way!
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427291.000-are-you-asleep-exploring-the-minds-twilight-zone.html
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I have that sleep paralysis every once in a while - more when I was younger. I used to freak out about it, trying to move and so on, but finally I started just rolling with it. When it happens I just try and go back to sleep. It started happening a lot less once I started doing that.
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Back in grad school (in an article on the old hag that was actually on the syllabus) I read that it happens most often when you sleep on your back, so I trained myself to sleep on my side. And now I can't sleep any other way. Hmph.
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Just this afternoon I took a nap and dreamed myself into an episode of Doctor Who. Not a particular episode, just one my brain made up. We were running from a nameless thing, the TARDIS was about to run out of power (yeah, I know), and... I woke up.
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And OH NO! NOT THE TARDIS!
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I can't remember if I shared this with Opal or not when she was here. Hmm.
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I do not sleep upstairs anymore.
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Last month I was working in the front galley of the plane, a boeing 67, with another flight attendant. Halfway through the flight we hear a door slam, footsteps with heavy breathing coming from the flight deck. Thinking it's one of the pilots we start asking if they need anything but no one answers.
We head towards the door and no one is there, not even in the washroom next to the flight deck. Most pilots think they have a sense of humor and often play tricks on us. Not these guys, they are known to be by the book and keep to themselves.
Turns out, after we called them to make sure it was not them, that they never left their seats! We told the In-Charge about the noise and she pointed out this plane was known for the unexplained noises and to let it be!
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They were staying in a B&B on Catalina island and my step-mom (Terry) was taking a shower. When she got out, "I love you, Terry" was written in the steam on the mirror. She came out and said to my dad, "You're so sweet!"
He said, "Why; what'd I do?"
"In the mirror...You wrote that sweet message."
"What?"
So she shows him and he says "I didn't write that."
For a while she was convinced he was playing a prank, but my father has never played a prank in his life. Then, when the steam dissipated, my father looked hard for the streaks that should be present had someone wrote on the mirror. There were none. He steamed up the room again to see if there would be remnants of the message, which, again, there should be had someone written on the mirror. There was just a straight mat of fog as if there had never been any message at all. Later, when the checked out, the discovered that that room had a reputation for being haunted. I forget what the said the ghost's name was rumored to be, but they always tell that story.
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A little background: my aunt Barbara, my Mom's oldest sister, died as a result of injuries sustained from a car accident in January of 1986. The irony is, it wasn't a serious accident, but she'd fallen asleep in the back seat of the car (my then-16-year-old cousin was driving) and had slumped down so that her seatbelt was right over the vulnerable area between her ribs and her hips. When the car jerked to a stop, it cut into her internal organs and she bled to death internally. (Safety tip learned as a result of this: ALWAYS keep your belt around your hips. :-o )
This same aunt and her family loved to travel, and had more than once in the past given us crafts or other souvenirs from their travels as birthday/Christmas gifts. One of them was a little wooden Christmas carousel from Germany (link is not an exact match, but close enough to give the general idea: when the candles in the candlesticks are lit, the heat makes the air move enough to turn the wheel). We would pull this out and light it only at Christmas time. The rest of the time it stayed in a closed cabinet (with a glass door) in my parents' bedroom.
I was in that bedroom, crying with my Mother, not long after we got the news that they couldn't save my aunt. Since it was January, the carousel was in the cabinet, with the door closed. All the windows and all the doors in the bedroom were closed. But when Mom and I happened to glance over at the carousel (I don't remember exactly why), to our shock we both saw it turn all the way around once before stopping. Almost as if it were...well, as sentimental as it probably sounds, we like to think it was Aunt Barbara saying goodbye.
It's never turned since.
Oh, I imagine it probably would if we took it down and put new candles in it, but we've never been able to bring ourselves to. If I remember right, it still has the partly-burned candles in it that we'd left in after that Christmas. It's still sitting on the same shelf in the same cabinet, and every time I look at it I remember my aunt and that little miracle we feel we were granted to ease her loss.
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