True story of ghost experience

[rockhouse]

True story of "ghost" experience...

I was 20 years old. I was married with a infant daughter. We lived in a small rock house in the woods built by my great-grandfather. The house had a history of paranormal activity before we moved in but we were unaware of it until after these things started happening, at which point my great-uncle filled us in on prior activity.
Anyway, it was a summer nite, around 1 am. The window AC unit tripped the breaker that was located outside on the opposite side of the house.
With the AC being off i woke up starting to sweat, (texas heat). I got up and went outside and flipped the breaker on, then went back inside and turned the AC back on. Before i laid back down i checked on my daughter sleeping in the next room, and she was asleep.
I laid down next to my wife, (she was on the wall side of the bed), and she was also sleeping deeply.
I was laying there maybe 5 minutes on my back, (it's hard for me to fall asleep), when a creepy, half whisper voice said my name RIGHT into my right ear.
My mind raced trying to rationalize W(ho)TF it was in my house at 1 am. In about 2 seconds i decided that whoever was F'n with me was going to get knocked out by a hammerfist death-blow. I swung with all my might in that direction and hit nothing but air. My momentum almost swung me off the edge of the bed.
At that point i just took a "boxers guard" defensive position, expecting a possible attack of some sort. So after about 5 minutes of just sitting there in the pitch dark with my hands up and freaking the F out i convinced myself i was mistaken at what i heard (i knew better though). I was completely exhausted at this point from the craziest adrenaline surge of my life, (i've been skydiving, chased by brown bears in alaska, been on sinking ships in the fog, etc.) and i just wanted to forget what happened and remove myself from that place by sleeping again.
So about 10 minutes go by, I'm laying on my back again, trying to clear my mind and forget it all...then, "JJJJJJOOHHHHHHHNNNNNN"
The same creepy, raspy, throaty voice but even louder and more intense and closer RIGHT into my right ear! I jumped up flipped on all the lights and swept the house with a 12 gauge. All windows/doors were locked, it was just my sleeping wife and daughter in the house.
This is just one account of many. I was a skeptic but, after living there i now believe in "ghosts".

 

[zoobyshoe]

Hearing your own name spoken in your ear while you are lying in bed at night is, strangely, a very common occurrence. Although I can't tell you what causes it, I can mention, by the way, that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders specifically excludes this experience from the kind of "hearing voices" that schizophrenic's experience:

"The hallucinations must occur in the context of a clear sensorium; those that occur while falling asleep (hypnagogic) or waking up (hypnopompic) are considered to be within the range of normal experience. Isolated experiences of hearing one's name called or experiences that lack the quality of an external percept (e.g., a humming in one's head) are also not considered to be hallucinations characteristic of schizophrenia."

DSM-IV, p.275

As a kid I was several times startled out of near sleep by a woman's voice calling my name in my ear. My sister's said the same thing happened to them now and then.

 

[rockhouse]

I was wide awake. I was not on drugs. It was as real as me sitting here and having a friend lean over and say my name in my ear.
*Other stuff*
*My mother stayed the night there and she heard her name as well.
*My wife heard a child in her face at night say, "what are you doin'?"
*My wife was on the toilet in the middle of the night and looked out a tiny crack in vertical wood blinds on the window to see a small boy, dressed in 1930ish clothing sitting on the rockwall about 20 feet from the window...staring DIRECTLY at her.
*We would leave to go to my grandma's house out of town on Fridays, for the weekends. I would make sure the doors/windows were locked and the breakers were off. Many Saturday and Sunday mornings my aunt (she lived about 75 yards down the hill), said the lights in the kitchen would come on and she could see a figure moving about in there.
*An old black man that worked part-time at the neighbors house also about 75 yards down the hill told me that he wouldn't even look up towards the house. He said that many a time he looked up there while we were gone and would see an old woman in a blue scarf picking up kindling under the trees...(my great-grandma wore a blue scarf when outside to pick up kindling for her wood stove).
*We would hear boots walking on the wood floor past our bed, (the floors WERE wood, but we overlaid carpet when we moved in!)
*We would hear doors open and shut while we stared at them, but they wouldn't move.
These are just some of the things that happened. Maybe one day science/technology will explain what these manifestations are...or maybe not.

 

[rockhouse]

Here's another weird thing about it...
Around 1999 or so the house was demolished and a medical center was built on top of were it stood. My cousin had to take his son down there one day and the doc's office was directly over were the old house had been.
Knowing the houses history, he asked the receptionist if they ever had weird stuff happen there. He said she turned pale and asked how he knew! He told her the house story and she said that they all hate to be the last ones there, or the first one in the morning because they hear boots walking on wood floors (it's carpeted), and hear men clearing their throats, women clanking pots and pans around and talking, and kids playing!

 

[rockhouse]

I know all those ghost shows have feeble evidence, if any at all, but I'm here to tell you that there's some weird paranormal stuff out there for real.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I posted a version of this in another thread and I'll repost here:

In pondering the question of "ghosts", or any unexplained phenomenon, the "social experiment" thread ZapperZ posted recently should be born in mind as yet another example of the unreliability of eyewitness accounts and people's susceptibility to confirmation bias:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=304908

Police fielded calls from alarmed residents, and the supposed UFO made national news.

I examined the case the next day, noting striking parallels between this sighting and the infamous 2008 Phoenix Lights hoax in which flares were tied to balloons. I provided a detailed, point-by-point analysis showing that the New Jersey lights were almost certainly a copycat hoax.

However, many people refused to accept the skeptical explanations offered by myself and others, concluding that alien spacecraft was more likely.

Skeptical of the skeptics

Some UFO buffs ridiculed the idea that this was a hoax, claiming that the movements of the lights ruled out the possibility of flares.

One writer stated that "thousands of eyewitnesses said they saw a giant, solid, triangular object fly over their heads." Often the UFO-theory defenders cherry-picked their evidence and eyewitnesses, for example dismissing those who saw balloons tied to flares as mistaken while giving credence to others who didn't see balloons. (For a fascinating glimpse into the rabid denials offered against the flares explanation, see the readers' comments section of my initial column.)

The case was even profiled on the popular History Channel show "UFO Hunters." Bill Birnes, the lead investigator (and publisher of "UFO Magazine") also dismissed the flare explanation. According to the show, "police say the unidentified flying object was nothing but flares - a theory "UFO Hunters" has already tested and proven implausible."

The show was very influential, with many viewers accepting their conclusions without question.

The case remained open (among many UFO groups anyway), until this week when, on April Fool's day, two 20-something college kids, Chris Russo and Joe Rudy, admitted to the hoax.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20090402/sc_livescience/ufohoaxwasasocialexperiment

Reports of ghosts, paranormal happenings, and belief in visitations by alien spacecraft and in alien manufacture of crop circles are things that can be reproduced "in the lab", so to speak.: deliberate hoaxes will produce reports of remarkable phenomena indistinguishable in sincerity and degree of certainty from the reports that come from known causes. That being the case, assurances by eyewitnesses that they knew what they saw are pretty much worthless by themselves as evidence . That is something which can be demonstrated ever and over again on demand.

I have linked before to Derren Brown videos in which he demonstrates how people can be hypnotized without their realizing it into some pretty remarkable hallucinations and delusion based behaviors. Those same mechanisms can be triggered in people who are already socially 'primed' to believe in such things by accidental occurrences of phenomena they don't immediately recognize, be it flares tied to balloons or unusual glimmers of light in your peripheral vision in a darkened room.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Vz_YTNLn6w&feature=related





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRilLMNRFPc&feature=PlayList&p=A1FDA903978D4998&index=0&playnext=1



Shakespeare commented on our occasional propensity for seeing what we expect instead of what’s there:

Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

-Theseus, A Midsummer Night's Dream

And imagination's tricks are now being observed "in the lab":

"In 2000, Timothy Griffiths published a detailed and pioneering report on the neural basis of musical hallucinations; he was able to show, using PET scans, that musical hallucinations were associated with a widespread activation of the same neural networks that are normally activated during the perception of actual music."

Oliver Sacks
Musicophilia
p.84

The erroneous meme that a person can tell when they're hallucinating is undermined by these scans that demonstrate the same neural mechanisms that are activated by authentic stimuli from the senses are also activated by internally generated, non-authentic stimuli.

One can't disprove ghosts, but you can prove the phenomenon of hallucinations and of self hypnotism.

The 'priming' for paranormal experiences and visions of aliens is no mystery. We all 'prime' each other from a very young age to believe in ghosts and the paranormal, and that priming is constantly reinforced by popular entertainments; movies, TV, video games. Sharing ghost stories is a bonding experience much like sharing musical tastes and clothing trends, sex stories, and tales of adventure. Gathered around the campfire, or maybe just the intermittent glow from a bong in a darkened, funky room, people offer up their stories of their encounters with the unexplained along with mutual assurances that "Science doesn't know everything." It's fun and amusing to suppose experts are wrong, a way to vent general irritation with authority figures, and to bond with peers who suffer equally from being under the thumb of teachers, parents and "the man" in general. It's also fun to be scared (up to a point, of course), and guys who pay attention figure out that a properly spooked girl is more receptive to sexual advances than a calm, clear-thinking one.

All that priming is reinforced from a completely different direction in some families imbued with informal mystical traditions by stories of dying relatives speaking to the spirits of the previously departed on their deathbeds, of clocks stopping at the moment of death, of dead relatives appearing in dreams with important messages, and similar ones.

For a lot of people the existence of ghosts is effectively proved by the prevalence of ghost stories alone: if ghosts are not real why do so many people claim to have seen them? Underlying that is a constant monitoring of what beliefs are in vogue, socially acceptable, socially desirable to hold: if everyone else seems to subscribe to a notion or trend, it’s a social gaff to for the non-alpha group members to dissent.

 

[leroyjenkens]

One writer stated that "thousands of eyewitnesses said they saw a giant, solid, triangular object fly over their heads." Often the UFO-theory defenders cherry-picked their evidence and eyewitnesses, for example dismissing those who saw balloons tied to flares as mistaken while giving credence to others who didn't see balloons. (For a fascinating glimpse into the rabid denials offered against the flares explanation, see the readers' comments section of my initial column.)

This sort of thing happened to me when I would talk to my conspiracy theorist friend. He was automatically trusting of anything that supported his conspiracy theorist views and automatically skeptical of anything that contradicted them.
Some people would rather believe what they want to be true more than what's actually true.

 

[rockhouse]

Haha, you can post as much confirmation bias commentary you like, but i am a cynical and skeptical person. All that stuff was happening out of the blue, in/around a house out in the woods with only 2 other houses even near it, and now that same stuff is happening in a new building that sits right on top of where the house stood.
Those ladies in the doc's office knew nothing of the house until my cousin told them, and yet they all experience the things i just mentioned above.
I laugh at crop circles/alien abduction crap and most of the ghost "evidence"...but there's no denying the unexplainable stuff that happened there...and is still happening there.
Anyway, just thought i'd share a few of the stories. I know that the first explanation should always be the obvious one, followed by the next obvious, on down the line...but this stuff was too frequent and too unexplainable to be explained away easily, if at all.

 

[rockhouse]

Here's another one...
Me and another cousin were hiking down a trail in SE Alaska, (we were both commercial fisherman), and we saw an old-*** lady in front of us on top of the rise, about 30 yards ahead. We were wondering why she would be just standing there, all alone in the woods.
We both looked at each other like, "that's creepy and weird", and when we looked up again she was gone. Thinking she just had turned and walked away, we expected to see her when we crested the rise. We were wrong. There was no trace of her. We scoured the whole area and she was straight-up gone...like vanished into thin air.
My because even ran ahead at full speed to the nearest fishing village and asked the people at that end of the village if an old woman came past and they said no, (even though there's no way she could've out-run my because to the village anyway).
I stayed behind and looked all over some more and never found a trace.
The indians in the village automatically said it was a spirit lady that tries to lead you deep into the woods to get you lost, and said some of them had had that same stuff happen to them regarding the old lady.
They referred to her as the "beaver lady"...it was pretty weird, but not as weird as the house stuff.

 

[zoobyshoe]

This sort of thing happened to me when I would talk to my conspiracy theorist friend. He was automatically trusting of anything that supported his conspiracy theorist views and automatically skeptical of anything that contradicted them.
Some people would rather believe what they want to be true more than what's actually true.

Paranormal, UFO, and conspiracy stories seem to be almost like addictive drugs to some people: they can't get enough of them.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Zooby, let's stick to one claim at a time.

If you have a personal theory, we have the Independent Research forum for that. It is certainly not appropriate to address every claim known to man in order to respond to one story.

 

[waht]

Most ghost story reports try to project an external cause of the event. The house was haunted, somebody died a tragic death etc. And that is only reinforced by second eye witness.

But did you ever consider an internal cause? That is, an illusion generated by your own mind?

In fact, our perception of the world is incredibly subjective. If you see a blue color, there is really no color there, only a wavelength of light. Color is only constructed by your brain. Just like every sense of touch, smell, sight, hearing...it is just a perception to establish a correspondence with reality - which one can never truly experience.

Sort of off topic. Optical illusions demonstrate how the mind fails to interpret certain images. For example, there is one constructed with disjoint line segments positioned in certain way, and when you look at it, your mind literally fills in the missing line segments where there are none in the image. While other optical illusions make you dizzy, or rotate when they are not.

It has been shown that room height, shape of the walls, their color, smell can influence the way people think. Also, body language is probably stronger than verbal language. Have you ever looked at someone and knew a lot about a person, could pick up subtle clues whether the person is in fear, nervous, uncertain, ... these kinds of cues can also spread among people. If you feel nervous, than the person sitting next to you might pick up on that and start feeling nervous.

Also, people with Schizophrenia hear and see things which aren't there. What does it tell you, that if the brain is not functioning correctly you hear voices, or the voices are really there?

Hence, certain conditions/influences can induce an internal stimulation of perception.

 

[rockhouse]

Most ghost story reports try to project an external cause of the event. The house was haunted, somebody died a tragic death etc. And that is only reinforced by second eye witness.

But did you ever consider an internal cause? That is, an illusion generated by your own mind?

In fact, our perception of the world is incredibly subjective. If you see a blue color, there is really no color there, only a wavelength of light. Color is only constructed by your brain. Just like every sense of touch, smell, sight, hearing...it is just a perception to establish a correspondence with reality - which one can never truly experience.

Sort of off topic. Optical illusions demonstrate how the mind fails to interpret certain images. For example, there is one constructed with disjoint line segments positioned in certain way, and when you look at it, your mind literally fills in the missing line segments where there are none in the image. While other optical illusions make you dizzy, or rotate when they are not.

It has been shown that room height, shape of the walls, their color, smell can influence the way people think. Also, body language is probably stronger than verbal language. Have you ever looked at someone and knew a lot about a person, could pick up subtle clues whether the person is in fear, nervous, uncertain, ... these kinds of cues can also spread among people. If you feel nervous, than the person sitting next to you might pick up on that and start feeling nervous.

Also, people with Schizophrenia hear and see things which aren't there. What does it tell you, that if the brain is not functioning correctly you hear voices, or the voices are really there?

Hence, certain conditions/influences can induce an internal stimulation of perception.

I agree that external factors can lend to some experiences, to a degree...but there is a point where you cross the line into stuff that is what it is, with no explanation.
I guess if you knew me personally you'd know that a hallucination/illusion/mental disorder was out of the question...not to mention all the others that experienced the same thing independently, without knowing the back stories.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Zooby, let's stick to one claim at a time.

If you have a personal theory, we have the Independent Research forum for that. It is certainly not appropriate to address every claim known to man in order to respond to one story.

Is this whole post directed to me, or just the first sentence?

 

[zoobyshoe]

I agree that external factors can lend to some experiences, to a degree...but there is a point where you cross the line into stuff that is what it is, with no explanation.
I guess if you knew me personally you'd know that a hallucination/illusion/mental disorder was out of the question...not to mention all the others that experienced the same thing independently, without knowing the back stories.

You missed all the stuff I posted about Derren Brown and general priming. One needn't know a specific back story, just the general type of back story. Everyone has a plethora of these tucked in their memory to be evoked by a spooky house or lonely location.

Knowing you, personally, is beside the point: I am not aware of anyone who couldn't be induced to experience an illusion or outright hallucination one way or another.

 

[GeorginaS]

Hearing your own name spoken in your ear while you are lying in bed at night is, strangely, a very common occurrence.

Really? I wasn't aware of that. While preparing to go to my young then-brother-in-law's funeral, I was bent over in the bathroom blow drying my hair. As clear as anything I've ever heard before, I heard someone say my name right next to my left ear. I turned the blow dryer off and waited to see if someone was calling me. I knew that it wasn't anyone else in the house calling me, because the sound hadn't come from far away -- it was directly beside my ear.

I called downstairs to ask if anyone had called up to me, just to check, and no, no one had. I finished blow drying my hair.

Nothing like that had happened previously or since. I didn't chalk it up to "ghosts"; I chalked it up to an experience I don't have an explanation for. It was pretty weird, though.

 

[leroyjenkens]

Really? I wasn't aware of that. While preparing to go to my young then-brother-in-law's funeral, I was bent over in the bathroom blow drying my hair. As clear as anything I've ever heard before, I heard someone say my name right next to my left ear. I turned the blow dryer off and waited to see if someone was calling me. I knew that it wasn't anyone else in the house calling me, because the sound hadn't come from far away -- it was directly beside my ear.

I called downstairs to ask if anyone had called up to me, just to check, and no, no one had. I finished blow drying my hair.

Nothing like that had happened previously or since. I didn't chalk it up to "ghosts"; I chalked it up to an experience I don't have an explanation for. It was pretty weird, though.

Is your name WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO (the sound of a blow dryer)? Cause that might explain it.

 

[waht]

Really? I wasn't aware of that. While preparing to go to my young then-brother-in-law's funeral, I was bent over in the bathroom blow drying my hair. As clear as anything I've ever heard before, I heard someone say my name right next to my left ear. I turned the blow dryer off and waited to see if someone was calling me. I knew that it wasn't anyone else in the house calling me, because the sound hadn't come from far away -- it was directly beside my ear.

I called downstairs to ask if anyone had called up to me, just to check, and no, no one had. I finished blow drying my hair.

Nothing like that had happened previously or since. I didn't chalk it up to "ghosts"; I chalked it up to an experience I don't have an explanation for. It was pretty weird, though.

I used to hear voices when sitting by an air purifier which runs as loud as a blow dryer. Here's why:

My parents always had a tendency to storm in my room spontaneously, to ask something, dump their opinions on me, and then leave. This irritated me when I lived with them because when I was working on something or studying, a sudden disruption in my concentration would last long after they leave, and in the end I was left with elevated heart rate.

Overtime, this built up to having a constant anxiety when my parents were in the house. I didn't mind them, just the abrupt interruption which they constantly do.

So when sitting by that fan, I had a thought that any minute somebody will rush in my room. And this is when I started hearing voices in the noise of the fan. Some voices were clearly my parent's, and others are open to interpretation. This occurred on regular basis, so I started investigating. When fan was off, there was no voices, when parents were out of the house, there was no voices.

I realized the voices were welling up from deep within my mind. And soon they became bothersome, so I started to tune them out, by ignoring them when they occurred. And the voices faded and never heard them again. That was back in high school years.

 

[waht]

I agree that external factors can lend to some experiences, to a degree...but there is a point where you cross the line into stuff that is what it is, with no explanation.
I guess if you knew me personally you'd know that a hallucination/illusion/mental disorder was out of the question...not to mention all the others that experienced the same thing independently, without knowing the back stories.

You don't have to have any mental disorders to experience different illusions.

 

[rockhouse]

I used to hear voices when sitting by an air purifier which runs as loud as a blow dryer. Here's why:

My parents always had a tendency to storm in my room spontaneously, to ask something, dump their opinions on me, and then leave. This irritated me when I lived with them because when I was working on something or studying, a sudden disruption in my concentration would last long after they leave, and in the end I was left with elevated heart rate.

Overtime, this built up to having a constant anxiety when my parents were in the house. I didn't mind them, just the abrupt interruption which they constantly do.

So when sitting by that fan, I had a thought that any minute somebody will rush in my room. And this is when I started hearing voices in the noise of the fan. Some voices were clearly my parent's, and others are open to interpretation. This occurred on regular basis, so I started investigating. When fan was off, there was no voices, when parents were out of the house, there was no voices.

I realized the voices were welling up from deep within my mind. And soon they became bothersome, so I started to tune them out, by ignoring them when they occurred. And the voices faded and never heard them again. That was back in high school years.

I don't know if you are inferring that maybe the same explanation could be used for my story...if you are you're WAY off. The name i heard was NOTHING even close to what you just described. It was just as i stated, laying wide awake in the dark, then hearing you're name from an unknown voice as loud and clear as if the mouth was 2 inches from your ear...only no breath or warmth was felt from it.
It was legit, believe me.

 

[leroyjenkens]

used to hear voices when sitting by an air purifier which runs as loud as a blow dryer. Here's why:

My parents always had a tendency to storm in my room spontaneously, to ask something, dump their opinions on me, and then leave. This irritated me when I lived with them because when I was working on something or studying, a sudden disruption in my concentration would last long after they leave, and in the end I was left with elevated heart rate.

Overtime, this built up to having a constant anxiety when my parents were in the house. I didn't mind them, just the abrupt interruption which they constantly do.

So when sitting by that fan, I had a thought that any minute somebody will rush in my room. And this is when I started hearing voices in the noise of the fan. Some voices were clearly my parent's, and others are open to interpretation. This occurred on regular basis, so I started investigating. When fan was off, there was no voices, when parents were out of the house, there was no voices.

I realized the voices were welling up from deep within my mind. And soon they became bothersome, so I started to tune them out, by ignoring them when they occurred. And the voices faded and never heard them again. That was back in high school years.

I have the same thing happen to me when I'm in the shower. I hear something and for some reason I interpret it as someone calling me.
Also when you have something like a blow dryer next to your head, it creates an oscillating sound which can maybe sound like a voice and your brain can possibly interpret it as someone calling your name.
Or it could very well be a ghost. I never rule that out.

I don't know if you are inferring that maybe the same explanation could be used for my story...if you are you're WAY off. The name i heard was NOTHING even close to what you just described. It was just as i stated, laying wide awake in the dark, then hearing you're name from an unknown voice as loud and clear as if the mouth was 2 inches from your ear...only no breath or warmth was felt from it.
It was legit, believe me.

Is it possible that you fell asleep for that split second and dreamt it, which woke you up, thus making you think it was heard while awake? I'll wake up sometimes hearing someone violently ringing my doorbell. I'll hear no one else in the house responding to it, so I know it was just in my head.

 

[rockhouse]

You don't have to have any mental disorders to experience different illusions.

Just outta curiosity, how many sane people have you known in your life have had hallucinations or seen illusions?
Lot's of skeptics love to throw out the old "hallucination/illusion" explanation, but have never had one, or even know of anyone that has had one...and i ain't talkin about seeing water puddles on asphalt in summertime, or hearing your name "ssssssssid" while standing at the stove, pan frying a steak.

 

[leroyjenkens]

Just outta curiosity, how many sane people have you known in your life have had hallucinations or seen illusions?
Lot's of skeptics love to throw out the old "hallucination/illusion" explanation, but have never had one, or even know of anyone that has had one...and i ain't talkin about seeing water puddles on asphalt in summertime, or hearing your name "ssssssssid" while standing at the stove, pan frying a steak.

I think he means illusions as in optical or auditory illusions. Something anyone can experience. Like me driving home from work at night and seeing the street flooded ahead of me. It wasn't flooded, it was just an optical illusion.

 

[waht]

Just outta curiosity, how many sane people have you known in your life have had hallucinations or seen illusions?

I know one such person that perceives the external world as slower in time, and bending like being immersed in a jellolike substrate - but what is the worth of unverifiable claims based on anecdotal description? It's just another extraordinary claim. Whether true or not, it's an internal process.

Lot's of skeptics love to throw out the old "hallucination/illusion" explanation, but have never had one, or even know of anyone that has had one...and i ain't talkin about seeing water puddles on asphalt in summertime, or hearing your name "ssssssssid" while standing at the stove, pan frying a steak.

People hear voices in noise, see faces in clouds, feel different things in different situations. This is all but an attempt by the mind to interpret the world. The product of all past experiences, and memories define who the person is. But it has been shown that memories don't always form imprints that reflect reality, in fact, the mind can fill in details, similarly how it fills in missing lines in an optical illusion, and so one can remember things from past based on what the mind added at a time of forming, and swear it is the truth because this is how you remembered it. And hence omitting crucial details in the process, which were never remembered because your attention was elsewhere.

In the psychological perspective the case for ghosts is dead. It's all phantoms in the brain. Does it prove or disprove the existence of ghosts? No, but it put the odds slim to none against ghosts.

Perhaps in 50-100 years when computers will become powerful enough to simulate the interaction between trillions of interconnected neurons, will be able to simulate ghosts and their dynamics.

 

[DaveC426913]

I was 20 years old. I was married with a infant daughter. We lived in a small rock house in the woods built by my great-grandfather. The house had a history of paranormal activity before we moved in but we were unaware of it until after these things started happening, at which point my great-uncle filled us in on prior activity.
Anyway, it was a summer nite, around 1 am. The window AC unit tripped the breaker that was located outside on the opposite side of the house.
With the AC being off i woke up starting to sweat, (texas heat). I got up and went outside and flipped the breaker on, then went back inside and turned the AC back on. Before i laid back down i checked on my daughter sleeping in the next room, and she was asleep.
I laid down next to my wife, (she was on the wall side of the bed), and she was also sleeping deeply.
I was laying there maybe 5 minutes on my back, (it's hard for me to fall asleep), when a creepy, half whisper voice said my name RIGHT into my right ear.
My mind raced trying to rationalize W(ho)TF it was in my house at 1 am. In about 2 seconds i decided that whoever was F'n with me was going to get knocked out by a hammerfist death-blow. I swung with all my might in that direction and hit nothing but air. My momentum almost swung me off the edge of the bed.
At that point i just took a "boxers guard" defensive position, expecting a possible attack of some sort. So after about 5 minutes of just sitting there in the pitch dark with my hands up and freaking the F out i convinced myself i was mistaken at what i heard (i knew better though). I was completely exhausted at this point from the craziest adrenaline surge of my life, (i've been skydiving, chased by brown bears in alaska, been on sinking ships in the fog, etc.) and i just wanted to forget what happened and remove myself from that place by sleeping again.
So about 10 minutes go by, I'm laying on my back again, trying to clear my mind and forget it all...then, "JJJJJJOOHHHHHHHNNNNNN"
The same creepy, raspy, throaty voice but even louder and more intense and closer RIGHT into my right ear! I jumped up flipped on all the lights and swept the house with a 12 gauge. All windows/doors were locked, it was just my sleeping wife and daughter in the house.
This is just one account of many. I was a skeptic but, after living there i now believe in "ghosts".

I have heard my own voice whispered into my ear too. It has happened to me several times. It happens when I am alone and quiet or resting. It is quite startling.

The fact that you are not the only one who has experienced this should tell you that it is not paranormal, but a trick of your brain.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Really? I wasn't aware of that.

Hearing one's name called when there is no one there is common enough among the sane that The DSM had to specifically identify it an experience the psychiatrist should ignore as an indicator of schizophrenia, as I quoted.

While preparing to go to my young then-brother-in-law's funeral, I was bent over in the bathroom blow drying my hair. As clear as anything I've ever heard before, I heard someone say my name right next to my left ear. I turned the blow dryer off and waited to see if someone was calling me. I knew that it wasn't anyone else in the house calling me, because the sound hadn't come from far away -- it was directly beside my ear.

I called downstairs to ask if anyone had called up to me, just to check, and no, no one had. I finished blow drying my hair.

Nothing like that had happened previously or since. I didn't chalk it up to "ghosts"; I chalked it up to an experience I don't have an explanation for. It was pretty weird, though.

Your experience sounds just like mine with the exception that I was always just about to drop off to sleep when it happened, not up and about. The voice I heard was a woman's, and it was as vivid as if spoken very close to my ear.

I suppose that if everyone conducted an informal poll of their relatives and acquaintances it would turn out this experience is as common as all the other weird experiences. I have never seen it discussed in neurological literature, but odds are there are people out there to whom it happens often who might be studied to find the cause.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Just outta curiosity, how many sane people have you known in your life have had hallucinations or seen illusions?
Lot's of skeptics love to throw out the old "hallucination/illusion" explanation, but have never had one, or even know of anyone that has had one...and i ain't talkin about seeing water puddles on asphalt in summertime, or hearing your name "ssssssssid" while standing at the stove, pan frying a steak.

Every perfectly functional person I know has had one or another form of hallucination. I'll rephrase that from another angle: I know large numbers of people who are in zero danger of ever being diagnosed with a mental illness, who have experienced at least one obvious hallucination during their lives.

If you converse with people in a non-judgmental way they open up about all kinds of things they don't normally discuss: their sex lives, opinions they normally repress, and experiences they keep to themselves for fear of being called "crazy".

 

[DaveC426913]

Every perfectly functional person I know has had one or another form of hallucination.

This is an excellent point, worth repeating. Hallucinations, while rare, are not abnormal.

 

[zoobyshoe]

This is an excellent point, worth repeating. Hallucinations, while rare, are not abnormal.

That's right. Famous examples are the hallucinations in the blind spot, a hallmark of Charles Bonnet syndrome, the musical hallucinations of the elderly who have suffered some hearing loss, and people who have synaesthesia. These people are not mentally ill by any standard, their psychology is not abnormal. They are experiencing unusual neurological events for different reasons specific to the syndrome in question.

 

[ideasrule]

I've had hallucinations before, though not vivid ones. Often, I hear my relatives calling my name. Sometimes I'm outside, so I know they can't possibly be calling me. Sometimes I'm inside the house with the relatives and ask them whether they called me, and they say no.

BTW zoobyshoe, people with synesthesia do have abnormal psychology by definition because synesthesia is rare.

 

[zoobyshoe]

BTW zoobyshoe, people with synesthesia do have abnormal psychology by definition because synesthesia is rare.

They are abnormal neurologically, it's a relatively rare neurological condition, but there's no automatic conclusion to be drawn about their psychology from that, any more than you could draw a psychological conclusion about all colorblind people.

 

[DocZaius]

Couple points:

1. I will add myself to the list of people who have had a clear auditory hallucination while being perfectly sane. However the couple of times this has happened, it was associated with sleep paralysis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_paralysis

Auditory hallucinations are strongly associated with sleep paralysis. I would also hear my name being called, clear as a bell. Now unlike the other claims here, it was clear to me that I was experiencing something related to my brain (rather than possibly being a ghost) because of the sleep paralysis. This wasn't a dream by the way. I could look at my room but simply could not move for what seemed like a very long time, then was able to move and checked outside my door to make sure no one had actually called me (by some coincidence with my sleep paralysis). Of course no-one had. But I can attest to the creepiness that comes with hearing a clear voice that was never uttered.

2. If someone lives in a house that has as many paranormal phenomena associated with it as rockhouse's house does, why not try to record it with video or audio? It seems like a win-win situation.

If you do record it, then you receive full validation for your claims and help science with evidence that must be investigated further. If you do not record it but do experience things, you know that it comes from your brain, and if it continues long enough you will know to medically investigate what is responsible for all the hallucinations (which is a good thing for your health!).

Now, if the ghosts chose not to come out when there is recording going on, then that seems like a good anti-ghost device! I suppose another possibility is that you do hear things that the recordings don't pick up and claim that the ghost is communicating straight to your brain. In that case, I am not entirely sure how distinguishable that would be from having a physiological/psychological disorder.

 

[rockhouse]

I expected all of these responses, after all it's the skeptic and debunking forum.
When you take ALL the experiences, independently of one another, there is something "paranormal" that went/goes on at that site. Like i said, maybe someday technology will explain what these anomalies are, or maybe not...but one things for sure, they were not hallucinations...i'd bet my life on it...literally.
Oh and BTW, not everyone experienced these things. One of my cousins wanted to see/hear something in the house SO bad, but never did. He lived with us for a few months and never even heard a peep, and yet others who knew nothing of the stories would visit and hear all sorts of unexplainable things. It was really a hit-or-miss type of thing...but when it hit, it would scare the crap outta you cause it was real and no reason could be found for it.
Anyway, carry on.

 

[rockhouse]

Anybody know anything about the HAARP project blue beam? What's up with that thing? Is it real?

 

[DaveC426913]

When you take ALL the experiences, independently of one another, there is something "paranormal" that went/goes on at that site.

But there is a perfectly valid and highly plausible explanation: human beings are very well-known poor sensors and recorders.

How can you even begin to look for an alternate explanation until you have somehow ruled out this highly confounding factor - you have no baseline for the reliable sensing and recording of events by humans.

I'm not trying to suggest there is no alternate explanation - I'm saying your search for it is stillborn.


It's be like looking for cosmic gravity waves in a laboratory situated on the San Andreas fault line. You're showing me charts rife with squiggles and wondering why I'm suspicious of your evidence.