I think most of us have had some of these experiences, or ones very like them, and I am nearly certain that there are many, many more people who have had them too.
I have, ever since I was a little girl. At that time, I either sensed, or knew, that the grown-ups would say I "was telling stories" (lying) if I mentioned them so I didn't. If I was scared by them, I cried, then said I didn't know what had scared me.
When I was about twelve, I finally told me mother about these experiences, and she admitted she sometimes had similar ones,
She had discussed this with an elder lady - a close friend who had said then that she should be very careful not to tell people about this, as "they will either say you are demented, or a witch" ( west of Scotland, 7 miles outside Glasgow in the 1950s).
She had added, "watch the wean (meaning me) she sees them too." which my mother had disbelieved at that time, but followed the advice not to talk about these experiences.
I have always been very cautious who I told about it, as my great aunt was right: people do treat you very oddly if you refer to the matter.
I have both good and bad experiences (and many of them). Some of the latter have been so bad that I have had to make an excuse to get out of the place concerned, if I was with people I didn't dare tell what was really wrong. Once in the kitchen of a stately home open for visitors, outside Pitlochry, once in a church crypt in Kolding in Denmark, and one of the very worst in the open air walking along Alstersee (Binnenalster) in Hamburg.
I had no previous knowledge of any of these places when I had these scary experiences, bad enough to make me feel, but not be, physically sick, and to shake quite uncontrollably, so I was not influenced by knowledge of anything that may have happened there.
To those of you who are scared in your own homes: you might want to consider asking the advice of an Anglican or Catholic priest - both churches have prayers for blessing houses, which I have known work even if the householder did not believe that sprinkling holy water and blessing a house could possibly have any effect.
Fortunately, for me the good experiences are far more frequent than the bad, my mother (dead 7 years at the time) was with us in the hospice when I said good-bye to my dying sister, who occasionally walks down the street behind DH and I in in a town that we never were all in at once, my late father walked up the stairs here ( a house he had never been in ) one night exactly as he did in my childhood when coming home from night visits in his practice, and cats we have loved and in the course of nature lost, pop in and say hullo, even although some of them never were here either.
And like the rest of you, I am not on drugs, asleep, intoxicated or deemed mentally unfit when these things occur.
I think it is part of human existence as most cultures have similar unexplained events, that remain unexplained because our world is domineered by the scientific approach that states that anything that cannot be proved to exist, does not actually exist.
Incidently, I see the cats, but not my parents or sister - I just know they are there, suddenly for a few minutes, then they go away again.
