Paranormal (?) experiences

Nankate - that’s so eerie - I remember that post

When I was in my mid 20s I became involved with some spiritualists through a relation by marriage who acted as their medium. It began because I was attempting to rehome some tortoises and they had an animal sancuary with many different animals and reptiles. They invited me to one of their meetings. There was no payment involved. I wont go into detail as it still makes me uneasy but there were manifestations which cannot be explained. I attended about 6 meetings and then stopped going. I just felt that I did not want to be deeply involved in spiritualism and the house was a 2 bus journey away. To be truthful I convinced myself that I only wanted to see the tortoises settled, which I did.

I was told by my relative that I had psychic gifts. Ive always been able to read the tarot and the crystal although I rarely do so now because it (literally) takes the spiritual force from my body. I cant explain the feeling. I am exhausted afterwards.

Yes and I remember reading it

I have been trying to post a pic but having difficulty, new laptop etc. So you could visualize the table etc. Anyway just before Christmas time around November I had not been well, bit flu like etc had to have 2 days off work.

My dad had sent me some flowers (well he asked one of my dd to buy them and take them to me at home)

They were in a vase on a table just to my left, I was sat on the settee ,tv just to my left and this table with the flowers on.

I had got up this one morning as I felt much better, put my dressing gown on and thought I would make cuppa sit down then go upstairs get dressed.

Made cuppa sat down and I was just looking at the flowers and thinking how nice they were, when a movement just to my right and just slightly above caught my eye.

I turned to see what had caught my eye.

It was a vision of my mum! it was sort of greyscale, faint but well enough to see as plain as day it was my mum.

My mum was lying on a pillow, with her hand sort of tucked upwards and you know when you put children to bed and they pretend to be asleep but they end up giving the game away and start smiling! well that is what my mum did.

I sat there, knowing what I had just seen but not believing what I had seen ( I still don't) but I know what I saw.

The vision was almost full sized, but not quite, but then my mum was only a small person. it was just her head on this pillow.

I will swear on any one's life that is what I saw, I even sketched it very briefly in my notebook later on.

My mum died 2 and half years ago and yes I still cry every single day.

I know what I saw. But of course no one else is ever there at the right time to prove anything.

One thing that I kept thinking of is, when my mum was in her coffin (they did not present her well) when I felt her head as she did not seem to be lying comfy in the coffin, I said to my dds that they hadn't even put a little pillow under her head. I found this so awful, not sure what her head was resting on but it wasn't a little pillow.

Another one for Derby - must have been about 18 years ago. I was a nurse at Derby Children’s Hospital and myself and an HCA went to collect a child from the emergency dept. As we got in the lift with the child a man got in with us. When we got out we looked at each other, puzzled, as he was no longer there. Neither of us could remember what he looked like, just that he was dark, as in dark clothes. We couldn’t really picture him. That night a child died on HDU. I’m certainly not the sort of person to pay heed to anything like this, but it stuck with me. I think it was that someone else experienced it too.

Nearly 30 years ago my husband was killed in a motorway accident. A couple of months later I was in Church and became aware of him standing next to me. Although he had left the RAF by the time he died, he was wearing his RAF greatcoat, No 1 hat and his brown leather gloves. But as soon as I became aware of him, he faded away.
10 years or so later I woke one morning aware that I'd had a dream but unable to recall it. Later, I picked up his photo to dust the frame and it was as if an electric shock went through me and I remembered the dream vividly. I was visiting him in hospital, but his bed was in the middle of a vast stretch of lawn and there was no one else about. I was worried about leaving him there alone, so went off to find his mobile phone. When I came back he was up and moving around his bed "Look," he said "You don't have to worry about me. I'm fine. And anyway, you and I don't need mobile phones to keep in touch."
Not long after my sister died five years ago I had been invited, along with my two granddaughters, to my great-niece's house for the birthday party of one of my great-great-nieces. We were a little bit early so we were sitting outside in the car for a few minutes. I was holding my phone in my hand and happened to look down at it as my sister's name appeared at the top of the screen and moved slowly across it. She would have so loved to have been there!
So that's a few of my 'experiences - I can't explain any of them away. Those we love live on with us.

Currently staying in our daughters home whilst she and SIL are having a night in London, it is over 500 years old with a hidden staircase and secret rooms.
It was a safe house during the English civil war, how my daughter stays here alone is beyond me.
I’m not of a nervous disposition but this place creeps me out😬

My great gran and her daughter were mediums. I was in my early teens before realising not everyone had older relatives who talked to the dead, or seemed able to foresee the future. Maybe this made me more open to the idea of an afterlife, of the presence of spirits.
I had a precognitive dream at age 13 which spooked me. I didn’t want to repeat this strange experience. I’ve felt the presence of lost loved ones. I believe in our increasingly secular, money motivated society, we risk closing down more spiritual aspects of life.

Taichinan
I have often wondered whether these experiences are the departed’s way of saying “Don’t worry, all will be well “ or perhaps our brain’s way of reassuring us that the love we knew cannot be wiped out, just as you still love and feel loved by absent friends and family.

In emotional times, we see/hear what we somehow expect and want to hear/see.
Nothing supernatural, just our minds going along paths we want.

A few months after my dad died, my eldest daughter was in his local hospital for an operation. She was, by far, his favourite g.child and had he been alive, he would without doubt have walked over and visited her. On the morning following the op. I went to her, and as I walked along the hospital corridor, I was thinking how my Dad would have been accompanying me. Got to her ward, she was still coming out of the General, but told me that when she first woke up, she thought of Grandpa (forgotten his death), and knew he would be visiting her, and saw him in the chair at the side of the bed.

Now both of us knew that there was spirit or ghost, etc. just trick of her mind seeing what she expected to see.

No spirits, no after-life. No souls (anyone tell me where that is? Just our minds.

Yes, foxgloves I agree. They are also born of an intense longing on the part of the living. The thing is, they are real whether they are 'only in your mind' or not, but it is difficult for someone who has not experienced these manifestations to fully understand which is why they are seldom spoken of I think.

It’s always a matter of wonder to me how the scoffers can be so absolutely certain that what other people have seen or experienced, was purely in their imagination.

I do know a sceptic or two who were the same, until some experience or other gave them rather a rude shock.

I’ve never seen anything, but for a few days after my much loved MiL died - too young - I had a very strong sense of her presence in our house, where she’d always been happy - things could be difficult at home, especially during her last few years - FiL was not the easiest person.
I could almost ‘see’ her sitting on the sofa.

I put it down entirely to my imagination, and when my father died, only 6 months later, I fully expected to ‘imagine’ the same, either in our house or my mother’s, where he’d died.
But there was nothing - absolutely zilch.

Bereaved people often hallucinate the dear dead person. When a reality is too much to bear the brain makes an alternative reality out of memories.

Witzend

It’s always a matter of wonder to me how the scoffers can be so absolutely certain that what other people have seen or experienced, was purely in their imagination.

I do know a sceptic or two who were the same, until some experience or other gave them rather a rude shock.

I’ve never seen anything, but for a few days after my much loved MiL died - too young - I had a very strong sense of her presence in our house, where she’d always been happy - things could be difficult at home, especially during her last few years - FiL was not the easiest person.
I could almost ‘see’ her sitting on the sofa.

I put it down entirely to my imagination, and when my father died, only 6 months later, I fully expected to ‘imagine’ the same, either in our house or my mother’s, where he’d died.
But there was nothing - absolutely zilch.

A very interesting post. May I also add my own experience, please? I had a lovely relationship with my father and nursed him at home until the end. He was very, very elderly and just wanted to go. It felt as if we had spent a wonderful lifetime knowing each other and it was easy for him to pass as the time was so right. I have never mourned him, never dreamt about him and talk about him everyday as if he were still here. He is, just not in physical form.

Scepticism is our safeguard against delusion. There is no doubt that people experience what they do. However the debate is about whether ghosts are exist independently of minds or alternatively are mind-dependent.

Caleo

Bereaved people often hallucinate the dear dead person. When a reality is too much to bear the brain makes an alternative reality out of memories.

I grieved for my much loved father somewhat more than I did for my MiL, so I do wonder why my imagination didn’t conjure his ‘presence’ up out of thin air, too.

I have been reading these moving posts.
I was reminded of the words of Quaker Astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell who was being interviewed on Radio Desert Island Discs perhaps and asked how she married her Scientific understandings with her spiritual beliefs
She said something to the effect that when we die we are still around in the universe, part of the stars .

Grammaretto, I remember that interview, and I too was impressed by JBB's personality and message . I gather that JBB meant that energy changes its form but never becomes non existent. I am no physicist but this physical theory of energy can be googled.

Witzend wrote:

"I grieved for my much loved father somewhat more than I did for my MiL, so I do wonder why my imagination didn’t conjure his ‘presence’ up out of thin air, too."

I confess, Witzend, to a bias against a belief in ghosts as beings that exist other than subjectively. Therefore my guess the explanation is not metaphysical but psychological .

I was with my maternal Granny when she died, we had always been very close.
That night I woke up and she was sitting on the end of my bed, smiling telling me I would be alright and she was happy. I took great comfort from that and to this day I have never dreamed about her.

Is an explanation necessary? Doesn't matter why such things are experienced.

I don't believe in ghosts or anything else. Though I do think some people pick up a suggestion and it does something to their mind.
We have a house in our village where someone committed suicide about 20 years ago. Quite a few have lived in it.
Just after Christmas the woman who lived there would not go back in and quickly sold. It is now on the market again as the purchasers only stayed a few weeks and said they felt uncomfortable all the time.
I was talking to someone about it and we wondered if it was a kind of thought association. I think you now have to state if your house has ever been subject to flooding or if something untoward happened in it.
Lots of little children play with imaginary friends even in school, they are often the unsettled lonely ones.

ive had many other worldly experiences , but i still doubt,the mind can play tricks.As for spiritualists, they have been found time and time again for conning people,fact is they prey on vulnerable folk, who can disagree with that?

My uncle lost his wife of many years and was never the same again. He was also registered blind but still lived independently in the home they had shared for many years.
One day he was sitting listening to his radio and somehow cut his finger. He tried to find a plaster but unable to find one.
Nodded off in his chair and when he woke there was a plaster on his finger. We said he probably forgot he’d found one.

Years before they had lost their only son at 17. He committed suicide and died on 27/12/53. When his wife died she died on 27/12/81. When my uncle was ill in Hospital he said on Christmas Day, I want to go home for the last two days. He died on 27/12/92..

My Father told me that the Vicar who married him and my Mum told them something that had happened to him when he first became a Vicar.

He had been sent to a new parish, didn’t know anyone. At about 11pm there was a knock at the door and a girl said, please can you come with me as my Father is dying. Obviously he went to the girl’s house, sat with the man until he died.
The man’s wife said thank you sir for coming but who told you my Husband was dying. The Vicar said your Daughter fetched me. That can’t be right she said as my Daughter died 10 years ago.

Pink Quartz, I know of another person who had an impressive paranormal experience concerning the old Eagle Centre in Derby.

What your experience and hers have in common(apart from happening in Derby) is that both experiences had special feelings. In her case the ghost made her feel pity.