Have you ever seen a Ghost

Pammiel
That must have been very comforting ?

My granddaughter has definitely been here before. When she was about 4? she asked my daughter if she would be her mummy next time she came here

I don't believe in them at all - yet saw one. It was the 'ghost' (spitting image) of my sister (who was, and is, alive) hovering a few feet above the staircase in our home. it was semi-transparent, as I could see the panelled wall behind. I was petrified.

I can only explain it as something 'projected' from my own imagination, during my semi-awake wanderings. It took the exact form that I'd expect of a ghost, so logical.

At our last (Victorian) home, I saw nothing - but there was a very strong feeling of a presence in the back bedroom, where our sons slept. Nothing sinister, just a happy little soul watching and accompanying when in that room.

I'd often turn around, expecting to see the dog, a cat or small child - but nothing/nobody there. My husband noticed nothing - so I put it down to imagination (again).

Then, one day, my three-year-old son said he'd been playing with the teddies - with 'The little boy in my bed'. I have no explanation.

Of course not - neither have I seen Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy.

So easy to conjure up such images in your mind. My eldest daughter was in hospital when she was in her early 20's having a spleenectomy. She was, by far, the favourite g.child of my father who had lived close to that hospital. Sadly, he had died just a few months earlier. When I went to visit her, she told me that when she was coming round from the anaesthetic, she could 'almost' see Grandad, sitting in the chair next to her bed. She knew it was not real, nor a ghost, just her own mind expecting him to be there,as he would have done if he was still alive.

When my son was little, he had an 'imaginary friend' and I'd often hear him chattering away.
One day I asked him what his friends name was and he told me, the name was the same as my grandfather (my grandfather died when I was 10 and I adored him - we were extremely close), I put it down to coincidence and thought nothing more of it.
A few weeks later, he was telling me about his friends sore hand and also that his friend had told him about his fire engine.

My grandfather was a fireman and had driven a fire engine during the war, on one occasion during the blitz, he'd injured his hand quite badly and when I used to ask about it he'd always say 'ah, my sore hand'.

At this stage, I dug out some old photographs which he'd never seen and as soon as he saw a picture of my grandfather, he immediately pointed and said 'that's my friend".

I have no explanation for it and once he reached 6/7 he never mentioned it again.
I like to think it was my grandfather but who knows!

MerylStreep

Pammiel
That must have been very comforting ?

My granddaughter has definitely been here before. When she was about 4? she asked my daughter if she would be her mummy next time she came here

I know of two cases of ‘been here before’ in small children. Have probably posted before but here goes anyway.

A dd was pushing a Singaporean niece of 3 on a swing, when she started saying very alarming things about her daddy, my Brit BiL, who is the most chilled bloke imaginable.

Dd (shocked!) of course said she was sure her daddy would never behave like that.
In entirely matter of fact tones, niece said, ‘No, I mean my other daddy, before.’
Singaporean SiL said there had been similar incidents.

Other - very spooky! - was told to me by a close friend. The whole extended family was visiting a site of Greek or Roman ruins in Cyprus, where none of them had ever been before. Her little grandson, , who was still pre school so could not have read anything about it, said immediately on arrival, ‘I used to live here!’

And went on, very happily, to point out the remains of his house, and his friend’s house (he even gave a slightly garbled but appropriate name for him) and the cave where they used to hide, etc.
The whole family was seriously spooked!
When they left he said, ‘Thank you for bringing me home.’
I don’t know whether it’s relevant that his heritage includes both Greek Cypriot and Italian!

In both cases, though, any such ‘memories’ were completely forgotten after they were about 5.

When I was 17 my parents went on holiday leaving me at home alone for a week for the first time. We lived in a new house which had been built on fields so I wasn't scared of being alone. We also had a dog which made me feel a bit better.

Anyway, One night I woke up feeling like someone was shaking me awake. I opened my eyes and my mum was sitting on the side of my bed. She wasn't dead, she was on holiday. It must have been a dream but I certainly felt like I was awake.

Also, like Hetty58 when I was first married we lived in an old Victorian house. The back bedroom always felt cold, unlike the rest of the house. I slept in the room occasionally when my children were ill or couldn't sleep. I regularly felt a presence in the room and had also very vivid unpleasant dreams when I slept in there. I have spoken to my son about it when he was older and he also said he had some strange experiences - feeling that someone else was in the room

We had a friend who used to scoff at anything other-worldly, and other people’s fevered imaginations. Until he and his wife spent a week in an old, isolated cottage in Scotland. They were washing up together one evening when they both heard a noise behind them and turned round to see an old lady just standing watching them from the kitchen doorway. As they looked at her she slowly faded. He hasn’t been quite so cynical since.

I’ve never seen anything, but DD1 as a baby used to suddenly beam, say “asta”, which was her word for “there it is” and point firmly towards absolutely nothing as we carried her round the house. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end every time, but whatever she saw obviously made her happy. We moved days after her first birthday and she never did it again (thank goodness!).

We live in a modest 300 year old house. We've been here for over 20 years. I have never ever felt or experienced anything in the house, nor has any of my family. But the couple who used to own it lived just across the road from us and the old lady told me one or two stories of seeing a ghost in the house.

Mind you, she was a bit 'fey' and I am not...

My grandmother also experienced various unexplained things over her lifetime; she was 'fey' too...

Witzend, although I don't believe in ghosts - I do think that there is much we don't understand. All things in nature are recycled, so maybe souls are too. Tiny babies are so 'knowing' with an inborn personality.

I've often been to places that seemed strangely familiar - or met people I appear to instantly recognise and know well.

Maggiemaybe, dd said that both her first and second babies at 8 - 10 months - so having recently learned to wave - would smile and wave at someone who wasn’t there, and there was no mirror or anything else where they could have seen a reflection. It only ever happened in a particular place.
The 3rd hasn’t done it, at least not that I’ve heard.

The wife of the chap who’d lived there previously had died not long before the sale. Dd was slightly spooked, but the house has had always had a lovely warm atmosphere - you could tell it had been a happy family home - so she’s sure that than any presence, if there is one, is entirely benign.

We moved to our current house when my daughter was 5. We bought it from the estate of the very old lady who lived here before us.

One day, my daughter told me that she had been talking to an old lady in her bedroom. The lady had asked her who she was, and was generally chatting to her from what we could gather. I told her to tell the old lady that it was fine, we would look after her house and that she could leave now. We heard no more about it, but my daughter remembered the incident a few years later (she doesn't now).

My granny told my mum that an old lady in a black bonneted visited her and sat in the corner for a long while, gran died a week or so later. I also had an imaginary friend but I always understood that wasn't unusual in eldest or only children.

I have another!

In the week after my mum died I was in her back bedroom, which she'd used as a study, looking for photos to use in the Order of Service at her funeral. The room suddenly filled with the smell of fresh cigarette smoke. Mum loved a cigarette so I found it very comforting. The window was closed and I was alone in the house, so I can't think of a reasonable explanation.

I didn't tell anyone about it for fear of spooking, or upsetting them. The next day I walked into the house to find my dad and brother sitting, looking very shocked. They had been sitting chatting about mum and suddenly the air had been filled with the cigarette smell!

I know some people are sceptical but when these things happen to you they seem so real - and when others experience the exact same thing it's so hard to just dismiss them, however much you want to.

After my lovely MiL died, too young, for a few days I had a very strong sense of her presence in our house - I could almost ‘see’ her sitting on the sofa.
I put it down entirely to my imagination, so when my father died only 6 months later, I fully expected to ‘sense’ the same, either in our house or in my mother’s.
But there was nothing. Zilch.

I was sitting on my bed, singing to my new baby daughter, when my Granny's face and upper body appeared on the other side of the cot. She smiled and nodded and then faded away. It was a lovely experience.
My daughter and her husband and young family rented an old farmhouse for a couple of years. It was in the countryside next to what remained of a castle. Just part of one wall left standing.
My granddaughter was 5 at the time having just started school.
One early summer morning she awoke, got out of bed and looked out of the window. She saw a boy sitting cross legged on the lawn. He was wearing strange old fashioned clothes and was wearing a hat. Realising it was too early to be up She went back to bed.
Later that day she told her mum about the boy, but wondered if he was part of a dream.
My daughter related this tale to my son in law. He looked very surprised and told her that he too had seen that boy.
A tale is told in the locality of a boy sent out on an errand from the castle. Before he returned the castle was locked up for the night, nobody realising that he had not returned. In the morning when the castle door was opened the body of the boy was found sitting frozen to death on the doorstep.

We lived in an house that dated from around 1600, we had a very naughty ghost, there are so many stories I could tell.

I never saw our ghost but she often spoke, she was good at switching lights on and off but her party piece was hiding things!

On the day we left one of our removal men saw her,poor man was really shocked, he’d been telling her to keep out of the way as some heavy furniture was being lifted down the stairs and she just disappeared!

Some friends ( non believers) came to stay and only confessed recently that they had had an incident in the night!

Yes a dog and I wasn't on my own in seeing it. I also saw someone before I knew they had died. Things may be in your own mind but there is something very powerful that happens when someone dies ime

Coastpath

I have another!

In the week after my mum died I was in her back bedroom, which she'd used as a study, looking for photos to use in the Order of Service at her funeral. The room suddenly filled with the smell of fresh cigarette smoke. Mum loved a cigarette so I found it very comforting. The window was closed and I was alone in the house, so I can't think of a reasonable explanation.

I didn't tell anyone about it for fear of spooking, or upsetting them. The next day I walked into the house to find my dad and brother sitting, looking very shocked. They had been sitting chatting about mum and suddenly the air had been filled with the cigarette smell!

I know some people are sceptical but when these things happen to you they seem so real - and when others experience the exact same thing it's so hard to just dismiss them, however much you want to.

I agree. I had never really had strong feelings one way or the other about an afterlife, but that experience after my husband passed away really made me think. I was so distressed that night, as the loss had started to really hit me, and suddenly there was such a calming presence. I can’t explain the movement of the bed, but I know it wasn’t imagination and it was no dream as I was fully awake and aware of the noise from the TV in the background. Maybe some would put it down to wishful thinking, but I can’t dismiss it that easily.

BlueBelle wrote:
"No because I don’t believe there is anything that isn’t in your own mind".

Same here BlueBelle. Some anecdotes about ghost experiences can be explained as hallucinations. But others seem to have no normal causes

I have had a few inexplicable occurrences which may or may not have been ghostly but I think it's wrong to dismiss these experiences as over-imagined rubbish.
There may well be energies, for want of a better word, that we don't have a clue about, much like electricity which was always there in nature but a complete unknown until Benjamin Franklin was credited with it's 'discovery'.
Maybe ghostly phenomena are like that, existing but waiting to be fully discovered and explained? Bit philosophical for a Monday morning

Not me personally, but I know people who have.

A nurse at a hospital where I used to work told me of an encounter she had. It was 0300 and she was going to a particular room to set up a couple of tube feeds. She saw someone enter the room ahead of her. When she reached the door, it was CLOSED. The person had walked through a closed door. She told me that other staff had reported being in the same room, hearing a noise, looking up and seeing a man reflected in the mirror, standing next to them, but when they turned to look there was no one there.

Another nurse colleague told me of an experience she had as a child. A woman came to the door and my colleague answered it. The woman asked for my colleague's mother and was informed she was out. The woman left. When my colleague told her mother of the incident and described the woman, her mother said, "That was your grandmother. She died years ago."

Hubby has also seen the ghost of our late cat, Gatsby, coming down the hall toward him.

Two of my colleagues have experience with the supernatural. First colleague – she lived in an old house. One day she woke up and saw a puddle of water on the floor but it was in the shape of a perfect circle - a sign of poltergeist.
On her last day at the house, she was standing at the open doorway and the doorbell rang when there was no one outside.

Second colleague works part time as a caretaker in a village school. Many years ago, a schoolgirl from that school was found murdered in nearby woods and the ghost of a young girl has been seen at the school.

My colleague had seen her, she said it was getting dark outside and the apparition was standing about 30 feet away from her.
A teacher who worked late one evening had also seen her . She made a big fuss about it, so the school had to do something. The local priest was invited. He, witnessed by the school representatives, carried out an exorcism session and it worked.

Not long after that, my colleague was talking to a lady who lived in a caretaker house next to the school and the lady said ‘The ghost has left the school but is now in my house!’

There’s something called ‘stone tape theory’ which tries to explain paranormal experiences. The theory is that traumatic events, unhappy atmospheres and strong personality traits from the past, are all stored in the fabric of the building where they took place. These events are then played back periodically, which is why we see what we perceive as ‘ghosts’. Similarly where other sensory experiences such as smelling perfume or tobacco, or sensing a presence, is down to the personality of the deceased person being imprinted on the building and manifesting to others from time to time. Another theory is that we live in a multiverse and all possible variations of our individual lives being played out. Occasionally the different planes interact, and as a result we see what we think are ghosts, but are actually fleeting scenes from the other dimensions.

After my exH and I had split up. I was alone in my cottage and it was fairly isolated. I always felt very comfortable and safe there. There was a friendly atmosphere about the place. One night I was awoken round about 3am. I was wide awake, not dreaming. Petrified, I could hear two men talking to each other in fairly loud voices as they came up the stairs! I couldn’t investigate. Too scared. The house was locked up. I pulled the duvet over my head and waited…. and waited. Nothing.
In the morning after eventually falling asleep again, I checked the house over and nothing was amiss. Ghosts? I don’t know.

No but a plumber who had to go into our cellar told me he'd seen a ghost down there. I casually said "oh, that'll have been Willie McG" (someone who lived here long ago) then saw that the plumber's face was dead white!!!!

Oops!

In our previous house the ghost lived in the loft and he was called Henry. We never saw him.