Do you believe in spooks? Well sure, we all know they're out there operating the arcana of their dark art, and the insouciance of latter day youth denigrates their online presence, "Glowies." But what about real spooks, ghosts, apparitions, typically of the dead. People see these, no doubt about it, and so have I. Here's a short story.
Back in the '80s our family lived in an Edwardian rectory on the outskirts of 'Nam, Cheltenham. My room was on the top floor and, when it was time for dinner, Ma LSP would shout out from the ground floor, "Dinner!" and off we'd go, all 5 kids.
The pattern repeated. One night I was a bit slow off the mark and left the eyrie late. Walking by my parents' room I did a quick eyes left and there was the silhouette of a woman, it was winter, the lights were off and she was combing her long hair in front of a mirror on the wall in the darkness.
I thought it was one of my sisters, being a comb your hair in the dark hippy, and was going to tease her for the malfeasance but thought better of it. Don't be a churl, LSP, let her enjoy the moment, so I duly walked down another flight of stairs and thence to the breakfast room, where everyone was present. No kidding, what had I just seen.
True story. Was it a ghost and if so, what are they, spirits of the dead in some kind of limbo? A transdimensional occurrence, a slip in the fabric of space and time? Or something else. Feel free to weigh in.
Ghostly,
LSP
I don't believe in spooks, ghosts, haunts, haints, cold spots, Bigfoot/feet nor Yeti's nor little green men from Mars or perhaps Alpha Centauri and the ilk.
ReplyDeleteThen again, I've never personally seen any of those either, so......
I'll tell you what I do know, however. Had a recuring dream while home on leave before heading off to Viet Nam, five or six times maybe. It was at night, and I was standing outside a lumpy structure watching weird lights in the sky off in the distance.
Fast forward a couple months and I'm standing in the dark outside a lumpy sandbagged bunker watching artillery flares drifting under their parachutes off in the distance. All this identical to my recuring dream in every detail. Freaked me out to the max, I can tell you that. Still does.
Does that count?
Wild, it most definitely counts.
ReplyDeleteAnd our dreams are strange things. We're told to keep a diary but I never have, maybe just as well.
I believe in ghosts , LSP, but have never seen one, and don't want to. I've just been reading about about Liberace's Las Vegas house which is rumoured to be haunted. There are many things we humans don't understand.
ReplyDeleteRead "The Third Man Factor", excellent book on the subject of the "unseen" influences (Holy Spirit being our main one). I have experienced what he writes in the backcountry travel when circumstances got a bit "tenuous". In one chapter the author describes the Old Testament era as people having a more awakened right-brained spiritual connection (mainly to God) while "the noise" of modern man has dulled or completely drowned that out.
ReplyDeleteWe simply do not see or know the spiritual connection as before, so it's a bit of an intangible mystery to us. Ghosts? Unsure...but who am I to say the veil can't be thinned now and then, especially if I have not experienced an apparition.
We lived in a house in Overland Park that had a ghost. Our beagle would accasionally suddenly go on alert mode, stand up on our bed and stare into the room across the hall. One night about one am we both heard a voice that said "hear hear hear". I got up and searched the property and never found anyone. When our Grand daughter was small she liked for one of us to be in her room while she went to sleep at night. While sitting next to her crib I saw something look in the doorway at us. A human shaped form with no distinct features. My wife saw it more than once. I used to say that I would believe in ghosts when I saw one, I have seen and heard one.
ReplyDeleteWe lived in a house in Overland Park that had a ghost. Our beagle would accasionally suddenly go on alert mode, stand up on our bed and stare into the room across the hall. One night about one am we both heard a voice that said "hear hear hear". I got up and searched the property and never found anyone. When our Grand daughter was small she liked for one of us to be in her room while she went to sleep at night. While sitting next to her crib I saw something look in the doorway at us. A human shaped form with no distinct features. My wife saw it more than once. I used to say that I would believe in ghosts when I saw one, I have seen and heard one.
ReplyDeleteThe thought of Liberace's ghost is more than a little unsettling, Anon.
ReplyDeleteI'll check it out, Paul. And yes, our ability to see seems to have been weakened. Mind you, perhaps that's changing and not in a good way. Remember all those witches hexing 45 on a weekly basis?
ReplyDeleteInteresting, gregg. Similar, in a way, to what I saw. Not necessarily bad but certainly eerie.
ReplyDeleteWhile I have never seen or experienced anything paranormal I don't doubt those who have. Perhaps I'm some sort of anti as a few people who claim to be physic are uncomfortable around me.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first tried to write this, it quickly became apparent that it was going to be way too long. So in the interest of (some) brevity, I am leaving out a number of details and focusing on the part I observed.
ReplyDeleteTo bounce off what Paul M said, some folks seem to be more sensitive to the spiritual realm than others. I am not. In my near 70 years on this rock, I cannot point to a single sight or sound that ever made me think or feel like I had experienced a spiritual presence. Do I believe such things happen? Yes. There are simply too many firsthand accounts from credible sources (like LSP). And now I have my own account.
Our daughter is sensitive. This is her experience over the past few months. She and her husband and our two year old grandson live about 20 minutes away. Short version—
I will refer to our daughter as “M”. At some point she began to pick up on a feeling of unease, of feeling “unwelcome” in a room in their house. Around the same time, the baby monitor camera in grandson’s room began to pick up bright orbs. A “medium” (for lack of a better word) was contacted who came to the house, along with some sort of electronic equipment. Story is that the spirit in grandson’s room was that of my late father (the old 8th Air Force B-17 pilot) sent there to protect his great grandson from the evil in the room down the hall. Situation has been resolved, evil has departed.
M is not a wall flower or shrinking violet. She is a uniformed LEO with 10 years experience on patrol. The gal (medium) who showed up with the equipment is a retired 911 dispatcher who grew up in the area. I can only attest to the videos from the baby monitor.
In the videos I have seen, the orbs are bright, about the size of a softball, and move across the screen very quickly. The appearances seem random in location and duration.
In one video, M enters the bedroom and grandson playfully runs out. M glances down for a moment at her cell phone which she had set on a low table. The phone screen appears to flash rapidly in her face for about 1.5 seconds. She said she saw nothing out of the ordinary and was unaware of the flashing until she saw the video. When I first saw the video, the thought instantly “popped’’ into my head—is there a pattern to the flashes, and could it be Morse code? Understand that my knowledge of Morse code can be written on a small post-it note. It’s a code. They use dots and dashes.
When I watch the video frame by frame, there does seem to be a pattern, albeit somewhat garbled at the end. Possibly it is three dashes, three dots, then three dashes which would be OSO. For someone inexperienced like me, it would be easy to accidentally reverse the order. Could the intended message be SOS? I don’t know. When I see my dad again, I’ll ask him.
I can imagine you'd make some psychics uncomfortable, WSF. That's good, surely.
ReplyDeleteRHT, that's quite a story and thanks for posting it.
ReplyDeleteThe orbs are curious and seem to be a common phenom. Why? I don't know, but there it is. Also, the morse is interesting, some kind of cry for help?
I won't go on, the important thing is that you're all safe and sound.