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sen_no_ongakuMy impression is that when most people hear ghost stories, most are told in the third person, making it easy to dismiss them. Luckily for them, they don't have relatives in the Philippines.
A few weeks ago, my brother sent me a cellphone photo of his wife's aunt, taken at a party. In the background is a figure who partygoers say wasn't there for the picture, and who folks claim is her husband, who had died a few weeks previously.
A cousin tells me she once looked up through the skylight of a bathroom and saw half of a woman staring back at her.
An aunt tells me that she (and others) have heard children talking and running about in the basement of a particular house when nobody was around. Unlike others, though, she hasn't turned to see these children watching her.
An uncle visiting from the States once woke up to find all of his clothes ordered neatly in the front yard.
In a pathology lab, people occasionally report seeing an old man wandering around the halls. Sometimes they realize that they've seen him in pictures around the building; he is, after all, a former director of said lab. I don't know how they react when they find out that my grandfather passed away eight years ago. (My mother and grandmother [both doctors] half-jokingly -- but only half -- chastise my grandfather for having fun at the expense of others.)
I've stayed in some of these homes. I'm none too pleased about that.
I'm curious -- what take do you folks have on ghosts, if any? Utter bullshit? Hallucinations? Complete and total belief? Measured skepticism?
A few weeks ago, my brother sent me a cellphone photo of his wife's aunt, taken at a party. In the background is a figure who partygoers say wasn't there for the picture, and who folks claim is her husband, who had died a few weeks previously.
A cousin tells me she once looked up through the skylight of a bathroom and saw half of a woman staring back at her.
An aunt tells me that she (and others) have heard children talking and running about in the basement of a particular house when nobody was around. Unlike others, though, she hasn't turned to see these children watching her.
An uncle visiting from the States once woke up to find all of his clothes ordered neatly in the front yard.
In a pathology lab, people occasionally report seeing an old man wandering around the halls. Sometimes they realize that they've seen him in pictures around the building; he is, after all, a former director of said lab. I don't know how they react when they find out that my grandfather passed away eight years ago. (My mother and grandmother [both doctors] half-jokingly -- but only half -- chastise my grandfather for having fun at the expense of others.)
I've stayed in some of these homes. I'm none too pleased about that.
I'm curious -- what take do you folks have on ghosts, if any? Utter bullshit? Hallucinations? Complete and total belief? Measured skepticism?
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Date: 2006-02-10 04:23 pm (UTC)Also, I lived in a very old house in DC for a while. It was supposed to be haunted, and I laughed it off until I was home alone one night and heard knocking on the walls - as if someone was trying to locate a stud or a hollow place, continuing down each wall in the living room in a methodical fashion. We had no upstairs neighbors, there were two closed businesses on either side, and the knocking was definitely coming from right in the room with me. I got a little bit freaked out listening to the knocking, so I left the room and went into mine. You had to cut through my room to get to the 2 rooms in the basement, and we had a bead curtain at the bottom of the stairs. On my way into my room, I heard the distinctive sound of someone running through the bead curtain, and when I got to the top of the stairs it was swinging back and forth. I turned my back and the sound happened again, and the curtain was swinging violently. It for sure was not a breeze or a wind (communicating between a closed basement and a closed room) - it was something denser and more directed than that passing through the curtain in a certain way much faster than any breeze.
I wish I'd had the presence of mind to try some sort of "knock once for yes, twice for no" thing, but I think I just sat on my bed and said "I hope you're a friendly ghost" and went back to my book. It happened a few times later that summer, always when I was alone. I never saw anything. My roommates who had lived there longer than me confirmed that they heard the knocking sometimes too, and it became sort of a thing to say "Hey ghost, I'm home" when coming through the door.
Like me, my roommates always heard it when alone in the house.
Were we having a collective hallucination? Was the house just settling in some way? I have no idea, but it's sure kinda creepy, isn't it?