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What are your scary, spooky, creepy and unexplained experiences?
It's October, spooky month! So I figured I'd ask if anyone has any creepy, spooky, scary or unexplained experiences they'd like to share. I may have been waiting all September to post this These stories are always fun to read on AskReddit, so I figure it's only right to ask here on the spookiest month of all.
The spookiest thing that ever happened to me:
When I was 7 or 8, my mom sent me to bed because it was bedtime but I didn't really want to go to sleep, so I waited til she got in the shower and snuck across the hall to my parents' room to watch whatever was on
her tv. Well, it was classic high-quality horror movie Monster In The Closet, and I sat down on the bed right as some guy got dragged into the closet by The Monster! I wasn't too bothered by it (having already watched Poltergeist and totally not been scared was a point of pride for me at that age) but I was scared of my mom catching me out of bed so I went back to my room and tucked myself in. But then....the door to my closet started to move! I could hear soft thumping noises as the door shook slowly open. I screamed for my mom and covered my head with the blanket, but of course she couldn't hear me in the shower. The thumps stopped...BUT THEN SOMETHING JUMPED ON ME!!!! I thrashed around and the monster went flying! I peeked out from the covers and didn't see anything except the closet door open a few inches. As I lay there trying to decide what to do, I realized my kitty, who always slept with me, wasn't in bed....my kitty who also liked to sleep in the closet, who I had apparently trapped in there earlier in the day and then chucked halfway across the room in my illicit-tv-watching-induced terror. So I had to go to sleep with no kitty that night, and I always made sure from then on to check my closet extra well before closing it. The End.
That unlocked a similar memory. I was having a slumber party and we all planned to sleep in the basement where we'd made a blanket fort. It was a dark and stormy night, so of course we decided to sit in the fort and tell scary stories.
One friend told us about an evil tooth fairy, which I've recently realized was a direct copy of a movie called Darkness Falls. Still, she did a good job at setting up the mood. I particularly remember her describing the grotesque face under the tooth fairy's mask before the hero punched her at the climax.
So after she finished, the mood was set and another friend started her turn. At which point the tent wall next to us began bulging inwards. Cue four ten-year-old girls screaming at the top of our lungs and scrambling away as the monster pushes through the thin sheet, the blanket pulling away to reveal...
My dog.
She was terrified of thunderstorms. She would shake nonstop like her body had a vibrate setting, would follow you close enough to trip over her if you turned around, and would cry and scratch at the basement door if it was closed. The basement was her safe place, we'd leave the door open with a light on if we knew there'd be a storm during the day.
So on this dark and stormy night, she'd naturally gone to the safety of the basement and sought comfort from the four little girls who had been fawning over her. And instead got greeted with four screams of terror. We immediately apologized and gave her lots of pets and hugs, and scary story time ended.
We did not sleep in the basement that night.
This is the cutest story ever haha. Poor pupper; I feel like I've only ever known dogs who were either completely terrified of thunderstorms or entirely indifferent to them.
Oh man Monster in the Closet is such a classic. It's a fun watch as an adult by the way, lots of undertones that my 10 year old brain wasn't able to catch. š
That maybe 30 second clip is all I've ever seen of it, I guess one day I should give it a watch.
Is that an Enchanted Forest Chronicles reference I see? I feel like I've mentioned that series more times since I started posting here than I have in the last 20 years.
It is! I can count on one hand the number of people that have recognized my username, and I think I've probably been using it for about 20 years across different platforms š
When I was a teenager. Probably 18 or 19. Living at my parent's house. I got back home one day sometime in the afternoon. It seemed like no one else was home.
I walked in the front door which opens into the living room, but there is an open floor plan between the living room, dining room, and the kitchen.
Sitting on the dining room table was a severed head. It was a woman, her head was shaved, there was a little blood around the neck but nothing else on the table.
I stood there freaking out. My adrenaline spiked and I could feel my heartbeat in my ears. Her eyes were open and I could see them clearly. Her skin was very pale. I was frozen for a while. I was afraid to get closer. But eventually, I walked from the living room to the kitchen. So I could see it from another angle, thinking it must be a mask or something. But it was still a severed head. I was frozen again there for a while. I couldn't believe what I was seeing and It made no sense but I couldn't not see it. Eventually, I slowly walked towards it, just as I was getting within arms length I suddenly saw that it was just my mom's white purse.
It looked nothing like a severed head, from any angle. I walked back to my previous positions and couldn't see how it looked like a head at all.
I had been looking at it I think for at least 5 minutes. It felt like an hour. I was covered in sweat and exhausted. My brain had somehow seen a head and had refused to see anything else until I was right up close.
This is by far the worst version I have felt, but it's like when you glance across a room and think you see something weird but when you look back it's just some shadows or something. This time my brain just wouldn't let go.
I think of that memory often when people have ghost stories. They don't have to be lying or crazy for ghosts not to be real.
My experience of the human brain is it just sucks sometimes. It's constantly making things up and giving us bad data. We don't really see the world as it actually is. Just our brains best guess based on a smear of photons hitting our cones and rods, plus some more random data from the other meat-based sensors that we managed to grow.
Yeah, most ghost stories are definitely a result of people's imaginations getting the better of them. There's all sorts of ways our brains can mess with our perception and show us things that aren't there. Charles Bonnet Syndrome particularly comes to mind with your last paragraph, it's a form of visual hallucinations associated with deteriorating eyesight. The most commonly accepted theory is that it's the brain trying to fill in blanks to compensate for the blind spots, and doing a bad job.
Still, the fact you saw a purse as a severed head is a wild one. Just curious, but did you ever feel uneasy at the house? Even if it was your brain messing with you, sometimes I feel like the history of a place can just... Linger and leave bad energy. Not in the sense of ghosts or the like, but you can almost feel like something happened there. I've definitely been to a few places where I felt weirdly chilled and had an urge to get out ASAP despite it being broad daylight. I wonder if your brain picked up on some feeling like that and decided "Yes, a severed head absolutely fits in this place."
I don't remember feeling bad vibes about the house in that way. It was the house I grew up in. If anything, my parents were pretty abusive when I was young and I was at the age where I was looking forward to getting out of there. Maybe that was what my brain was trying to tell me.
You just unlocked a vivid memory in the same fashion. One Easter when I was like 12, my dad had put easter baskets on mine and my sisters' nightstands eeearlly in the morning. I remember waking up and seeing what looked like some horrifying monster perched on my nightstand. I forget what exactly I did from there but I remember turning the light on and seeing that what I thought was some freaky head on this thing's body was actually one of those poofy ribbons that look like carnations pinned to the plastic packaging around the basket.
Good times.
Sounds like one of those magic eye illusions. If you can get your brain into the state where you see the illusion it'll hold - right up to the moment it breaks completely.
I don't have any stories of my own that don't have funny endings, so I'll tell a story from my mom I've previously told on reddit about her real-life horror movie experience: The Nerd on the Roof. Apologies in advance, this is a long one.
It was the 1970's, and my mom was around ~17/18 and working at a summer camp as a counselor. She was there for two weeks, with batches of campers arriving on Sunday and leaving on Saturdays. There were five cabins, with A, B, C and E hosting campers while Cabin D was used as a meeting space for counselors. Cabin D was a neat building partially built into A hill, located below the rest of the camp and near an access road. The access road notably dead-ended in the direction of another, smaller camp that used tents instead of cabins.
Here's a map she drew last time.
On Thursday night of the first week, she and some other female counselors were in Cabin D when they heard noises on the roof. Two of them went out to investigate, just in time to see two male counselors come running down saying they'd seen a guy jump off the roof. At that moment they heard a car engine, and turned to see a car's lights on the access road partially hidden behind some trees. They also saw a figure running towards it, and it took off for town.
So, you know how in horror movies you have teens totally dismiss ominous red flags and joke around instead of acknowledging the potential danger? Yeah, turns out that trope's true. They found it more funny than creepy and joked around. At the time nerd basically meant "loser", so someone called him "the Nerd on the Roof" and it stuck. The "NOR" became a bit of a running joke.
Then came Friday night in Cabin E. Cabin E is far away from all the other cabins, on a different hill entirely and separated by a good amount of trees and a large fire pit. It's remote enough that it was the only cabin with a telephone connecting to the main camp. During that first week they didn't have enough campers to need all four cabins, so my mom and two other counselors were assigned to stay there alone.
Cut to the middle of the night when they're woken by the phone ringing. One of her fellow counselors answered it, groggily went "uh-huh, uh-huh, okay", hung up, and leaned a broom against the door handle before returning to her bed. When pressed by my mom and the other about what the call was about, she sleepily responded, "Fred thought he saw someone in the woods and is coming over with a gun."
Good news is 2/3 counselors instantly understood the severity of the situation, but my mother is still deeply amused at her friend's logic that a broom handle would be enough to keep anyone from breaking in. Yeah, really can't criticize horror movie characters for being unrealistically stupid and obvious after hearing that. Fortunately for their nerves their fellow counselor showed up soon with a gun, and he stayed there for the rest of the night.
However, in the morning they found the phone line to Cabin E had been cut.
And later on Saturday they finally learned how dangerous things really were.
After the campers left some of the counselors headed into the nearby town to run errands. It had a small local newspaper published every Saturday, and someone grabbed a copy on a whim. Later that night someone read the police blotter, and that's the only reason they learned this.
Remember how I mentioned a second camp down the access road? Well, at some point that week there was an attempted kidnapping there.
When I say "attempted kidnapping", I don't mean someone tried to pick up a kid who wandered away from camp or looked like they were alone.
Someone opened an occupied tent in the middle of the night, grabbed a random kid in full view of the other campers and counselor, and just took off running into the woods while carrying this random child.
That is, quite possibly, the most brazen and audacious attempted kidnapping I've heard of to date. It wasn't broad daylight, but it wasn't someone trying to be sneaky either. It still shocks me to try to imagine it. Naturally the counselor ran out and chased him down, because you don't just do nothing when a strange man kidnaps a child. Eventually the man dropped the child to focus on escaping, at which point the pursuit ended so the counselor could tend to the obviously traumatized child.
The kidnapper was never caught.
Of course mom and her fellow counselors were freaked out, as well as angry that no one had informed them of the obvious risk to their campers. Honestly not sure why it was hidden in the police blotter instead of being the front page story. It also made the NOR a little less funny.
So they went into the second week a bit more wary. They had more campers this week, and assigned the older girls to Cabin E. My mom and the others also continued to stay there. Fortunately for their nerves, nothing freaky happened over the course of the week, and they made it to Friday night without incident.
Fridays had what they called an "Indian Pageant" (it was the 70's, different time), which was some big gathering. All the kids and most of the counselors would gather at the "pageant grounds", a space so far removed from the rest of the camp, she didn't bother drawing it on the map I linked above. It was somewhere to the far upper left of the pool. It was used only for the Indian Pageant as one last big hurrah.
At some point though, one of the counselors came running and pulled my mom and a few other counselors away to share chilling news: "Someone broke into Cabin E."
They all took off running. Cabin E was at the opposite end of the camp from the Pageant Grounds, and it took ten minutes to reach it. They threw open the doors to a chilling sight. Someone had gotten into the campers' belongings and tore everything up. She described the kids' bras hanging from the rafters, sleeping bags and pillows covered in slashes, and clothes cut into shreds and scattered all over. No belongings were spared or salvageable, the level of destruction alone was disturbing enough.
But written on the mirror in toothpaste, were four chilling words:
"THE NOR WAS HERE"
It took half an hour to clean everything up. All of the campers' belongings were a total write-off. When the campers arrived, they were told a raccoon had gotten in there. Naturally they were upset, but at least they didn't have the trauma that would come with the truth.
The next day the campers went home with no further incident, and my mom returned too as her two weeks came to a close. Her fellow counselors confirmed the NOR didn't return after that.
The story ends there for the most part. A chilling tale my mom's told me many times over the years. However, there are some details worth noting.
Namely, the man on the roof and the vandal are most likely different people.
They actually have a suspect for who vandalized Cabin E. The campsite had a nice couple living there as caretakers, along with their adult son who was considerably less nice and more creepy. Mom and the others suspect he overheard the counselors joking about the NOR at some point, and got inspired to play a sick prank. However, since he lived on the campgrounds, he had no reason to jump off the roof and run towards that car. So he likely wasn't the NOR.
My theory is that the original NOR was the attempted kidnapper, scouting the camps. Cabin D was at the bottom of a hill below the three occupied cabins that week after all. Upon realizing he'd been spotted, he took off to where his partner was waiting and fled. If true, the attempted kidnapping becomes even more disturbing, as it was not only pre-meditated but had at least two people involved.
But the last time I had my mom retell me this story to I write it up for reddit, I realized something.
Remember the night in Cabin E? Well, we're just assuming that incident was on Friday. It's been 40 years so her memory of the exact timeline is spotty, she just knew it happened after the NOR and before they learned about the attempted kidnapping. She also can't remember which day the kidnapping attempt happened, only that it wasn't Thursday.
In other words, there's a chance that the kidnappers were scouting for a second attempt on Thursday... or the attempt was Friday night.
And the other camp was in the same direction as Cabin E.
And one more chilling realization as I write it this time: the NOR's likely connection to the original kidnapping attempt probably isn't known. It was a small town, and the two camps were full of "outsiders", which is likely why it wasn't bigger news in the newspaper. I can't find any records of the attempt online, and there was no reason for my mom and the other counselors to report the original sighting of the NOR to police.
There's a chance the local police never knew the possibility of there being two people involved and just how premeditated it was.
It's also possible they went on to commit some other crime, and no one knows enough to connect it to this original attempt.
If the NOR was indeed one of the kidnappers and was scouting the camp like I suspect, I can't imagine they would give up entirely after just one (or maybe two) attempts. They'd probably abandon the camps and find some other target. Maybe they got caught, or maybe there's some unsolved case tied to them. Maybe this is an unknown footnote in some serial killer's history.
Either way, I suspect the Nerd on the Roof was far more dangerous than any of them realized.
I shouldn't have read this before bed and I'm a grown man. That's some adult terror right there.
Definitely. I basically grew up hearing this story, it just felt like a scary campfire story. Writing it down feels like the plot of a horror movie. As I grew older and got more details though, I gradually realized how genuinely terrifying and dangerous the situation really was. The realization that the NOR and his accomplice could have gone on to commit other crimes is chilling.
This makes me suspect one of the camp counselors your mom was staying with to be honest. Perhaps the guy who was coming over with the gun, perhaps someone else.
Obviously it could have been a stranger, could have been the creepy adult son, or it could have been someone else. Since this was a long time ago and not well-documented, it could also be inaccurate.
But considering all of this apparently started and ended with this camping season, and considering the very strange use of the inside joke at the end, it really sounds like a sadistic person got themselves into a position of authority over children. Maybe this counselor played along to the fullest extent to make sure nobody would suspect them. Perhaps they enjoyed watching his or her fellow camp counselors get the shit scared out of them.
Would be interesting to know if the person who "discovered" the news story, the Cabin E break in, the kidnapping attempt, etc. were all the same person.
I don't think there's any conspiracy with the counselors. My mom is still in contact with everyone and they're all good people. They joked about the NOR a lot throughout those two weeks, so it's highly plausible the caretakers' son overheard it, and he'd know that Cabin E would be empty on Friday at that time since he lived on the campgrounds. Also, while my mom was only there for two weeks, the camping season lasted all summer and continued after she left. It was a coincidence that her two weeks overlapped with these incidents.
The facts are, there was a man on the roof and someone in that car, neither of whom were counselors, and there was a kidnapping attempt at the nearby camp. This was beyond simply scaring people, there was at least one attempted crime. Possibly two or more, if I'm right about the man on the roof being involved in the kidnapping attempt.
I have a spooky story.
Back in the 1980s, when my parents were together, they used to have a beach house. We didn't go there very often, so they had a Caretaker. He often slept in our beach house when we weren't there, as well as in other houses he took care of. It was kind of a dangerous job, robberies were common in the off-season.
Long after my parents sold the house, on multiple occasions, we heard the Caretaker screaming at our house (not the beach one) demanding to be paid. I can vouch that I heard it myself. AFAIK we didn't owe him any money, my mother went looking for him anyway. She was informed that the Caretaker was murdered years ago. Shot in the eye.
I posted this last year but we have a lot of new users that never read it so I guess it's okay.
The house I grew up in was haunted. Main source of sightings was seeing a person or once a dog go from one bedroom at the end of the hallways to the other like they were playing (I wasn't the only one to mention it happening). This is to the point I've gone back to see who it was only to find nothing (2nd story, locked windows, no drugs, wide awake, few places to hide, was even daytime once).
The basement was furnished and had a room down a hallway in the back that gave everyone the creeps. At some point it was turned into a bedroom for my sister who swears she kept seeing the ghost of a large man at night blocking her doorway, acting like it was protecting her from something. I've been in a lot of "creepy" places that didn't phase me, love horror movies and haunted houses make me laugh, but that back room was something else. I've only run across a similar feeling in 1 other place, it was when I was hiking through some woods & suddenly everything got creepy for no apparent reason, seemed like the same woods I'd been going through. I could try to explain most of it away, but it makes you wonder if there's something to the whole ghost thing.
Did you ever look into the history of your house? Especially curious with that feeling about the basement room. At risk of sounding crazy, I feel like sometimes this sort of "energy" can just linger in some places. Like something happened there and forever left a mark, even if it's not a physical one. I haven't encountered it often, most recent example was an exhibit room at Ellis Island, but I hear it a lot about places where there were murders or other tragedies.
The fact you compared it to the woods just adds to it. I feel like that one may have been more your subconscious picking up on some sort of physical danger you yourself hadn't noticed, like an animal or person. So to get that same feeling in a room in your house... Yeah.
I've read about people having the heebie jeebies out in the wilderness before and also offering barely noticed signs of wildlife or people as an explanation. Like just on that edge of getting your brain to notice, but not enough to be cognizant of why. I wonder if there's something to it. One story I read was a redditor who got a real creepy feeling in his backyard once when cooking on the BBQ and he couldn't put a finger on why until he realized the birds were completely silent. Turns out a cougar was hanging out in the big tree in his yard just watching him.
There are aspects of vision that aren't handled in the visual cortex, but other parts of the brain. It is hypothesized that one of them is the ability to sense when you are being stared at. The thought is that your peripheral vision picks up forward facing eyes (predatory) being cast upon you, and registered as a threat subconsciously. Weather this has been reinforced by science I'm not sure.
Catching something in your peripheral vision makes some kind of sense. That part of your vision is already reduced in detail like lacking color for example.
I'm referring to something even more specific than that even. Some people with cortical visual impairment (meaning that their eyes are working properly, but the visual cortex in the brain is not) can show different kinds of visual perception like reacting to a bright light in a room, instinctively navigate around an obstacle, etc. This is because there are different areas of the brain that are responsible for aspects of vision outside of the visual cortex. Basically the visual cortex is responsible for processing what we consciously see, but some other regions appear to handle reflexive forms of visual perception.
So while our eyes don't have as much detail in peripheral vision, the hypothesis is that something about forward facing eyes, be it the shine off of the eye, or the predatory nature of binocular vision (big cats that stalk and camouflage), something about that orientation trips a reflexive threat alert subconsciously.
The original owners traded homes with my parents, who added some money on top. They were older and moved out wanting the smaller home. No one died that i know of. There was nothing there before the house was built. I couldn't think of any reason it should be haunted. Just a house on the edge of a small town in the Nevada desert. It's even in a flood plain and bordering the old town dump, making it less likely there was a graveyard there.
Why would your sister agree to sleep in the creepy room? Why would your family want/make her do it in the first place? We had a weird all-green back room with no windows and carpet halfway up the walls that was my bedroom for a few years, but the creepiest thing about it was it seemed to be a wolf spider disco for some reason so I kept a glass and a stiff envelope around for relocations. I don't really believe in ghosts but I for sure would not have agreed to sleep in a room that creeped me out for any reason, or let my parents make my sister sleep there (she is terrified of spiders and I am not, which is why I got the Spider-A-Go-Go).
I have a personal reason for asking about your family's thought process: My brother recently told my sister and I that he has been attacked more than once by an old man ghost in the upper bedroom of the house he's been renting for 3 years. He never mentioned it until a few months ago, but apparently the ghost stomps up the stairs (he says his cats also react to the sound), and once he woke up to something aggressively pressing his face and chest into his bed as if trying to smother him and another time woke with long painful scratches on his torso. He's only seen it once and says it was a misty man-shape that faded quickly.
According to my brother, his landlord used to live in the house and just recently admitted (while telling my brother he needed to raise the rent lol, the balls on that man) he knows about the ghost and his wife made them move to the lower bedroom and finally move out because of the attacks. They only happen in the upper bedroom. The landlord said it was the ghost of the man who used to own the place, who died in bed. I was able to mostly confirm this through property reports and obits online (I found the name of the old owner and then an obit that said he "passed suddenly"). So I guess we know the ghost's name is Stanley, which is a perfect angry old man ghost name.
My brother doesn't seem to be lying or joking about this; it doesn't fit his personality and I don't think he could keep it up without cracking. He's also never shown much belief or interest in the occult, although he could just never have said. I work in mental health and he hasn't shown any signs of developing psychosis (or exposure to carbon monoxide for that matter) other than seeing a dead guy. He drinks pretty heavily but my whole family does/did, and we aren't prone to seeing pink elephants. No psychedelic drug use, and he quit recreational coke several years ago after a friend went off the deep end and lost almost everything to addiction (finally got his shit together about 2 yrs ago and just got married, thankfully). So despite my inclination to disbelieve in ghosts, I'm hard pressed to come up with another explanation right now. I want to ask if he'll let me come sleep in his room for a week, but I doubt he would.
In addition to being attacked in his sleep, the upper bedroom is very stuffy in the Summer and there's no bathroom up there so my brother has to try not to roll down a flight of steep stairs every morning just to take a leak. Despite the obvious advantages of moving to the lower bedroom, my brother continues to sleep upstairs. He just kind of shrugged it off when I asked why he stays up there. So I'm hoping you can shed some light on the thought process that would lead someone to choose to repeatedly expose themselves in their most vulnerable hours to creepiness and possible violence.
The ghost "protecting" her was probably the biggest reason she was fine and she strongly believes there was one which made it tolerable to her. She's not the type to just make stuff up and isn't into the occult either. The most she's done is allowed a church group to convince her to get rid of her ouija board, which was a gift from years before. She wouldn't have stayed if she were actually attacked.
I'm not sure why your brother would stay. I'd at the very least start testing ways to ward off ghosts, like white sage, and see if they work. He isn't depressed or a major introvert is he? Depression could sap his energy too much to consider moving and an introvert might see the process of finding a new home more scary than a ghost.
Anyway to go on as to why she agreed to the move, she wasn't forced into as it was originally going to be my brother or me. It's possible she was just being a nice older sister since it was obvious neither of us liked the idea, though I'm fairly sure she, as a young teen, liked the idea of getting a bedroom far from our parent's room with a small, newly built walk in closet, a bathroom that wasn't shared with 2 boys and a window that made sneaking in/out easy. It was also a nice setup with the concrete foundation stocking out 4 inches on 2 walls providing some shelving and it was all well painted. The walls were insulated drywall too. The basement was furnished and carpeted, our old playroom/Dad's man cave with her room down a hallway in the back. This is in a desert with normal windows, sort of a half basement really, so it wasn't your typical damp, dungeon-like basement. Before we turned her room into a proper bedroom it was an area that had a guest bed with an old tv that we used to play the Nintendo. Except for the creepiness, it was a nice room.
Luckily spiders weren't a big issue and not concentrated anywhere, there wasn't a whole lot of them probably because the ones we had likely ate the rest and there wasn't a lot of food for them to begin with. We had small cellar spiders every so often, same with yellow sack spiders which both stuck to the edges of the ceiling. A jumping spider might make it's way in on occasion.
The black widows were super predictable and stayed in dark, low traffic areas like the hot water heater closet or another room that was a workshop. Not as scary as people think either, very shy spiders that stick to their webs. We'd still kill them as we spotted them, can't have them laying eggs after all.
The wolf spiders weren't that bad, they were there but not in the way. They didn't make webs and mostly stuck to the floors and ran for cover as you approached. Though they were big, my dad once stuck a wicker stick up to one and we could hear an audible crunch when it bit it. The bad part is their babies ride on their back so getting covered in baby spiders because one crawled on you in your sleep is traumatizing... that happened to my sister and she has been afraid of spiders ever since. Luckily she's getting better as she gets older though. She even managed to stay collected long enough to pull over when a jumping spider appeared on her dash in front of her in her car. A bugzooka or something similar is the best thing you can get someone who fears spiders. I think since it lets them collect and dispose of spiders from a distance it might help the fear since they have a way to deal with them.
We also had wind scorpions every so often (harmless, no stinger, big jaws) and the only real scorpion we found was dead in a widow's web. Which is kind of lucky as some people in the same town had issues with them.
I get that sometimes. My partner and I have both had it about 3 times where we don't discuss it and one of us says something and the other is like "oh god, you feel it too, lets get out of here!". I often associate it with a smell. Sometimes its the kerosine smell of railroads, sometimes it's just old building. One time it was in the middle of nowhere like you describe and there was no real good justification for why I felt it so suddenly being a very similar forest, but I did. I always assume it's a smell now, even if I can't noticeably recognize it.
We got that feeling while camping in our friends front yard during the early months of covid. Real wiggies situation. We ended up breaking down the tent and moving it under the awning over their front door. 3 years later we come to learn that the house location was the original barn for the main house in the area. Like the only house for nearly a square mile that butted right onto the railway. Back in the 30s hobos used to squat in the house and then in the 70s it became the logo agro surfer hangout. Before the area was redeveloped it had a reputation for being haunted. Crazy to have that validation years after the fact.
Didn't think of smell. That makes sense though, one of my thoughts was it could be some instinct and a smell would be perfect for triggering that. I'm not sure what it was in the woods though, was nowhere near any structures. It's an area know to have homeless people camping out though, so who knows what one of them might have brought in. Who knows how many died out there too.
This one isn't really that creepy, scary, or spooky, so I suppose it doesn't really belong in this thread, but your question just reminded me of this, and it is really quite weird. Its entirely possible, but it really creeped me out right after it happened, because it felt like maybe, just maybe all of reality was a lie.
When I was younger I decided one day out of the blue to watch The Matrix. I'd never seen it before and I was working my way through 'classic' films (read: whatever was on IMDb top 150 films). The Matrix must have been on there and I felt inspired that day, so I pulled it up on an illegal (gasp) streaming website. I watched the movie, enjoyed it, and my mum called me and my siblings down for tea. As we sat down, I made a casual Matrix reference to my sister, and because she also was an avid film watcher, I assumed she would have seen it. She looked at me absolutely shocked and said, 'how did you...' and then yelled at me and told me not to look at her internet history on her laptop. I didn't know what was going on, but after vehemently denying the accusation, she told me that she had just finished watching The Matrix, for the first time. I was in absolute disbelief, and so was she when I told her I had just finished watching it too. Having just finished the film, I honestly had a brief moment of questioning my sanity...
Nothing about that experience was unexplainable or impossible. I suppose the best explanation is we both saw something online, maybe the same Reddit post for example, that inspired us to watch it. But what's weird is, at the time neither of us could remember anything like that happening, and we certainly hadn't discussed it with each other. This was years after the film had come out, and we both watched it on illegal streaming websites, so it's not even like we opened Netflix at the same time and saw it there or something. In any case, two siblings separately deciding to watch the same movie at the same time is a really weird coincidence. Two siblings deciding to watch The Matrix of all films at the exact same time is just bizarre.
You know that two scientists (Leibniz and Newton) decided to invent Calculus at roughly the same time in history without knowing about each other? Many other examples are there too, perhaps Linus and Andrew Tanenbaum trying to write a Unix clone at same time? ChatGPT and Bard? These bizarre events keep happening!
It's called "synchronicity"! The Wikipedia page used to have some great examples, but it seems it's been cleaned up sometime in the past few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity?wprov=sfla1
Aside from calculus, my favorite example is: in 1951, the US comic Dennis the Menace debuted within the same week as a completely unrelated Scottish comic strip of the same name. Both Dennises even wear striped shirts!
When I was a kid, I woke up and saw what id say was a ghost standing at my bedrooms closet door. It resembled a neighbour who had moved away some years earlier. I got up out of bed and went towards it, I could see through it (your typical whitish translucent ghost) so I put my hand through it and the second my brain realized that my hand actually went through it and it was a 'ghost' I freaked out and ran out of my room and woke my parents up and all that. Of course it was all gone by the time I got them to check it out and I've never seen something like that or had a similar experience since. This was probably 30 years ago.
To this day I don't know what I actually saw and I'm sure there is some legitimate scientific explanation for it, maybe some kind of sleep walking or maybe hallucination. But at least what my brain recalls, I cannot explain what happened.
"Better check if I can touch it" isn't a trope we often see in horror movies
This isn't scary or spooky - just unexplained.
In my first month of high school, all the students in my year were going away for a 3-day orientation camp. To spread the load, half the students went Monday to Wednesday, and half went Wednesday to Friday. I was in the Wed-Fri group.
On Wednesday morning (before I left for the camp), I woke up remembering a dream. In this dream, I was in a big crowd of students, gathered around some old wooden hall, out in the bush. I was near the back of the crowd. On a porch at the front of the hall, some teachers were speaking. There were lots of gum trees in the background (Australia). I saw a cyclone wire fence surrounding the area.
But then I woke up, and got ready for my first day of camp.
I'm sure the more astute readers already know where this is going, but I'll tell the rest of the story anyway.
I got to school. All we students got loaded onto buses, and we drove out to this campsite about an hour away.
Upon our arrival at the camp, we were told to assemble out the front of the main hall. I ended up near the back of the crowd of students. There was a cyclone wire fence surrounding the grounds of this camp site, and beyond that there were lots of gum trees.
Then some teachers got up on the porch in front of the hall, and start speaking.
Suddenly, I had a massive sense of dĆ©jĆ vu, and I remembered the dream I'd had that morning. The details were identical.
I had dreamed that scenario a few hours before arriving. (By the way: I'd never been to that place before.)
I have no idea how that happened.
I have had occasional similar bouts of dĆ©jĆ vu throughout my adult life, but they've become less frequent as the decades go by. Sometimes, when I'm experiencing that dĆ©jĆ vu, I can even remember the dream from days or weeks ago, wherein I dreamed the scenario I'm currently experiencing. This became a common enough feature of my life that, a few times, I've woken up from a dream and thought "I wonder when that will happen." A couple of times, I've realised what's happening while entering a scenario that shouldn't be familiar but is. However, as I said, this has become much less frequent over time. I can't remember the last time I had this type of dĆ©jĆ vu - certainly years ago, possibly more than a decade. But it used to happen a lot in my 20s, and then less often in my 30s.
This is one mystery I can't explain.
I got dream deja vu a lot as a kid and up through my teens. It pretty much stopped by the time I was in my early 20s. It was never about anything important and I always thought it was a waste of a superpower.
That's just a change in the Matrix being implemented, no worries at all.
Deju vu is very common, I had it a lot growing up. The brain is weird.
I had a very similar experience in high school. My friends and I used to walk the school quite a lot at night. We would sign in for an extracurricular activity, such as speech and debate, and then just wander the campus and adjacent neighborhood and chat. I loved it. One day we took a street we had never taken before. I had never been on the street but as we rounded the corner I recognized every detail of the street and could remember the dream it had been in. To this day I can remember the dream, what happened, who was there... all of it. I had no real explanation for it but to this day it makes me think there may be actually be time jumping similar to Kilgore Trout in Slaughterhouse-five than we may think.
Nowadays I live in an old family house. It's 100+ years, previously belonged to my grandma until her death, and is most likely haunted.
When we were moving in and the place was still messy with my grandma's belongings, I noticed strange red paint strokes in one of the bedrooms, right above the baseboards and under the wallpaper, and these small marks on the floor near a wall. I asked my dad about it, who basically told me that my very religious grandma was becoming superstitious at the end of her life, and asked someone to ward off evil spirits in this particular room. Great. We painted over the markings on the walls but the ones on the floor are still there. I guess it's enough to keep demons at bay since it's my kids' bedroom and they haven't killed us yet.
Oh and in my grandma's room (which is now our room), there was an old dressing table whose mirror was covered with a sheet. Mirrors are scary at night, I understand, but in hindsight it's still a bit unnerving.
Speaking of kids, they can be very creepy. For a few months, my youngest told us there was "the lady" who came at night (y'know, in their cursed bedroom). She also saw her in the door frame when we were right there. Out of curiosity I showed her a photo of my grandma, she didn't react to it. So I guess it was someone else's ghost, but she stopped mentioning her.
Another day, she suddenly stopped playing, looked over a door, pointed to it, and told us "the birds are gone". I was like "ok?" but my wife reminded me there was once a decoration with birds above that door. A decoration that we removed before my daughter's birth.
The last event happened ~4 months ago iirc. I was alone downstairs with the cats. Wife and kids were sleeping. I hear my wife coming downstairs, one of the cats turns around to look at the door in anticipation, then nothing. The door doesn't open, there's no-one in the stairs. I mentioned it to my wife the day after, who basically shrugged it off š
So yeah, haunted house but we've been there for 4 years now so I guess the ghost is chill with us.
When I was school aged I would occasionally see a tall man in a top hat watching me out of the corner of my eye. It started after I had a nightmare about a man trying to kidnap me from my after school program when I was around 8, and lasted until late high school. In the dream he pretended to be my aunt picking me up from after school. A counselor came and told me that my aunt was waiting for me but when I went up to her I realized that it was a trick and ran away. I went searching for my friend and found her in the auditorium with the man who then cut off her ear in front of me. It absolutely terrified me for a while, especially when I started seeing the hallucinations.Whenever I'd see him, I'd feel chills running down my spine and become extremely anxious, although I think I always knew he wasn't real. I remember him as being a tall lanky shadow, with a trench coat and a purple top hat.
He wasn't the only thing I'd see either. Occasionally shadows would move or shapes would twist as I lay in bed. Naturally, I got up to bug my parents a lot and had a ton of night terrors. As an adult I ended up telling my psychiatrist about the movements and the hallucinations as I got diagnosed with several mental health issues. She seemed unconcerned and never really gave an explanation, and I still see the flickers of movement, but not the man.
That reminds me that men in hats are strangely common hallucinations. First heard about it with Charles Bonnet Syndrome, a condition linked to deteriorating eyesight where people will see things they know aren't there. Since then I've seen stories of men in hats pop up a lot, particularly with night terrors and sleep paralysis. I recall there's speculation it sticks out to people partially due to the top hat creating such a distinct silhouette.
I believe I've actually read about that particular syndrome in a book from Oliver Sacks. It was interesting reading about it, particularly as I read it at the strange moment that I think was a pivot for me in my mental health. I hadn't been allowed to talk to anyone about my mental health as a kid, my mom is a big disbeliever in mental health issues and is huge on "natural medicene". Shortly after reading it I started seeing a psych and started unraveling everything. It was nice to feel less alone reading about people with all sorts of different mental and physical issues. It also helped me realize how fragile and wacky the brain is. Also how scary hats are.
I researched it as part of a project for my senior year that I called "You're Not Crazy". It really made me realize just how strange and wild the brain is, and how it can mess with perception in ways I never even thought possible. Like Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, which makes you see objects in different sizes and at different distances than they really are. Or Capgras Delusion, where patients firmly believe that people close to them have been replaced by imposters.
I sometimes wonder how many ghost stories and the like are a result of brains glitching out for brief moments. I've always liked the idea of a horror story where the protagonist has Charles Bonnet Syndrome and initially writes off the ghost or monster as another hallucination.
Not spooky, but freaky improbable/unexplainable. In about 2002, my wife and I were in the kitchen of our little (terrible) apartment, putting away groceries. I was hit with an overwhelming dĆ©ja vu, and mentioned it to her. The dĆ©jĆ vu slipped into premonitions just about 2 seconds ahead, and as I spoke them, they happened.
"Cup falls in sink." Clonk.
"Cupboard's not closed." Creak.
She looked at me wide eyed. We were both a little freaked, but I tried to hang on to the feeling.
"Knock at the door." Knock knock. It was the Greek we'd ordered. The feeling slipped away, and I've never had it since.
It's not out of the realm of possibility that it was coincidence or my subconscious making observations I hadn't yet surfaced consciously... but it sure was freaky.
When I was a kid, I had this macabre recurring nightmare about a severed arm chasing me around my grandmother's house saying it was going to kill me. It went on for years, until one time I had the dream and got so fed up that (in the dream) I began screaming back at this thing that I was going to kick its ass, amid a long string of expletives I'd learned from my folks. The dream never happened again after that.
I had a recurring dream similar to this, but with big cats that would stalk me (tigers, lions). I think it was maybe my subconscious working through real life stressors, since the dream would progress over the course of a few weeks. At first I'd have dreams of fleeing, and then fleeing and hiding, then fleeing hiding and getting cornered and having to confront the tiger or whatever. Then they would stop.
This story is from my mom.
When she was a young woman, she was awoken from her slumber by a sudden movement of the mattress.
She discovered the cause: a masked man with a knife was sitting on her mattress. She calmly talked him down: you don't want to do this, you are a better person than this, etc. After some minutes of this, he climbed out the window and left.
Honestly, few things more terrifying than a real person. Did she ever find out anything about what happened with him? Was the guy caught?
He was never seen again, as far as I know.
Iāll give it a go I suppose.
On an overnight Boy Scout trip to Gettysburg, all troops were camped out in the open field where the Confederate army was stationed before Pickettās Charge. The park was having a Scout Weekend where a bunch of troops would spend two days to get to know the extent of the battle/history and camp on the battlefield. I mean, it was all pretty cool considering.
Camped where Maj. Gen. George Pickettās forces advanced on Emmitsburg Road, however, was a little intense. I do believe we were scheduled there when it all actually happened in 1863, on July 3rd.
All of the scout troops had their a-frame tents lined up in rows behind the rock wall and tree lined road. The first day came and went and after dinner (which had to be chili, hot dogs, or something else gnarly for the intestines) sleep came. Not for me.
Well that food just gave me the worst gas pains. I just couldnāt fart it out. It was so intense I seriously couldnāt sleep and just had to lay there or try rolling around. I was agonizingly waiting for sweet release when I distinctly heard horse hooves clip-clop by my tent.
I unzipped the flap and looked to the left down the row of tents. To my 13 year old mind, it was like any other ghost tale and itās still burned in my brain. It had to be 2am, it was foggy out, with moonlight shining through. There he was; some white misty guy on a horse clopping away down the row of tents.
I never did release that gas. Itās probably still in me 34 years later. Either way, Gettysburg is cool.
the house I grew up in was haunted. From the couple two owners before my parents bought it, the wife killed herself by walking into a nearby river.
When my older sister was a kid she would often feel someone sitting on the edge of her bed brushing her bangs away with their hand -- but when she'd open her eyes, nobody was there.
We often had a lot of weird shit happen -- cupboards slamming out of no where, stuff falling off of shelves... stuff like that. For that couple, their daughter lived next door to us and our neighbor would often have crazy shit going on at her place when our place was calm.
... so that's one thing.
And now one for the christians!
Many years ago when I was in bible college (note: no longer a christian or involved in the church), I didn't live in the dorms, but I was helping close up the school one night and I found this really cool looking plastic sword that was definitely some kid's toy. It wasn't unlike something you'd get from the dollar store.
So I go back to my buddy's room and he's sleeping, but fuck that -- I start hitting him with the sword and he wakes up and has a really startled / weirded out look on his face. Long story short, he had been reading about the armor of god (Ephesians) before falling asleep and when he was asleep, he had that same sword in his dream.
Neat.
So its late and I was staying over. The rooms all had bunks and I was staying on the top bunk. I got up there and left my pants folded at the end of the bed.
A few hours into sleeping I feel this hand grip my ankle and the pants at the end of the bed slide off. I wake up, call my friend's name.... at this point I should note that we're in a charismatic denomination and seeing super weird shit isn't new, but my buddy's came up through an even crazier church... anyway, he wakes up and he's like 'who is there?' and I know there is absolutely nothing there that I can see. So he says, 'well, whatever you are, in the name of Jesus, you can't be here' and then says 'WHOOOA!!! the whole door is on fire' --- for him. For me, I am in a pitch black room where something was grabbing at me. Another weird thing is that I left the sword on this one dresser, but it was on a desk in the morning.
So the next day we're talking about this crazy thing and I was still weirded out. I took the sword home with me and had nightmares almost every night for weeks. Its silly, but I felt like I really needed to give the sword to the guy, so I did. Bam! no more nightmares.
Since leaving the church, this and other spiritual warfare experiences are tough to reconcile.
The ol' spiritual warfare reconciliation...now that's something quite niche that I know only too well! One night when I was a teenager, I 'woke up' in my bed and the door to my room was open and the hallway was engulfed in flames, with embers spitting into my room. I panicked and surveyed the room that remained in darkness. As I turned my gaze finally to the wall in front of me, I encountered a hooded shadowy figure poised above my body, holding a dagger toward me. It had no face or features and seemed to be composed of swirling smoke or mist. I was immediately seized of the most existential fear I have ever felt. It was bone-chilling and it felt so real. It bore the dagger down towards my chest as if to kill me right there and then and then I blacked out and woke up. I told my mom in the morning and she told me it was a demon and that it was trying to attack my soul. I was actually clinically depressed at the time, so it wasn't exactly helpful!
oof. do you ever see spiders or a rat or whatever around your bed when youāre barely asleep? it sounds like a similar state.
with reconciling this part of it all, iām not even sure where to start. a lot of other stuff is a breeze, but this and a healing i had donāt make any sense in the new light.
No haven't, have you?
haha yeah. Not often -- and I'm relatively aware of wtf is going on. If there ever is a big spider or a rat crawling around at 2am, I'd probably dismiss it.
I predicted very near the exact outcome of a true random number generator with an infinite range of possible outputs after a single digit # of trials (most likely one but I will say more to be conservative). Should basically be impossible but it happened... Apparently there's some legit (Princeton) scientists looking into a very similar phenomenon.
It seems to not actually be affiliated with Princeton for quite a while now and there's considerable criticism of it's methodology apparently...
One day I had decided to rewatch the Matrix. I went to the store for some groceries and didn't think much of it. I ended up with a red and blue bag of chips. And while walking home I saw a white bunny sitting in a patch of grass.
I'm still waiting for my laptop screen to turn black and give me some secret message.
Something unexplained.
My grandfather was in the end stages of lung cancer, and I lived 6 hours away.
The night he passed, at about 3 am, I woke up completely chilled to the bone. I mean shivering, couldn't get warm. I had to get another blanket and turn on a space heater and I was still cold.
That morning, around 6 am, my mother called to tell me my grandfather had died in the middle of the night.
My little brother died when I was eight years old. While he was in the hospital, and we didn't yet know if he would live or die, a woman came by and told my parents that he had decided to leave this world because he wanted to be a little girl, not a little boy.
A couple years later, my little sister was born. When she was a toddler, around two years old or so, she went through a period of telling everyone who would listen, "I used to be a boy in a hospital, but then I died." At some stage, she grew out of saying this, and when we asked her about it, she had no recollection of it.
Of course, there is likely a very simple explanation: The woman was a kook who said some random thing, and it was just a coincidence that my parents later went on to have a little girl; it's a 50/50 chance, after all. When my sister overheard adults talking about her older brother, who she'd never met and probably didn't fully grasp that he had ever existed, she misunderstood and thought they were talking about her.
My family are all skeptic/atheist types, and no one believes my sister is the reincarnation of my brother; we just think it's a weird and funny story.
Since I live in a house that was built before the American Civil War, my family and I always see shadows moving in the corners of our eyes. Either from woman that died during child birth (we did some research on the history of our house), or one of my two cats that we had that passed away.
But, what is really strange is that my sisters' bedroom has a solid wood door, as in it is really fucking heavy, that one time was slammed shut by itself, with no one by the door, and with both sisters in the room when it happened. And the thing is that everyone was down stairs, when this happened.
As for something that happened to myself. A few years ago, I had a skin issue that was causing me to bleed sometimes (thankfully it is not an issue any more), and I took a bath to help clean it, and I was in my room with everything closed, from the door and the windows, along with the fact that my room doesn't have a air vent in it. The reason that I brought this up was that I was dressing in there with my shirt on and I was pulling my sleeping pants on and I felt my shirt being lift up, like someone was lifting up to see the issue. So, I quickly pulled my pants on and bolted from my room and quickly ran down stairs to the living room.
Spooky:
When my grandmother died in my hand, the same moment the candle next to the window went out. Of course, it was just a tealight that had reached it's end, but it scared me happening the same moment. When I told the nurse, she replied with a voice showing it was an everyday thing, "of course, he spirit blew it out when passing through the window". Only then I noticed the window was open in November. This was how I learnt that it's a tradition in Germany to open a window in a room where someone died or was about to die. When I enter such a room I make sure the window is open ever since - and I never had to open it, as it's already taken care of in all hospitals or retirement homes. I am agnostic, but somehow I like the idea.
That's a really nice and sweet tradition.
Though your story reminds me of when my grandfather died. There was a power surge at his house, and then we later found out there was also a power surge at the office he founded and sold to my uncle. Two different cities and a pretty clear day, so wild that both had power-related issues at the time he died. (Pretty sure my aunt and uncle's house also had a surge or outage, but it's been a while so that might be wrong.) Between that and a small electrical fire at his wake, one aunt joked at his funeral that he should have been an electrical engineer.
More recently though, I found out that he told multiple of his children that he believed that after death, you turn into particles. And that he planned to enter electrical wires in that particle state. My grandfather wasn't one of those people who believes in crazy mumbo jumbo, he was an engineer and a bonafide genius who was firmly rooted in logic and rationality until his dying day.
So uh, given the power surges right after he died, he may have proven his theory.
That's a nice memory as well!
I admit, there was one exception - the one moment I was next to a dead one where I didn't check the window. That would fit the scary part of your question, but I'll post it only if you want me to. It's nightmare fuel and not remotely fun or anything.
When my father died, he wanted his ashes to be buried (in Germany you aren't allowed to scatter them, so we use urns that dissolve in water over time) in the sea. We buried him - as he demanded - in the Baltic Sea. He said that would be his best chance to travel a bit around there.
I feel that anything I could relate about the quirky weird things that happen to me wouldnāt be super profound but still, I have had so many weird little things happen in my life and a lot of them seem to be of an electrical nature.
Example: My kids jokingly call me a natural EMF buster, if Iām near electronics and not having a good day, or upset with whatever electrical device I happen to need to use, then they go wonky, turning on and/or off, etc. I even had a cash register spitting out its roll of receipt tape all over the counter one time because I didnāt want to use the damn thing, Iād never done that before & the thought of it at time made me angsty. Had the manger rushing over exclaiming to me āWhat did you do!?ā and thankfully a customer standing next to me came to my defense letting them know that Iād never even touched the register, and me stating āSee. I told you. I donāt work registers because I donāt like them and ātheyā donāt like me.ā ā I also really donāt like handling money, but it seemed funny to me to say that about registers, at the time.
Have had ball lightening come into my house not once but twice, both times while I was sitting in the living room, big blue glowing orbs the size of basketballs. Both times this happened in the middle of the day, not a cloud in the sky. 1st time it went into the back of and old fashioned tv we had back before flatscreens, didnāt even hurt it, just floated in from outside, right through the open sliding doors, a few feet off the ground but hugging close to the living room wall, followed the wall to the tv stand, rose up a bit and went behind the tv to disappear without a sound, and 2nd time it happened years later, but this time it popped up in the hallway and coasted along in the air about two and half to three feet off the floor, went into a nearby bedroom and then right into the back of a desktop pc and then blew it up; that one had me jumping up, the explosion was terrifyingly loud, and it sadly fried & killed the motherboard.
Certain truck of my spouses to this day I refuse to drive anymore because it has a history of refusing to crank for me and only me, and when I state refuses, I mean that it wonāt even turn over the engine, itāll act like it has a dead battery, and then my spouse would shout at me āWhat did you do!?ā (Canāt tell you how often thatās become a repeated phrase directed at me, ugh.) and Iād tell him that I didnāt do anything other than put the key in the switch and then try to turn it on! Then Iād show him, and it wouldnāt do anything, but then heād get in and āboomā it cranks right up on his first try. And this truck only did this crap to me after Iād first get in it at home and crank it up and then drive off somewhere, to get gas, or go to the bank, or do some grocery shopping, etc, & it always happened at different places, some close to home and some far away, so we didnāt see any recurring patterns to this mess, except for every damn time, when Iād come and get back in it to then drive it back home, then it would act up on me and play dead. As an aside, we got that truck used from a nice Hispanic guy, and it was white, so I secretly named it El Diablo Blanco. Damn truck had issues with me, and after a while I wasnāt happy with it either, heh.
Your ball lightening stories might be the most interesting thing I've read on this thread. Is there any more info you can provide? Do you have any theories why one just disappeared and the other exploded?
Sure thing! Ok, my house is wood and on stilts because I live in a flood prone area, been through almost 40 floods in 40 years, the house is probably only 300-400 yards from a river. Also itās surrounded by a lot of sinkholes; not at all ideal but itās swamp 3 months out of the year and so the land was super cheap forty years ago, also at that time my spouse had bought for a hunting retreat. My spouse built our house, he used marine grade metal pipe for the stilts, as years went on he was slowly changing them out but he never did replace them all. Want to add, as a comparison, that my parents bought a lot a quarter of mile from his lot to use as a vacation home and their house is on stilts too but those stilts are all wood, and I lived in that house for a year before I met my spouse, and also lived years as neighbors after I moved out to then live with my husband, and they never experienced ball lightening AND for a good 10 years my parents had an outdoor antenna arrangement that an adult could climb up that towered from the ground to 12 feet above their home, and they also had one of the old time wire mesh satellite dishes, because we live very rural to this day and TV reception back then was impossible with out these things.
Next, my spouse was a kind of pack rat bringing home bits and pieces of whatever, ex: an old bathtub liner heād gotten for free from someone who had their bathroom remodeled and didnāt want the old liner and so I believe saw a chance to have it taken away then for free for them. Spouse would bring home stuff like that, old windows, old bricks, old toilet, etc etc etc! Heād re use them in our house if he could, back before I met him, when I first met him he use to refer to our house as his hunting āshackā which again, it was, before I met him.
He made the house bigger once we got married and then had kids, understandably. Then one day he comes home with some kind of a giant salvaged light pole contraption, I honestly donāt know what to call it, but I do know he said it came off a tear down of an old gas station, and was one of the lights outdoors to light up the parking lot. This pole was twice the height of our house, and he attached the base of it, on the ground, to a cement footer and then also using a type of metal bands onto the side of one of our wooden porch rails. The thing was all a type of metal but I donāt know what, I have no clue technically about any of it; how it was built etc, I just know it was absolutely ridiculous looking, and that it worked as a light.
So, with ALL THAT, my crazy (?) hypothesis is, that my spouse, in all his over zealous pack rat, pinch-a-penny & āIf I can then why not!?ā ways, turned our home into some kind of giant freaking electrical attraction magnet.
When that 2nd occurrence with the ball lightening happened, and one of my kids was there to also witness it (so I had someone now to back me up, because my spouse wasnāt there to witness the phenomenon either time), Iām freaking out now because it wasnāt benign this time, and so Iām grasping at straws and then settled on that monstrous ugly-ass light pole, so I was then finally able to convince him to tear the damn ugly light pole down. I wasnāt nice about it, I did yell at him that his āstupid Dr.Frankenstein lightā was going draw in lightening and blow our house apart!
And at that time in our past when the first occurrence happened, in the late 80ās, we didnāt have the internet for me to do any searches on ball lightening phenomena, but I have since and what little I have found, so far, states scientists arenāt even really sure what wittinesses have stated is even true, that it even exists, and especially in cases like mine where it occurred on land, in the middle of the day/broad daylight, and with clear cloudless skies.
Edit to add: No, I donāt have any real theories on why one ball just popped out of existence even though I clearly saw it go in behind the old TV and just disappear without any flash of light or any sound, but the other literally and simultaneously flashed and blew up the desktop pc. Honestly the whole damn thing is a head scratcher, and I wish I knew someone who has a lot of scientific knowledge just to tell this all to and then get their thoughts and reactions, itās so damn crazy yet fascinating, like: Yo! Some rural podunk person has reinvented the ark of the covenant unintentionally, so hey, come look at this crazy mess. Itās like an X Files episode, heh!
I'm extremely curious to read this thread. Reddit has such a problem with Karma farming and I think it caused a lot of lying and exaggeration for posts like this one.
I hope to hear some more believable stories here.
Yeah I'm coming back to this thread tomorrow for sure, hopefully it'll be filled š¤š¼