Spooky stuff
May. 24th, 2005 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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tviokh's posts about spooky stuff (except the stuff happening on her walks lately - I mean, it's interesting to read about but must be sucky to experience). It's got me thinking about the whole thing: I don't believe in ghosts but something's going on with these.
I have an interpretation that doesn't involve ghosts. Not that I can prove anything but it's something to consider. First, a story of something that happened to my mum (and me but I was too young to remember): we were at my grandparents' house. I was maybe 2, able to walk but still needing a lot of supervision. Most of their living space was on the second floor. The house was pretty safe for a toddler except for the laundry room, which had a steep staircase leading to a back door. They kept the laundry room door closed (though it didn't lock) so I wouldn't go in and fall down the stairs. I was upstairs and my mum was downstairs at the front door, talking to someone, I can't remember who. She suddenly had a sort of vision of the laundry room, from low down, like how a toddler would see it. And she knew I was in there. The door had been closed and whover she was talking to didn't think I could be in there but my mum went up (the front stairs) to check and there I was, in the laundry room. I must have gotten the door open.
Her theory, and it's pretty much impossible to test but it sounds reasonable to me, is that she must have gotten some kind of signal from me. She was too far away to have heard anything to indicate where I was.
Tviokh had another story in another post about her grandpa that made me think of my mum's story: someone's wife was in their house and she saw an old man who wanted her to leave the TV on (I think that was it) and her husband said "that's just grandpa." It could be that ghosts are the product of our subconscious communication with each other, like what my mum experienced.
That's easier for me to get my head around than it actually being dead people.
I've got two other stories. Another one that my mum told me and one that happened to me. When my mum was in her twenties, she had some friends who had a vacation house... uh... somewhere in England. It was build against a cliff and it was cold. It was in a remote area and you could hear horrible screaming noises that were actually foxes doing mating calls. So it was a creepy house to begin with. Everyone said it was haunted. My mum's friends refused to be there alone. They said the ghost came at midnight. ... you know, I'm really fuzzy on the details of this one, I should ask my mum when she gets home. I don't think the ghost did anything threatening, just general ghost things like moving objects or making noises. So my mum went there once, by herself. I don't remember whether she was going there on vacation anyway or if she specifically went to check out the ghost. Someone had nicknamed the ghost Fred. At midnight, she went around the house going "here, Fred! Come out, Freddy!" There was no sign of Fred. After that, her friends never had any more ghost sightings there. They said she'd scared him away.
The second story is a little different. I can't explain it, except that I must have imagined it. In elementary school, there was a big mirror on the wall of the girls' bathroom and we used to play Bloody Mary. The ceiling was composed of thin, removable accoustic tiles resting on a frame, the relevance of which will become apparent in a moment. In our version of the game, I guess it's pretty standard, we'd turn off the lights, so it was almost completely dark, except for any light that could get under the door, then stand in front of the mirror and chant "Bloody Mary" ten times while slowly spinning around. We'd turn the lights on immediately after the tenth "Bloody Mary" because we'd all be freaked out by then. One time, I was in there with two or three other girls. One of them turned the light back on and I saw the ceiling tile in the corner tilt up about a foot at one side and then drop back down. I said "must be termites" which is absurd. It was more to reassure the others than anything. I don't think they either saw it or heard me (I spoke very quietly as a child, though I've mostly gotten over it). I still have a clear memory of the ceiling panel tilting up and dropping back into place. I both saw and heard it. The only explanation I've been able to think of besides imagining it is that there was a draft that somehow moved it but all the ceilings in the school were like that and I'd never seen it happen before or since.
So my theory about the ghosts is that it's actually projections from other people's minds. Which probably sounds equally implausible to some but people really see these things, they're not making it up. It has to be something. When more than one person sees the same thing without consciously communicating with each other about it, there has to be some explanation.
I know that doesn't explain the shadow people or the graveyard feelings. To explain that without ghosts, I'd have to get into ideas about collective consciousness and I'd need to read more before I'd buy that. I wouldn't go so far as to say people can leave an impression on a place. But maybe they don't have to. Like Tviokh's weird barn, the people who lived nearby already had bad feelings about the place. Maybe that was enough. And maybe it's not limited by distance anyway. I can't recall any in particular but I know there've been stories about people experiencing this kind of communication with loved ones, like in my grandparents' house, over great distances.
There could even be an explainable physical mechanism for it: my mum points out that radio waves can travel uncorrupted over vast distances and our brains give off elecromagnetic radiation. One would think we'd have been able to detect that kind of thing if it happened but nobody goes around monitoring their own EMF all day. So I think it's possible. Certainly at least as plausible as ghosts.
I don't know about the Bloody Mary thing, though. Demons, I expect.
tviokh's posts about spooky stuff (except the stuff happening on her walks lately - I mean, it's interesting to read about but must be sucky to experience). It's got me thinking about the whole thing: I don't believe in ghosts but something's going on with these.I have an interpretation that doesn't involve ghosts. Not that I can prove anything but it's something to consider. First, a story of something that happened to my mum (and me but I was too young to remember): we were at my grandparents' house. I was maybe 2, able to walk but still needing a lot of supervision. Most of their living space was on the second floor. The house was pretty safe for a toddler except for the laundry room, which had a steep staircase leading to a back door. They kept the laundry room door closed (though it didn't lock) so I wouldn't go in and fall down the stairs. I was upstairs and my mum was downstairs at the front door, talking to someone, I can't remember who. She suddenly had a sort of vision of the laundry room, from low down, like how a toddler would see it. And she knew I was in there. The door had been closed and whover she was talking to didn't think I could be in there but my mum went up (the front stairs) to check and there I was, in the laundry room. I must have gotten the door open.
Her theory, and it's pretty much impossible to test but it sounds reasonable to me, is that she must have gotten some kind of signal from me. She was too far away to have heard anything to indicate where I was.
Tviokh had another story in another post about her grandpa that made me think of my mum's story: someone's wife was in their house and she saw an old man who wanted her to leave the TV on (I think that was it) and her husband said "that's just grandpa." It could be that ghosts are the product of our subconscious communication with each other, like what my mum experienced.
That's easier for me to get my head around than it actually being dead people.
I've got two other stories. Another one that my mum told me and one that happened to me. When my mum was in her twenties, she had some friends who had a vacation house... uh... somewhere in England. It was build against a cliff and it was cold. It was in a remote area and you could hear horrible screaming noises that were actually foxes doing mating calls. So it was a creepy house to begin with. Everyone said it was haunted. My mum's friends refused to be there alone. They said the ghost came at midnight. ... you know, I'm really fuzzy on the details of this one, I should ask my mum when she gets home. I don't think the ghost did anything threatening, just general ghost things like moving objects or making noises. So my mum went there once, by herself. I don't remember whether she was going there on vacation anyway or if she specifically went to check out the ghost. Someone had nicknamed the ghost Fred. At midnight, she went around the house going "here, Fred! Come out, Freddy!" There was no sign of Fred. After that, her friends never had any more ghost sightings there. They said she'd scared him away.
The second story is a little different. I can't explain it, except that I must have imagined it. In elementary school, there was a big mirror on the wall of the girls' bathroom and we used to play Bloody Mary. The ceiling was composed of thin, removable accoustic tiles resting on a frame, the relevance of which will become apparent in a moment. In our version of the game, I guess it's pretty standard, we'd turn off the lights, so it was almost completely dark, except for any light that could get under the door, then stand in front of the mirror and chant "Bloody Mary" ten times while slowly spinning around. We'd turn the lights on immediately after the tenth "Bloody Mary" because we'd all be freaked out by then. One time, I was in there with two or three other girls. One of them turned the light back on and I saw the ceiling tile in the corner tilt up about a foot at one side and then drop back down. I said "must be termites" which is absurd. It was more to reassure the others than anything. I don't think they either saw it or heard me (I spoke very quietly as a child, though I've mostly gotten over it). I still have a clear memory of the ceiling panel tilting up and dropping back into place. I both saw and heard it. The only explanation I've been able to think of besides imagining it is that there was a draft that somehow moved it but all the ceilings in the school were like that and I'd never seen it happen before or since.
So my theory about the ghosts is that it's actually projections from other people's minds. Which probably sounds equally implausible to some but people really see these things, they're not making it up. It has to be something. When more than one person sees the same thing without consciously communicating with each other about it, there has to be some explanation.
I know that doesn't explain the shadow people or the graveyard feelings. To explain that without ghosts, I'd have to get into ideas about collective consciousness and I'd need to read more before I'd buy that. I wouldn't go so far as to say people can leave an impression on a place. But maybe they don't have to. Like Tviokh's weird barn, the people who lived nearby already had bad feelings about the place. Maybe that was enough. And maybe it's not limited by distance anyway. I can't recall any in particular but I know there've been stories about people experiencing this kind of communication with loved ones, like in my grandparents' house, over great distances.
There could even be an explainable physical mechanism for it: my mum points out that radio waves can travel uncorrupted over vast distances and our brains give off elecromagnetic radiation. One would think we'd have been able to detect that kind of thing if it happened but nobody goes around monitoring their own EMF all day. So I think it's possible. Certainly at least as plausible as ghosts.
I don't know about the Bloody Mary thing, though. Demons, I expect.
