A Visitor from Victorian Times
I was in our family home, upstairs in the bedroom looking at various books when all of a sudden, out the corner of my eye I saw a Victorian man dressed all in black, as if dressed for a funeral.
One Last Tune
My father had cancer and he passed away in 2002. He died at about 8:00 pm in the hospital. He had been sick for a very long time. After he passed, and I had come home from the hospital exhausted and in need of rest, I went to bed. My father was a musician and his instruments were under my bed.
Throughout that night as I lay in bed I heard sounds coming from his guitar. It wasn't a tune, more like random notes, as if he were tuning it.
I Was Speechless
I was working on the third floor of an office building in the city centre about 30 miles from where I lived.
On several occasions, I would look out across the street from a tiny backroom window where I used to keep press cuttings into the three windows of a room on the same level in the building opposite. I would see a large lady dressed in a black cardigan and a dress, with bleached blonde, curly hair. She would always be pressing clothes with a steam machine (the kind where an overhead lid was brought down onto the clothes on the ironing board surface). She always had her back to me and I could see the walls to the room she was in lined with racks full of pressed clothes hanging in clear polythene bags.
I assumed she was working in a dry-cleaning or bridal hire company.
In the six months that I worked in that office, and visited that tiny backroom I would look across the street and see that lady busy with her pressing on dozens of occasions.
One day, while discussing Tuxedo hire with a work colleague who was attending a dinner, I suggested he try this place opposite where we worked, before looking elsewhere. He looked puzzled.
I took him to my office window to show him where I meant, and I almost fell over with shock. It was impossible to see through the windows as they were covered in thick grime; it must have taken years to accumulate that much. There was nothing to be seen through any of them. There were weeds growing out of the window ledges and roof tiles; it was absolutely derelict in appearance, and I was speechless.
My colleague said it had always been like that in the four years he had worked there. I told him everything I had always seen from the window whenever I had gone in there.
He went across the street to ask some of the storeowners if there had ever been a dry-cleaner or a clothes hire place in the street at any time. One gentleman who owned the barbers a few doors down from the building in question, said yes. His wife had run a small cleaning and mending outlet there in the 1960s, but she had died in 1988. She was a well-made up, blonde woman in her early 50s.
Who Can Resist a Man in Uniform?
The night my father died aged 72, he appeared to me in my living room. He presented as a young man in his 20's, dressed in his white naval uniform. He appeared as the most perfect a man could be, and he apologized for how he had been in this life.
This experience was very healing for me, and left me with a wonderful memory of my father rather then remembering the difficult times we had with him.
A Comforting Presence
After my father passed away I was over at his and my mother's house cleaning and the chair my father used to sit in began to rock.
My mother told me that earlier she had seen him standing at the end of the cabinet while she was washing dishes. She saw him out of the corner of her eye. When she reached for him he was gone.
Their dog would go and sit by my father's side of the bed and tilt his head as if he were listening to my father. My father had a brain tumor and spent a lot of time in bed before he passed away.
Oh, So Beautifully Dressed for the Season
I'm not sure whether I was over or under 13 at the time.
We went to a candle-lit concert, in a chateau in my hometown. It took place in a beautiful gallery with windows overlooking the gardens. The seats being lined up and I sat close to the window. It was winter and bitterly cold outside.
Sometime during the music I was looking out into the dark gardens when suddenly a very beautifully dressed woman walked past the window outside.
I admired her silky, shiny dress but thought she must be very cold as it was short sleeved. I really did not think much more about it then, and did not even tell anyone about what I saw. But, a little later, I must have been telling a friend about the concert and mentioned that I saw this woman and how I thought she would have been very cold outside.
That was when it occurred to me that nobody would have been in the gardens at that time, least of all some lady in what was, after all, rather unusual dress for the season. The concert was festive, but not an occasion for ball gowns or the like, and her dress looked more like something I's seen in costume dramas.
I am fairly sure, in hindsight that I saw a ghost and just hadn't realised it at the time!
You See Him Here, You See Him There
A few weeks after my father's sudden death I saw him walking down a busy road. I only saw the back of him and I turned to see the front of him and he was gone! This happened maybe four different times in all, for about a week.
Finally, I mentioned this to my sister and she said thank God I had told her, as the same thing was happening to her! After we talked about it though, it never happened again. We thought it was Dad just letting us know he was okay.
Now That Was Quite A Shock
When I was a teen I became interested in the paranormal, after the experience I mentioned earlier in the survey, with the spirit of my gran.
One night I went to the cemetery to do an experimental investigation, and I remember seeing a tall, misty, translucent figure. From what I could see it was a man, slightly bent over, walking across the path around 30-40 yards in front of me. While he appeared to be walking I can still remember that there were no feet to be seen.
I was both amazed and afraid at the same time, but my fear got the better of me and I bolted out of there as fast as my own feet would take me.
Who Is That Tapping?
I was sitting on the couch watching the television when I felt a finger tap three times on my shoulder. I turned and looked, because it was very obviously to me that a person was tapping my shoulder. No one was there! My parents were in the other room, too far away to have tapped me.
Here One Moment, Gone The Next
I was lying on the couch in my living room. I awoke to see the form of a man sitting in a kneeled position across the room from me. He was looking right past me (over my head), not at me. I blinked and he was gone.
Poltergeist Activity or Ghostly Impressions?
We were sleeping one night when we woke up to a loud, thudding noise. I just thought it was one of our cats but I looked on the floor and they were both right there sleeping.
Well, then my dog started growling, and my daughter yelled out from across the hall. Had I heard that noise too? We both wanted to know what the dog was barking about and I told her I wasn't sure what it was.
Then, it went quiet for the rest of the night.
We have like little things happen like this but not all the time. At one stage things were being moved around a lot in my daughter's room; she would even hear small, soft voices talking to her, but she could never make out what they are saying.
This stuff started happening to her ever since we moved into this house, and just recently, I started experiencing things too. We don't feel threatened or really scared; it's just weird when it happens, and we don't feel like it or they are here to hurt us.
Down on the Farm
It was when I was a teenager living on the family farm. Myself and three other family members saw three black panthers later in the evening around dusk in our front yard.
We had chickens in a shed in the back, so for protection of ourselves as well as the animals we decided to shoot the cats. My brother, my brother-in law and myself all took aim with high-powered hunting rifles. We all shot at the same time on my mother's count of three.
I saw the middle cat that I shot at flip backwards, then the light we were using to see at night went out. In fact, all the lights flickered and went out for almost a minute; then they came back on.
We remained in the house for the rest of that night.
The following morning we went out when it was plenty bright. There were no cats to be found anywhere. (I never missed when I was a young man) Anyway, we saw that the ground was scratched up real bad (no blood) and there were tracks that went into a freshly plowed field that I had cut with discs the day before.
We followed the tracks towards the woods.
There we saw three distinctly different animals. One was dragging a leg. About half way into the field the tracks just stopped. No back tracking movement was evident and there were no trees within a hundred yards. There was no way for anything to move without making tracks. Yet, no animals!
We did see them a few weeks later in another part of that same field but only briefly. It was in the area of an old slave graveyard, where over 300 slaves were buried after dying from malaria.
Whose Cat is This Anyway?
I was about 17 at the time. I was passing by my brother's bedroom when I saw there, sitting on the bed with its front paws tucked under its body in the characteristic way cats sit, a black cat. I remember its green eyes looked up as I was about to pass and then, as I stood staring at it, in about 2 seconds it disappeared just as quick as it had appeared.
Upon telling my mum she told me of a similar sighting that she had of the same black cat. Also, my little brother, when he was about 11 years old told me of how he awoke one morning to see a cat on his bed. He began stroking the cat thinking it was our own household cat, but upon coming out of his doze he realized that our cat stayed in the garage of nights, so it couldn't have been him. He said then the cat disappeared.
Shiva
After my uncle died my brother and I were staying at his home to once again observe the Jewish mourning ritual of "shiva."
While going from the living room into the kitchen I stepped into a kind of invisible "cloud" of my uncle's distinctive "personal smell" that seemed to be detectable in a discreet, circumscribed area.
If I stepped slightly one way or another, it was not detectable.
I called to my brother to come to where I was standing to see if he could smell what I was experiencing. He is a PhD research scientist and reluctantly admitted he could, but dismissed any significance.
Months later, my husband and I were in the house working when we both clearly heard loud knocking that seemed to come from my uncle's bedroom. When my uncle was alive, he had a habit of napping in the afternoon and when he wanted something would knock on his bedroom wall rather than call out.
On another occasion, we were both standing in the kitchen and I felt my left upper leg get incredibly cold.
At the time I had never heard of so-called paranormal "cold spots."
Down at the Jail
I was on a ghost hunt, something I picked up doing because of the unexplained things from childhood.
I was in an abandoned jail and we were taking pictures. I saw a full-body male standing in a strange pose, with his arms close to his body, his shoulders curled up near his ears, with dirty blonde hair, sad eyes, unclean clothing...
It only lasted during the time it took for the flash to go off, and as I was the only one looking in that direction I wasn't eh only one who saw this.
I saw him so clearly; I sketched him out. I can still remember him to this say. He was looking right at me and he was very frightened.
What is That Noise
When I was about 15 years old, my parents told me they felt the house I was growing up in was haunted. I had already come to that conclusion myself so I wasn't bothered by what they told me.
However, one day I noticed a strange buzzing sound in the room with me. It was similar to someone snoring. It started to fade after a few minutes, but then I realized it was just moving further away, into a different room. I followed the noise from room to room for about half an hour. I went outside several times to see if it was a chainsaw in the distance but it was quiet outside.
Eventually it faded to nothing.
Are You Still in Here Grandpa?
I was in my friend's house with my only guy friend and a girlfriend. We began to file into a room one by one; my girlfriend went first, my guy friend second. Then, suddenly my guy friend exclaimed that his ears started ringing as he stepped a foot inside the room. As I got myself inside the room, I almost fell to the ground because it felt as though something was pressing down on me, pushing me to the ground. My girlfriend just shrugged all this stuff off and said, "Well, my great grandpa did die in here after all."
