Did anybody experience beyond a doubt anything supernatural?

[Russell Nash]

Hi everyone:

I'm a collector of other people's experiences. In fact, I write them down, and I like to read them years after.

One of my friends from Nicaragua let me know part of his uncanny experiences, that I would like to share with you now:
-He was to be in the militia, years ago, when Nicaragua was apparently a military dictatorship.
-One foggy night when on patrol, his mate and him, saw the shadow of a man in haste entering a latrine.
-After investigating around the latrine, and asking if someone was inside using it, they got no answer.
-Kicking the door, proved that nobody was inside.
What happened there? Illusion? My friend is laughing at me?

Does anybody on the list ever experience anything supernatural beyond a doubt?
I add three questions,
1- did Poe ever experience anything similar to what he narrates in his stories?
2- did Lovecraft?
3- did Ligotti?

Thanks in advance.

Alberto

[Ligeia]

Nice topic Alberto...Unfortunately i don't have any experiences to share..As for the others..
Poe: Definitely...
Lovecraft: Absolutely...
Ligotti: We can ask him

[candy]

I have had a few things that I think could qualify.

We had a ceiling fan with a light built in. The only way to turn on the light was to reach up and turn it on by pulling the short string attached to it. My kids were both way to short to turn it on and could not even reach it by pulling over a chair. This particular evening I was the last one to go to bed. All the lights in the house were off. Except a night light in the kids room. I awoke with a start at 3:15 in the morning. I did not know what woke me up so I got up to check on the kids. When I walked out of my room I could see that the light was on. I couldn't believe it. I went and check on the kids, I checked all the doors and windows everything was locked. I woke up my husband and he had not gotten up(I always wake up if he gets up but I asked him any way and he told me he had not woken up) Some one or something had turned on that light. It totally freaked me out!!!

Another thing that happened when we lived in that house. We would all be in the living room and one of the bedroom doors would slam shut!!!

My daughter had very bad nightmares that someone was in her room!!!(at least I always thought they were nightmares)

Needless to say, we no longer live there and I am very happy to have left that house behind.

[paeng]

During my final year in university, I participated in a group project (a requirement of a theology class) to this place:

http://www.malapascua.de/Volcanoe-Ma...t_banahaw.html

where, with the help of a local psychic saw white spirits and went through astral projection. It was an incredible experience and certainly something that I'd like to go through again. I intend to move to that as I try to specialize in myth and archetypal studies in the uni where I work.

[Ligeia]

Wow Candy! Scary stuff..

[Russell Nash]

Let me share with you one of my strangest incidents in life.
_______

I was about 10. I cannot be more precise.
My parents and I went to visit some relatives to their house in the suburbs of Buenos Aires.
It was a Saturday evening, not too cold, not too hot. The sun already gone.
At about 7, I cannot remember exactly the time, I heard this old man laughing coming through a passageway that runs along the house, from the entrance to the back, or patio, where we were sitting down around a table drinking tea.
We were 5 people in the entire house, my father and mother, my uncle and my aunt, and me; no one else. That is a certainty.
I looked at the side, but the old man doesn't show up. The laugh doesn't repeat.
Somebody, I am not sure whether my aunt or my mother, says: "Did you hear that laugh?" My father answers something like: "it was only the wind".
I don't understand why they talked like that, I heard the old man laughing, what is wrong with them?
It happened that they talk and let me know that this old man died the day before.
___________

What could have happened?
1. There is a factory just beside their house. Probably some engines generated high magnetic fields that evening (but Saturday?) that we know for sure twist our minds letting us believe in what is not there.
2. It was a dream, the incident never happened.
3. I have this theory, perhaps is it true?, nature repeats itself. I believe that it is possible if someone coughs at certain hour for long time (months, years) then the day that person doesn't cough, nature generates "out of nothing" the cough to complete a sequence.

[Mr. D.]

When I was a child in Pittsburgh, PA the family of one of my father's co-workers used to live in a house that was a couple miles West of the city limits not too far from the Southern bank of the Ohio river. The house was built no later than about 1810 and though there had been additions and changes to the original house it was still in much its original configuration.
The house was haunted but this was not some eerie haunting. Rather it meant that there were a few additions to the household. When the family first moved in there was a room upstairs that had a little old lady who rocked in the rocking chair. This was during the day as well as at night. OOne could go into the room, which had no drafts, and see the silvery outline of a little old lady sitting in it and the chair rocked by itself.
On the ground floor there was a cold spot in front of the door to the cellar. It was about two feel wide and five feet tall. When we visited the family (and I and my siblings played with the children of my father's co-worker) we made a game of putting a thermometer in the cold spot and watching the temperature drop. It was always 20 degrees f. below the surrounding temp. Always.
In the cellar at the foot of the steps there was the outline of a man wearing old clothes. I would guess from about 1800. One could faintly see him until the celalr light was turned on, then he was gone.
Also, at night the interior of the house was luminescent. One never bumped into furniture in a dark room - unless you were 6 years old and running to fast.
When the younger cchildren were born the upstairs room was turned into a nursery and that drove the old lady away, but the othere features of the house were there as late as 1968. I don't even know if the house is standing today, but if it is it would be pretty interesting. Duke University investigated the house while our friends lived there and they could find no physical causes.
It wasn't spooky or anything. Actually it was a lot of fun for a little kid.

[starrysothoth]

The closest experience I ever had to touching something otherworldly was visiting my Uncle's newly purchased farm in rural Illinois as a child. At the time he bought it, many of the buildings were in an extreme state of disrepair. The animals occasionally moaned as though they were afraid of something at night, and the entire place definitely had an ominous presence around it. I stayed there about a week, and nearly every time I took a shower or used the bathroom in the house, the lights would go off. This wasn't a mere electrical problem, but the switch physically changing position, like someone or something was turning the lights off. I always made sure to lock the door as well. This happened to everyone else there too. Needless to say, after I experienced it several times, I made sure to make my visits there as brief as possible.

Since my Uncle settled in, the hauntings have slowly diminished. Though not before some strange and terrible events occurred out there. Several horses were released by someone or something at night during the first couple years he lived there, and every one of them died under unusual circumstances. One was struck by lightning during what seemed to be an otherwise mild storm, and another was hit by a train near the farm. Another time, a trailer on the property caught fire, killing the fiance of my Uncle's girlfriend's son. No evidence was ever found explaining how this fire started.

The other unsettling element in all this is the farm's history. Several fatal incidents happened there in the past, which some would say might account for the unusual happenings there. For instance, a farmer's adolescent son in the 1970s was shooting at birds from the upper floor of a barn, and a bullet ricocheted, hitting him the throat and killing him almost instantly. Further back, a train carrying wounded Union soldiers during the Civil War got stuck in a snowstorm near the farm, and many of them died as a result.

Despite the weird occurrences there, I've never been a committed believer in ghosts or anything else. More of an open minded agnostic, if anything. But the mystery and rather grim history of the place haunts me to this day, and perhaps played a role in sparking my interest in weird art and literature later in life.

[poetic_lament]

First, I have to highlight the fact that my thinking does not conform to the supernatural interpretation of experiences. First and foremost because I believe that experience as it is, transmits information that gets processed afterwards by what we expect, believe, learnt and wish them to mean; and this makes up the whole of our understanding about the phenomenon, in other words: my experience is my interpretation, especially if it is too shady.
Now I did however had one experience I could not reduce it by Occam`s Razor.
I was a student living togedher with my girlfriend and we were passing through a cemetery which separated two areas of the town. We were heading home from a visit of some relatives where we consumed only coffe. Because the route through the cemetary has reduced the distance significantly between the two areas and as typical students we was not to prone to spend money on taxi (to save it for a beer on the "other side"), so we decided to go through the mentioned shortcut. Well, it was a cloudy night around 23 pm, and we had to inch our way downwards, carefully not to step on a grave (or worst: in a grave). We held each other`s hands and carefully ascended through the graveyard towards the place we knew the gate to be located on the other side. I admit we were already a bit in a kind of intimidated state of mind, since avoiding suddenly spawning headstones from the dark (along with the avid imagination which accompanies the loss of sight and the stories which you tend to remember at such times) really heightens every sense, especially hearing and seeing, but even the skin tends to become more vigilent to gentle breezes and even changes in the temperature.
Not far from the exit we were heading to but far enough not to feel the safety of light, we heard a voice coming from the right side, pretty close, lets say from 3-4 meters. We froze. Because the voice was a gurgling-scrapping sound, clearly made out of something`s respiratory tracts. The voice seemed everything but natural, I can not even describe its texture, for it was nothing I ever heard until that. Recalling it more closely it resembled a cross between the growling of a dying creature, but had a metallic quality to it. We stood frozen in our track, grabbing each other`s hand and looking in the direction of the voice. But all we could see was a cross-headstone`s silluete, it was so dark...we imagined a darker darkness somewhere near there, but that does not unfold the pehnomenon. I made a step towards the voice in a desperate gesture of confused fear and the drive to escape, but my girlfriend held me back, and in a shaking whisper said "no, we should go, please"...I do not remember and can not really determine the lenght of this whole happening. But I do know that the fear was so huge that we were almost able to touch in the air. After several unsure steps away, we ran away as fast as we could. We were literally shaking after the event and did not sleep that night instead we were awake speaking with each other in the kitchen all night long. Not to mention, we were so curious that the other day we revisited the place, because we knew from the distance, trees and shrubs the approximate location of the event. The mistery grew when at the place we suspected the voice coming, there it was a perfectly round, ~0,5 m in radius, perfect circle made of heat, since inside it contained ashes only and around there were normal green grasses and a bit away the gravestone we sensed then. I still do not know if the two fenomena were or were not connected, but judged from the peculiarity of our feelings, the voice and the aftermath, it is likely. We speculated that night, that it was a dying dog, or a drunk junkie, or something of this sort. We were tempted to see the cadaver of a dog or the signs of human activity in that place, yet we found that circle, no dead animal, no bottles of vodka, no cigarettes, nothing....except that circle. The memory of the voice rang in our ears as we slowly walked away...we never returned into that cemetery.

[Russell Nash]

Thanks very much.

If your story is an invention, it is very close to a classic ghost story. And a good one, because I read from beginning to end.

However, why do you think that a ghost (or whatever it was) doesn't want to leave evidence of its existence, but only a circle of burned grass? Your experience like mine with the old man laughing, tells me that it is impossible for a ghost to come back to life for a few seconds or a minute just to laugh, or speak with a spooky voice, but timidly leave us afterwards. Never something like, "Yes, I'm dead, and this is -beyond any doubt- what you'll see in the afterlife".

6,000 years of no evidence, I would start with Menes, first Pharaoh of Egypt, would suggest that there is no afterlife, and as Ligotti himself said: "World views are just adornments that we wear to disguise the fact that we have only one suit in our closet . . . and it's made of flesh and bones." The Ligotti Outtakes The Ligotti Outtakes - THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE