Hard question for me to answer, a way of putting it would be "yes, but not in the Western sense".
And that, I think, is as close as the correct answer can get.
I am one of those people that have had paranormal experiences his entire life. There is no shortage of these incidents (and in a moment I will tell in-full the most perplexing of them), but I must say that - for the most part - I am at a loss to point a finger at a cause. I am a spiritual person, but to pin guilt on a 'ghost' is a bit vague. As this fellow said, most people see ghosts in the Western sense... which is a spook of the deceased who inhabits a place of prior importance. Maybe that is true, maybe it is not. But I've made purposeful treks to several old houses that have been turned into museums and almost all of the tour leaders I've spoken to about this think that hauntings occur.
Now, on to my stories. Note that these all happened to ME (except in the case of one story, which revolved around my older brother). I am not an exaggerator. What I'm writing is straight as it happened. I'll try and make this as chronological as possible, and I'll offer as much information against the paranormal that I can. After all, even with all of these incidents, I still hold myself be a skeptic.
[FONT="]Occurrence One[/FONT] The first memory of my entire life. I was probably around two years old and I had been put to bed for the night. I awoke in the middle of the night (a rarity for a deep-sleeper like me) drenched in a cold-sweat. I was deathly afraid for some reason and began to cry out for my mother across the hall. Then, from behind me, came the most-hideous noise I have ever heard. It was a deep, freezing "shhhh". I've never forgotten the sound.
Now, that is a very weak story. I only put it here because I feel there's enough personal evidence to warrant inclusion. Objectively, however, it's pretty worthless. I was a baby. I promise the rest will be a lot more informative.
Occurrence Two
Fast forward several years. I am now seven years old, and my family is looking to move across town. A lot of the early parts of this story has little to do with me directly, so for now I will be drawing upon what my parents and older brother have described.
My dad found a house. It was selling cheaply in a nice neighborhood. The residents wanted to close quickly and get out, but would never really clarify why. My dad jokingly asked if the place was haunted (My dad was a skeptic at the time, as you'll see), to which he got no reply. Regardless of the reasons, we bought the house and moved in.
Within the first week, my dad and older brother were stricken with some kind of illness. They missed a lot of work and school, respectively. Tension in the house was running high; my dad was working a lot of late-nights whenever he could manage and there wasn't a lot of sleep going on.
I remember lying on the floor of my room with my door closed. I was reading through a little picture-Bible my mother bought for me. I was alone. And then my lightswitch flicked off. I heard it go off, and I had to turn it back on. This was a minor event at the time, and only years later do I see it as something truly unexplainable... and frightening.
One night, it was just my mom and us three brothers. We were hanging out in the kitchen. My older brother was feeling especially sick and said he was going upstairs to get some medicine from the medicine drawer. He went upstairs, with the family cat following close behind (for whatever reason, she began following him everywhere after we moved).
A minute went by, and that's when I recall him jumping down the staircase and running into my mother's arms. He was dead-white. He was hyperventilating. All he could say was, "Upstairs... something" over and over. My mom was under the impression that there was an intruder and we were about to leave out the back door. But my older brother started to calm down and explained that something - not a person - was upstairs.
My mom felt compelled to investigate. She grabbed me and my brothers and we started to climb the stairs. I remember going up, and then looking down the hall. There, I saw the medicine drawer opened fully. I thought little of it, but I was terrified.
My older brother told us what happened. He went upstairs to get the medicine. Finding what he needed, he closed the drawer and turned back towards the staircase. At the end of the hall, he felt what he described as a cold wind move through him. Both he and the cat were frozen by it. He turned around again... and he watched as the drawer opened by itself. That was when he ran back to the kitchen.
After that, my older brother refused to sleep alone. On some nights he would try, but he would wake up feeling worse than before. So we started to share beds. A few weeks later, my dad was in the basement watching TV with my mother. Real quickly, this house was a split-level. The basement was directly underneath the upstairs (where the bedrooms were located). So anyone walking around upstairs can be heard from the basement.
During the night, my parents heard footsteps starting at one end of the hall and walk back and forth from end to end. It never slowed down, and it always stopped just short of the staircase leading downstairs. After a while, my parents decided to investigate. They figured it was one of us boys.
So they came upstairs. Everything was fine, until they looked in my room. I was asleep, but my older brother was on top of me, slapping me and shaking me trying to wake me up. He was dead-white again. He was hysterical. He told my parents that he saw... something... moving through the hallway. But he never did, to this day, elaborate on what he saw.
After that, my mom called in the church preacher to help fix the situation. He blessed a cross and gave it to my brother, and did some other things I'm not familiar with. After that, the problems went away. For a while.
Occurrence Three
A few years down the road, my older brother moved out for college. I moved into his old room. That was probably not a very good idea, as I noticed issues with the room almost immediately. At least once a week my door would, uh, convulse, during the night. It would shake and rattle as if someone were holding on to the knob and tugging repeatedly.
And then one night, my radio started moving on its own.
And then, as the summer after my sophomore year began, things started focusing on me. I had just gone to bed one night - I had literally just put my head on my pillow - when I had physical contact with this thing. I felt a hard slap strike me on the cheek. It was like getting hit in the face with a basketball. It was so jarring that my eyes flew open. Then I gathered my blankets and decided to not go into my bedroom at night. I started sleeping elsewhere. But whatever was in the house followed me wherever I went.
I slept for a while in the front living room. It was around this time that the family cat began following *me* everywhere, almost a direct echo of what happened to my older brother years before. But she would sleep on my chest every night. On one night, the most evil experience of my life occurred. Honestly, I tend to skip this story when I tell people these occurrences... it just scares the pants off of me.
But I was trying to sleep when that cold wind hit me. The room seemed to get a lot smaller. The cat tried to leap off my chest and run away, but I quickly grabbed her and squeezed her close to me. I think she knew, just as I did, that something very bad was about to happen.
I felt it when it came into the room. My eyes were shut, but it was a presence I'll never forget. The only way I can describe the next hour or so was an assault of images... I was force-fed pictures of the most abhorred ideas, things that I don't think anyone should see.
I don't remember falling asleep that night, but I didn't talk for a few days afterwards. Eventually I told my mom about it, and told her I had to move to another room. This time, I moved to the downstairs office (the office was in turn moved upstairs). That seemed to solve the problem once and for all. I can't explain why me going down to another bedroom would protect me from whatever was in that house. I won't even try.
Occurrence Four
Now, this part is the most-thrilling and light-hearted of all the stories I have. I genuinely enjoy telling this stuff. All of this occurred within the same two-week period. I was 17. I was in the state band of Kansas, on tour in western Europe. I didn't go overseas looking for the paranormal. It found me.
The first story takes place in Champery, Switzerland - a small village nestled deep in the Swiss Alps. It's a beautiful place (especially for a Kansan who can barely imagine what real mountains look like), made more beautiful by the rich culture of the village.
I was put into a rustic little hotel located at the base of a mountain, just behind the main stretch of village. The hotel was actually risen above the village atop a small hill. A very classic, serene location. I could see the entire village from there. When I got inside, I was given my room number: 27. To get to room 27, I had to go up a flight of stairs, down a hall, up another flight of stairs, then down another hallway. In that hallway there were only two rooms, 27 and 28. They were completely isolated from the rest of the hotel.
I explored the room a bit, and found a small mini-room behind the main room. The mini-room had just enough space for a bed and a dresser. I immediately claimed it as mine (you try spending over a week with a bunch of stinky teenagers in close quarters and not jump at the idea of being by yourself!). So I unpacked my stuff and hit the town.
I came back a few hours later; the sun had gone down. I walked into the hotel and was hit by that now-familiar cold wind. I knew at once the implications of that feeling. I said to myself, "This place is haunted. Something is going to happen tonight." I went on to warn some of my friends (the residents of rooms 27 and 28, as well as some others throughout the hotel). They scoffed at the idea, but I told them to just watch and wait.
I gave up my mini-room to another guy. I slept with two others in the adjoining main room. After light's out, we laid there discussing what causes hauntings. We never felt anything in the room. But the guys in 28 were not so lucky. About an hour after light's out, they started to scream and rand into our room. They were yelling my name in disbelief... something had happened just as I'd predicted.
According to them, they were all lying down for sleep when their lights started turning on and off rapidly. Not the lights, but the light switch. They could see no one doing it. And some of my friends in another room didn't sleep a wink; the whole night, something kept knocking on their door and whispering outside. They never saw anyone either.
The next morning I got a lot of reports of paranormal activity. I felt pretty cool, having called it in the air... but I was highly skeptic because nothing happened directly to me. I went to breakfast kind of disappointed, to tell the truth. I ate pretty quickly and started heading back to my room. I was alone.
Then, from a few feet ahead of me, I began to hear what can only be described as two girls giggling. It was odd, because I knew no one was around. I don't know why I did it, but I started to follow the sound. And with every step I took towards it, it seemed to move that much further away. In this fashion, the giggling lead me on a chase through the hotel. I eventually followed it up a tall spiral staircase. By now, I was utterly lost.
I turned a corner, and at the end of the hallway was one black door. Nothing else. The giggling lead me to the threshold, and suddenly the sounds was
behind the door. It was then that I came to my senses, realized that I had made a very stupid decision, and turned tail and RAN. I ran as fast as I could through the hotel and out the front door. I was scared out of my skin.
But after that, nothing further happened. Until I got to Germany. This is the final part of my European stories.
I was sitting in another hotel room at 11:14 in the morning. I was reading Dune for the third time. I was alone in my room with the door shut. From where I was sitting, I could see the door perfectly.
As I was reading, the door slowly began to open. By this point, I had become so jaded and accustomed to the paranormal, that my only reaction was a shrug. I looked up from my book and said aloud, "You know, anyone can open a door. I'm not impressed."
I went back to the book. But a moment later, that door slammed as hard as I think any door could ever slam. I looked up again, still unshaken. "I can slam a door too. Leave me alone. I'm reading."
Then the door opened again. I said nothing, choosing to ignore whatever was there. And nothing else happened.
I spoke to my youth pastor about that incident when I got back, and he told me I had no idea what I could have been dealing with. He was thankful that I didn't get hurt.
Occurrence Five
Going back in time a ways... when I was nine years old I was at a friend's house in his unfinished basement. I was, like always, by myself. At that point in time, the unfinished basement had only one source of light: a small pullstring light affixed to the ceiling. I remember looking right at it and then seeing it pull itself off. I was terrified and didn't go back over to that house for a while.
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Those are the big stories I've got. I have a number of personal experiences with ESP, telepathy, and UFOs. But I think those are going to be saved for more-appropriate threads.
Everything I wrote is factual and as they actually happened. Like I said, I'm more than happy to discuss the merits of each story. If you can convince me that something I saw or heard or felt was not what I believe it to be, then I'd be happy to abandon my belief that ghosts or spirits inhabit this Earth. After all, I'm still highly skeptical of all this.
