Ghosts?

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Do you believe in ghosts or evil spirits? Would you be willing to spend the night in a house that was supposedly haunted?

-- Meghan (faeriebaby@hotmail.com), March 22, 2000

Answers

To quote Verbal Kint from The Usual Suspects:
"Keaton always said he didn't believe in God, but was afraid of him. Well I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Kaiser Soze" To quote a conversation from my freshman year of college when I was living in the dorms at Salem State (near where your distant relative was hung!):
"Hey Woody, is this your copy of the Necronomicon?"
"Yeah."
"Do you believe in all that stuff like demons and spells?"
"No."
"Well have you tried any of them?"
"Hell no."
"Well why not?"
"Because if I'm *wrong*, it's not like playing poker for pennies. It's my immortal soul we're talking about."

So I guess my answer would be that I don't believe in ghosts and spirits, but I would probably be really scared to spend time in a haunted house. I'd still do it, especially because it would give me something to write about later.. but I'd be scared.

When I was a teenager I was really superstitious and into (shameful secret) Wicca. Actually I guess that's not too wierd. Almost all of my friends are either ex Wiccans, ex Gamers, ex Punks or some combination of the above. Anyway, I had some wierd shit happen then so I can't entirely discount the possibility of ghosts and spirits.

-- David Grenier (retro@retrogression.com), March 22, 2000.

No, I don't believe in ghosts, etc.... although I might have seen one once.

It was around 1977, I was living alone in an apartment in an older apartment building. I had decided to repaint and so one night I was painting the hallway. I was on my knees painting the woodwork... dipped my brush in the paint and as I lifted the brush from the paint can I looked up and there just a few feet away from me there was a little boy, not a baby but probably preschool age, maybe three or four years old, standing in the doorway of the second bedroom watching me. I was so startled that I dropped the paint brush and my eyes moved for a second to the brush I had dropped and when I raised them again he was gone. I got up and searched the entire apartment. I lived alone at the time -- the guy I had been sharing the apartment with had moved to another city and I had decided that I didn't need to put up with sharing, that I could handle the rent myself and that this gave me a spare bedroom so my son (who was about eight at the time and lived with his mother) could have his own room when he slept over... I was dating Nancy at the time but she was working in New York City, she didn't move in with me until the next summer -- and I knew I had been home alone, and there were no kids living in the any of the six apartments in the building, but I searched my apartment over and over, looking under beds and in closets. Need I say that I had goosebumps and that I was chain-smoking while doing this (well, actually, I was a chain-smoker then anyway.) I had seen that kid, standing there as plain as day. I even phoned a friend who had a son who might have sort of looked a little bit like this kid and was about that age, just to casually ask how things were going and make sure that their son was okay.

The next day I was talking with someone who told me she had had known a prior occupant of my apartment, a woman whose son had died while they were living there. But this woman had been a graduate student from India and the child I had seen was definitely fair-haired and very caucasian looking (reminded me of the little boy in the Michelin tire commercials, not the baby they use now, but the little boy they used twenty or thirty years ago).

I am a rationalist. I do not believe it ghosts. But I saw something that night...



-- Jim (
jimsjournal@yahoo.com), March 23, 2000.


Gosts. Yes yes oh hells yes I have seen them.
"Let me tell you. No, that's too long. Let me sum up."
(Pester me real nice and I might give the long version, though.)
Ok. There are some woods around here where I prefer to go hiking when I get the chance - for Florida, they are pretty nice. Oak hammock forest mostly, with pines, and palmettoes. Lots of pretty spiders. No snakes yet, but I've seen some gators.
Every person who I've ever gone there with keyed into something that is pretty damn creepy. Myself included. You know that you are being watched. I've seen these weird shadow things there, sometimes. Black with claws on their hands and feet, shaped like people, glowing green eyes, but with no real depth whatsoever. Just shadows. You only see them for a minute, then they are gone.
I saw a black arm with claws slice across air in front of me, but when I turned to see where it went, there was nothing.
We've seen odd mists, small, moving black blobs, those human shaped shadows... something is just up with that place. But I love it. I go there every chance I get.
And, ironically enough, when I took my camera in, the film was damaged in processing. White streaks everywhere. It happened to another roll I took in at the same time, so I know I wasn't lucky enough to get any ghosts, but still too weird.

Animate.

-- Julie (ZepFiend@aol.com), March 23, 2000.

Ironic. Something else ghosty happened to me last Sunday. I think I attract this stuff.
I was taking pictures at an old cemetery, with a friend of mine. (I'm not some freak that wanders around and visits cemeteries a lot - we got lost on the highway and found ourselves in that part of town. She's got some family buried there, which is how she knew about it.)
Anyway.
There was one particular thing there that intrigued me to no end - a raised section of ground, maybe four feet higher than the surrounding area, perfectly square, with large marble statues standing on each corner. White marble steps that would take you up to the top, where there were more plots and smaller brass markers.
I wanted to see what I'd find up there, so I went up the steps, camera in hand, to have a look. As soon as I stepped off the marble and onto the grass - pop! - a bracelet I was wearing spontaneously snapped and fell to the ground.
I wasn't wanted there. I just knew it. So I picked the pieces up, apologized, and left. Quickly.
I don't go around pissing the dead off if I can help it.

Animate.

-- Julie (ZepFiend@aol.com), March 27, 2000.

I believe. I know that ghosts are real because I can feel them all around. It's an overwhelming sense of confusion and lonelyness. They can't understand where they are, but can't quite remember their own lives. All they know is that they shouldn't be where they are.

-- Lejes the Saint of Justice (Lejes_Saint@webtv.net), March 30, 2000.


I'd spend a night in a haunted house in a heartbeat, on two conditions.

Firstly, I've got to know that the person/people getting me to stay there are not just setting me up to scare me. Even though I don't believe in ghosts, I can get jumpy at noises and stuff. :-)

Secondly, I'd better get something out of this. I'm not going to forgo sleeping in my own bed so someone else can get their jollies!

-- Rick Pali (rpali@alienshore.com), April 04, 2000.


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