Have you ever had a paranormal experience?

[wilson]

It's that time of year, I guess...I've read a number of these kinds of stories and had a few friends tell me recently about their various encounters with the supernatural. I have no personal stories to share, but would sure love if anyone here is willing to share some.
So...has anyone had a paranormal experience, including ghostly activities, cryptozoological encounters (Sasquatch and the like), and/or UFOs?

[tteettimes]

I woke up under a tent one morning....scared my wife nearly to death

[PackMan97]

I have seen a UFO before.

It appeared in the sky like a group of stars, but there was one star in the middle and 15-20 stars around it in a perfect circle. If you held out your hand at arm's length, it took up about the size of your fist in the night sky. I went inside to get my wife and by the time I can back out about 30s later it was gone.

Every time I see a cloudless night, I look in the same direction hoping to see anything that looks like it again, but I haven't.

[Indoor66]

I seem to have one every time I log on to DBR.😂😎

[Reddevil]

Once I saw Grant Hill throw a 3/4 court pass to Christian Laettner down 1 with only 2.1 seconds left. Christian faked right, dribbled, turned left and hit the shot at the buzzer to beat Kentucky and go to the Final Four. I know it sounds crazy, but it actually happened. I'm sure of it.

[PackMan97]

Once I saw Grant Hill throw a 3/4 court pass to Christian Laettner down 1 with only 2.1 seconds left. Christian faked right, dribbled, turned left and hit the shot at the buzzer to beat Kentucky and go to the Final Four. I know it sounds crazy, but it actually happened. I'm sure of it.

Mass hallucination. Must have been swamp gas.

[OldPhiKap]

It's that time of year, I guess...I've read a number of these kinds of stories and had a few friends tell me recently about their various encounters with the supernatural. I have no personal stories to share, but would sure love if anyone here is willing to share some.
So...has anyone had a paranormal experience, including ghostly activities, cryptozoological encounters (Sasquatch and the like), and/or UFOs?

Duke had a paranormal studies program until the early 1980's IIRC.

I have not had any, other than vary rare instances of deja vu or premonition. I chalk the former up to some sort of fritz in sensory processing, and the latter to random chance that what you anticipate will happen sometimes actually does. Like, when a song ends and my music library is on shuffle, I "hear" the next song in my head and then that song actually comes on next.

[wilson]

Duke had a paranormal studies program until the early 1980's IIRC.

Yes, the parapsychology lab was quite well-regarded from its founding in 1965, through a series of steadily loosening connections with Duke until its full, official disaffiliation with the university in 2002. It now lives on as the Rhine Research Center (named for its founder J.B. Rhine), which has no remaining official connection with Duke but is still located in Durham. As a kid growing up with an abiding fascination with all things paranormal as well as rabid Duke fanhood, I always thought this connection was cool.

[DukieInKansas]

I don't remember exactly how long it was after my mother died but, one morning as I was starting to ignore my alarm, I heard her call my name. I didn't go back to sleep.

During her last weeks, she talked about the two women taking care of her. My dad tried to tell her it was two of her daughters but I'm convinced it was my Aunt Pat and Mom Sharp (mom's best friend).

It freaked a friend out whe we talked on a Thursday and I told her Mom was going to die on Tuesday. She was a bit stunned when i called her on Tuesday to let her know that Mom had died that morning. (My mother just had to have the last word. She told us she was sick just like Mom Sharp and we told her she wasn't. To prove us wrong, even though they had different types of cancer, she died exactly a year to the day after Mom Sharp.)

Do those count?

[Reilly]

I had to have back surgery one time. Before I resorted to that last step, I visited a guy in an office park who supposedly had x-ray vision or something. Seriously. I don't recall all the details, but he worked with a friend of my sister's. He might've even been on "That's Incredible!" or something. I don't recall all the details (this was almost 30 years ago) and the involved people were generally very level-headed and skeptical and not into the paranormal. The guy wasn't necessarily proud of this -- he just had some ability to see or sense things not otherwise discernible and to move/manipulate them via energy. It didn't cure my ailment. But it all seemed legit enough (it wasn't for money) and I left thinking that the guy did have some sort of ability that most don't have (and I'm as skeptical as they come about these things).

[TruBlu]

As a lad, I had dozens of warts on both of my hands. My parents had a small farm with a run down 3 room (not 3 bedroom, 3 rooms total) house with no plumbing other than water to the kitchen sink. I was raised along with my brother and sister in that house until I was about 7 years old, when we moved into a nicer house in town.

My parents rented the old farm shack to a self proclaimed witch doctor for $20 a month. My parents mentioned my hand warts to him when I was about 9 or 10 years old. He told them to bring me the next time they came to collect rent and he would be able to get the warts off. They did.

He took me to a peach tree, and had me cut off a limb that was the diameter of my thumb, and about 6 inches long. He then proceeded to place one end of the stick at each of my wrists and cut a notch in the stick coinciding with each wart on both hands. (This made me a little worried, as it was just him and me in the orchard.) After he accounted for each wart, he had me dig a hole an bury the peach limb. He walked me back to my parents, and told me that if I trusted him and believed, the warts would go away within a month.

I DID NOT believe him, and was just thankful that he didn’t actually use the knife to cut the warts off, leaving me bleeding and in pain. I promptly forgot all about the matter. About 2 or 3 weeks later, while washing my hands, I was shocked to see that EVERY wart was gone!!! We didn’t go to a real Doctor, not put any medicine on my hands during that period.

To this day, I make sure to not pi** off anyone who claims to be a witch or witch doctor.

[HereBeforeCoachK]

Once I saw Grant Hill throw a 3/4 court pass to Christian Laettner down 1 with only 2.1 seconds left. Christian faked right, dribbled, turned left and hit the shot at the buzzer to beat Kentucky and go to the Final Four. I know it sounds crazy, but it actually happened. I'm sure of it.

I had that one too...wonder if it really happened? Also, had a terrible experience as I dreamed that Grayson Allen's hanging one hander somehow came off the rim against Kansas...defying the laws of physics...and then there was something about eight laterals...can't really remember...

[elvis14]

When I was in high school I opened my first checking account. Not long after I opened the account I received my first debit card in the mail along with a letter telling me that the PIN would be sent in a separate letter.

Soon after, I was home alone one afternoon when the mailman dropped off the mail. As I walked to the mailbox I had this day dream. I was telling my best friend at the time that the bank assigned PIN number was the same as his phone number (last 4 digits). You can guess the rest of the story. The letter was in the mail. I went inside opened the letter and my PIN number was 3819, the last 4 digits of my best friends phone number. I still get goosebumps when I think about it. I was totally freaked out and didn't really want to be home alone anymore. I just Googled my friends father, still has the same number 30 years later.

[awhom111]

I saw what appeared to be students in a classroom at UNC Chapel Hill. Must have been ghosts...

[aimo]

Duke had a paranormal studies program until the early 1980's IIRC.

Yep. I was working in the early 90s as a data tech doing reaction-time tests on a computer. One of the members of that program signed up for the study, then proceeded to tell me she would be no go to us b/c she could tell what the computer was going to flash on the screen before it did. She could "read" its mind. Well, she was wrong. Her answers were way off and her reaction times sucked.

I do not believe in such things. However, early one Sunday morning I dreamed I heard my uncle call out my name. Found out a few hours later that he had died right around that time.

[duketaylor]

I had just about finished two stories and my computer timed-out on me. Not sure why, I'll repost them tomorrow. Too tired now.

[sagegrouse]

I thought I was gonna have a paranormal experience when J.B. Rhine himself came to address freshman assembly. But he was modest and humble and admitted that some of his colleagues in the Psych Dept referred to his field of parapsychology as "perhaps-psychology."

A few years later, when I was helping Duke put together its self-study for SACS accreditation, I asked if we should put in a section on Rhine's program. "God, no!" said my boss, as he rolled his eyes

[TruBlu]

Two weirdnesses:

1) in the third grade, a friend and I were punished for bad behavior (imagine that!) by being made to stay by ourselves in the classroom while the well behaved kids got to go outside for recess. While goofing off with my buddy and throwing pencils at each other, I noticed a small knothole about 3/4 of an inch diameter in the old wooden floor on the other side of the classroom. I impulsively told my friend that I could throw my pencil into the hole from about 20 feet across the room. He bet me a popsicle that I couldn’t. I flipped the pencil, and it looked like an Olympic high diver scoring a perfect 10, right into the hole. I have no idea what possessed me to have that feeling, but I knew that it was going to happen.

2) in college, had a swimming class for phys-Ed. After swimming and going to the locker room, one of my classmates could not get his combination lock to open, as he forgot the combination. After watching him struggle with it for a while, I confidently told him I would open it for him, even though I had no idea what the magic numbers were. I did the two turns one direction, stopped on a random number, one turn the opposite direction, etc., then gave a tug on the lock and it popped right open. He thanked me and asked how I knew the numbers and what they were. I didn’t know the numbers, and couldn’t even tell him which numbers I used, as I wasn’t even paying attention as I was spinning the lock. I tried this again later and could not duplicate my feat. Again, I have no idea as to why I was so confident that I could do this. (By the way, it is not a good idea to take a swimming class in the winter quarter at Appalachian State U, if you have another class across campus 15 minutes later. Many times I walked into Biology class with ice in my hair)

[rsvman]

As a lad, I had dozens of warts on both of my hands. My parents had a small farm with a run down 3 room (not 3 bedroom, 3 rooms total) house with no plumbing other than water to the kitchen sink. I was raised along with my brother and sister in that house until I was about 7 years old, when we moved into a nicer house in town.

My parents rented the old farm shack to a self proclaimed witch doctor for $20 a month. My parents mentioned my hand warts to him when I was about 9 or 10 years old. He told them to bring me the next time they came to collect rent and he would be able to get the warts off. They did.

He took me to a peach tree, and had me cut off a limb that was the diameter of my thumb, and about 6 inches long. He then proceeded to place one end of the stick at each of my wrists and cut a notch in the stick coinciding with each wart on both hands. (This made me a little worried, as it was just him and me in the orchard.) After he accounted for each wart, he had me dig a hole an bury the peach limb. He walked me back to my parents, and told me that if I trusted him and believed, the warts would go away within a month.

I DID NOT believe him, and was just thankful that he didn’t actually use the knife to cut the warts off, leaving me bleeding and in pain. I promptly forgot all about the matter. About 2 or 3 weeks later, while washing my hands, I was shocked to see that EVERY wart was gone!!! We didn’t go to a real Doctor, not put any medicine on my hands during that period.

To this day, I make sure to not pi** off anyone who claims to be a witch or witch doctor.

I have a medical explanation for this. I hope you are not disappointed that this experience isn't paranormal even in the least. A lot of people do the same thing, but use potatoes. There are lots of home remedies, and they all work.

The reason your warts went away is that your subconscious mind activated your immune system to kill off the virus. That's it.

Now I'll tell you an interesting story about this exact phenomenon. Back in the 50's there was an experiment performed that would not be allowed today, but it went like this: They took people who had warts on both hands. They examined them and then told them the proverbial "good news, bad news" deal. Good news was that the warts on their right hand were caused by a benign virus that runs its course; the subjects could expect those warts to be gone within a few weeks, no problem. The bad news was that the warts on their left hand were caused by a particularly difficult, recalcitrant virus, and these warts tended to last for months and months no matter what. (Mind you, all the patients had the exact same virus on both sides; and oh, by the way, the same immune system on both sides of their bodies.)

You can guess the end of the story. Within a month or so, the warts on the right hand were gone, but the ones on the left persisted. The amazing thing to me is that they were able to selectively activate the immune system so that it functioned better on one side of the body than the other. Totally a fascinating study. The human body is pretty incredible, and the control the subconscious (properly called the "unconscious mind") has on the body's function is phenomenal and frequently underestimated.

[rsvman]

OK, so here's my paranormal experience, and it was a very powerful one (I'm assuming you'll allow ESP as "paranormal").

When I was in 8th grade, I had a math teacher that was way into ESP. One day she decided to show the class that ESP was really a thing. I was the biggest skeptic in the world; I was certain (absolutely certain) that she had rigged the whole thing beforehand with certain students.

The way she was to prove it to us was this: One person in the class was blindfolded and faced away, then she took a ring and gave it to one of the people in the class to hold in their hands below their desk where nobody could see it. She then turned the student around in circles several times. They were still blindfolded. At that point she asked everybody in the room to concentrate really hard on the location of the ring. Student after student walked to where the ring was.

To prove that she had rigged it, I made a HUGE fuss to be picked next. I KNEW she wouldn't pick me, because we had prearranged nothing, and my failure to find the ring would prove to the whole class that it was all a sham. To my surprise, she chose me and asked to come on up. I was ecstatic. I KNEW it wouldn't work on me. She put the blindfold on. I couldn't see squat. Then she spun me around several times, until I was a little bit dizzy. Then she asked me to go ahead and find the ring.

I stood there, slightly dizzy. I felt like I was going to fall forward, so I moved my foot forward to keep myself from falling. Then I felt that way again, so I moved my other foot. This continued. At one point I felt like I was leaning left, so I took a step to the left. Eventually, those feelings stopped and I was just standing there, still thinking the whole thing was a sham. Then I raised out my right hand, and the student who was hiding the ring put the ring into my hand.

I had walked from the front of the class right to the side of the desk where the ring was hidden, all without any idea what I was doing or why I was doing it, and with the sole intent to prove that ESP didn't exist.



Later on, we even did a tug-of-war, where half the class thought of a spot on the opposite side of the class where the ring really was not. We had the student going one way, then stopping, turning around to go the other way, etc. As he started to go one direction, we focused our attention more and he stopped and turned around.




To this day I am absolutely sure that ESP exists.