What do you make of this then?

[The23rdman]

Okay, get your brains around this:

When I was 18 and my sister 16 we had a big party. My mum being a bit of a party animal invited herself too. Several hours into the party she decided that she'd show off her psychic skills and try and contact someone via a ouija board. She used to be quite reckless with her ability and this was one of those times. I wasn't aware of what was happing as I'd pulled a very cute blonde, but that's another story! I can downstairs a hour or two later to find her and several other people doing the fingers on the glass thing around the whole dining room table. Turns out she had contacted a dead biker, Wurzel, who was a friend of one of our friends. He was utterly convinced it was him and was crying a lot whilst this was happening. Only Si at the party knew Wurzel who had died a few years before after his bike hit a tree. It took a long time before Wurzel let them cut the connection and it wasn't fun for anyone involved. There were a lot of scared teenagers after that.

Anyway, we forgot about this (it was normal for weird stuff to happen in our house) until a week or so later I had the following experience. I came home from the pub (okay, I know this makes my testimony unreliable!) and went to bed. I'd just lay down when I heard our cat scratching at my bedroom door. I got up to let her out but she wasn't there. I ask my mum and sister if Sue was in with them and they said no. Okay, I must be nuts, I thought, and went to bed. Exactly the same thing happened as soon as I got into bed and turned the light off, but this time it was accompanied by footsteps and, rather more chillingly, breathing by my ear and the bed shaking. It would be a slight understatement to say I was a touched freaked out by this and shot out of bed and into my mums room (we all run to mummy!). I told her and my sister, who had joined us in freaking out, what had happened and we all decided it prudent to camp down in her room with the lights on!

For the rest of that week stuff just went missing. I refused to go into my room except in the day, but found things gone regularly. My mum started to put two and two together and suggested it might be Wurzel. After consulting another psychic she trusted it was suggested that she try automatic writing. The idea is to hold a pen in two fingers by the end with just enough pressure to keep the tip on the paper. Not enough to move it and make more than a faint mark and definitely not enough to write. You then open up and ask if anybody's there (corny, I know). What happened from there provided us with entertainment for a week. Wurzel (for that is who it claimed to be) just started writing to us. His spelling was terrible, but he was moving that damn pen and writing like he was holding it. The look on my mums face when it started happening was priceless and I wish we'd had camera phones back then! We just asked him questions and chatted quite matter of factly for a couple of hours every night until...

The last night we decided we'd try and find out what it was like where he was. He'd been very evasive about talking about it stating there were people with him and he couldn't talk about it. The last night we kept prodding and prodding and he started to get a bit flustered and upset. He said there was someone here who was angry at us asking him about it. At that point the pen just went mental and scrawled “IT'S NICE OVER HERE” before running hard across the page, jumping up and banging down a full stop. That scared the crap out of all of us and my mum said it really didn't feel very nice at all. We stopped. I actually cannot recall what happened after that so I'd have to check with my mum and sister.

Now, for years I've tried to make sense of this and approach what happened with a truly skeptical mind-set. I'm fairly sure my mum would have been unable to write like “Wurzel” did and I've been unable to replicate it. I'm also pretty sure she wouldn't have played us in any way. As far as she is concerned it was genuine and I've no reason to doubt that. As for what was happening I really do not know, but I have been unable to rationalize it.

[NinjaPuppy]

[The23rdman]

As far as I recall we asked Alan (the guy mentioned as the psychic) around to clear the house. As my mum became more responsible later in life she has learnt this skill and has performed the task for others.

Yes, I tend to agree that one must enter the reality tunnel that this is possible for it to happen. Not always, but it does help. I guess it's like tuning into a radio station.

[NinjaPuppy]

[SydneyPSIder]

I would be interested to know why it's not nice over there. Did you keep the handwritten notes?

I, or someone I know, may have hypothetically had a ghost living in their apartment who died in 1860 or thereabouts. When quizzed on the afterlife by a strong psychic friend, they said they had never seen 'God', altho they believed in him from their upbringing, that they 'defend their turf' against other spirits in that location, and that their sister who had died at about the same time came to visit occasionally from another place.

Not sure how that fits in with the spiritualists' notions of 'levels' and a 'heaven', etc, we need to do a lot more research and enquiry with obliging spirits if possible. Anyone know a good medium? I might know one here, but she says she prefers not to communicate with dead people, just does living people.

[The23rdman]

[NinjaPuppy]

[The23rdman]

I've no idea, but I'll share this anecdote too...

This was in 1988 so I was 15. My sister, who was 12 at the time, had been unusually reserved for a few weeks. Nobody took much notice as, well, she was a 12 year old girl... One night my step-father was snoring particularly loudly after several ales so my mum slept in my sisters room as she was staying at a friends.

The next morning she was quite upset as something very odd had happened. She wouldn't tell us what it was, but said she had to speak with Lou when she came home. Anyway, Lou came in from school and mum said “I slept in your room last night...” Lou immediately looked down and became withdrawn. My mum asked her if anything unusual had been happening in her room. She eventually admitted that every morning her quilt was pulled from the bed and her curtains were drawn open. This is exactly what had happened to my mum and she didn't mention it to Lou before she told her.

At this point my freak out monitor went haywire so I ran away upstairs to la-la-la-its-not-happening land. Turns out Lou had played on a Ouija board (again) at the local youth club and “attracted a little girl who died in the park” (the name of the girl and historical fact of her death was confirmed later). Again, I have no idea if that is what happened, but something did.

My mum invited a trusted psychic friend around to “move her on”. It worked and nothing else happened as far as I can recall.

What happened here? Rule out collaboration and trickery because they're not that good actors and again would not keep up this pretence for 25 years.

[NinjaPuppy]

[SydneyPSIder]

Interesting how some ghosts can move things around and others can't, or don't want to. Wonder if it's an energy level thing for individual ghosts. Many more questions spring to mind, e.g. do we all leave a ghost, or only some of us? And can you have ghost pets (some people have seen them), etc. I joined another paranormal discussion site a little while ago after various recent experiences to discuss parameterising and measuring some of this stuff, but the forum is one of those limited wordpress types, and it attracts a lot of new age types and dreamers (not like here!) so I don't have much to do with it now.

[The23rdman]

Let me reiterate my position. I do not believe these experiences are necessarily down to ghosts, but I am open to that idea. I honestly do not know what the fork happened.

[NinjaPuppy]

[NinjaPuppy]

[The23rdman]

[SydneyPSIder]

I dunno about classifying types of ghosts -- my gut feeling is that they should all be the same. I don't really subscribe to the 'video playback on a loop' theory of ghosts for some reason. My hypothetical apartment ghost was still sentient -- could see, hear, possibly smell, and could learn new things. Don't ask me how that works, it's biologically inexplicable. I think some have different energy levels to others -- the poltergeists are more energetic, for instance.