Well, someone's gotta go first, so I guess it's gonna be good ol' lovable me. I love "true" ghost stories and was happy that a board was finally created for ghosts. (I put true in quotes cuz I'm always openminded about the validity of these amateurishly written stories.) You can find many sites that feature ghost stories, some of which are about animal ghosts, for anyone who thinks animals don't have souls. Maybe these stories will change your mind on that fallacy. Here are some I like that I have bookmarked (the first two are my favorites). I've not checked them out lately, until tonight. Some of them probably have links to each other.

Ghosts: The Page That Goes Bump in the Night

Shadowlands

Castle of Spirits

Ghost Web of IGHS (International Ghost Hunter Society) This one has a cute ghost for a pointer.

Ghosts of Tombstone This one plays a pretty loud midi version of what else, "Ghostbusters".

Ghosts and Other Haunts (New Zealand Ghosts) Also has midi music.

Ghosts of the Prairie

Shadow's Ghostly Gathering Also has midi music.

Obiwan's UFO-Free Paranormal Page

The Italian Ghost Hunters Anyone read Italian? Well, no matter; there's a link for the English version.

I don't generally believe in ghosts and paranormal phenomena, Mark, but I once had a very weird experience. When I was in high school, a bunch of us were invited to a teacher's house (let's call her Mrs. B). This house was about 250 years old, and had various weird features and stories associated with it. For example, the original owner had a trout pond in the basement. There was a staircase that led to nowhere. One owner was rumored to have "invented" photography, and his lab had been left untouched, including all the old chemical bottles and equipment he had used.

Our teacher was giving us a tour of the house, and when we got to the top of the stairs leading to the second floor, I had a very strong feeling of deja vu, as though I had seen that scene before in a dream the night before. The curved white wall, the small alcove, and the large painting on the wall.

About an hour later, I was suddenly overcome with a feeling of sadness like I had never experienced, as though someone very close to me had died. I locked myself in the bathroom and couldn't stop crying for half an hour.

A few years after that, I entered a local college. Senior year, I was eating lunch in the college cafeteria, and I started telling my story to my friends for the first time. One of my friends' girlfriends, Andrea, was also a local girl, but had gone to a different high school a few towns away. When I got to the part about reaching the top of the stairs, Andrea finished the sentence for me--"And you had seen the second floor in a dream." I was shocked and asked how she knew. She said she had visited the same house before, and exactly the same thing had happened to her. When she told Mrs. B, the teacher said that something similar had happened with another girl, but she never told Andrea who it was. I asked Mrs. B later, and she confirmed the story.

I'm sure there are lots of explanations for why this could have happened, but it was just a very unsettling experience for me, and a weird coincidence that the one time in my whole college career that I decided to tell that story, one of my listeners had had the same experience in the same house.

Not to brag, Juli, but I can top that, 3 times over.

My sister says that when she was little and spent the night at her friend's house, they slept in the attic room and that a little girl's ghost floated above her and that she (my sis) has also seen an old woman's ghost looking down from the attic windows.

One time for a short stay in Texas, I went to a church (shortly before becoming agnostic) where they had the lord's prayer in song, or else some cutesy song like it. That night or the next I was lying in bed, singing the song in my head. I stopped, then sang it again. Well, when I got home here in California I'd told my brother about it and he got freaked out cuz he said an evil force held him down one night in bed, choking him and then he heard me sing the song, and the evil force lifted. Then he heard me stop singing and the evil force started up again until he heard me sing the song again. I don't remember how often it happened that night or why it attacked him or finally went away but it was very weird all the same. Remember, we were about 1,500 miles apart, give or take a few!

Finally, my oldest sister (half-sister) died in 1990. I eventually took an old red push button desktop phone of hers. One night I was lying in bed, waiting to fall asleep. The phone,with its cord wrapped around it, was in my closet, the door was open, there was nobody living below or across from me at that time (the place only had 6 units), and I was still wide awake and the phone rang! Only once but it was still very weird. I very clearly heard it, and like I said I was wide awake so I know I wasn't dreaming, nor heard anyone else's phone ringing cuz this was too close and loud. I dunno, but maybe she was trying to contact me, like to say goodbye or for some other reason? I still have the phone but never had a repeat performance.

**Not to brag, Juli, but I can top that, 3 times over.**
Hate to tell ya Mark, but that's bragging--BIG TIME. Your stories are pretty creepy, but the least you coulda done was say, "Wow, juli, that IS weird" before you jumped in and trounced me. ;-p Pbbbt!

LOL! Sahwwy, Juli. I was only kidding, as you could see. No harm meant. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a lot of saliva to wipe off of my brand new $1,500 Armani suit. I didn't know you had so much spit inside of ya. *S*

And there's lots more where that came from, babe! >;-P Pbbbbbbbbtttttttttttttttt!!!!!!

(Can you tell I'm releasing stress from my encounter over at Political Musings?)
Pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbtttttttttttt!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(If I promise to pay for your suit, can I spit some more?--of course I'll have to see your receipt for $1,500 first. I'm not THAT naive.)

Now that that's out of my system (for the time being), do you have any UFO stories? You can top mine reeeaaal easy this time, because I don't have any....

Well, both of your stories top mine, but mine is the only one I have. Probably because I WANT to see these ghosts and so that's some sort of thing warning them to stay away? :-)
Anyway, my story takes place when I was ten years old. I was on my family's yearly trip to California, and this time we'd decided to go on a tour of the Queen Mary, which, you probably know, is rumored to have many ghosts and to be haunted. I didn't know that at the time, though.
Anyway, we were just about over with the tour. The guide had really been scaring us all with stories of the dead cook stuffed into Oven 13 (or something like that) and all of that, and then we came to the pool.
I looked at it, and it was filled to the top and there were wet footprints all around it. I thought it was interesting, but didn't say anything about it.
As we walked out of the ship, I mentioned that it was funny that someone would go swimming since it was so cold inside the ship.
Mom asked me why I would say that and I said, "Well, the pool was filled and there were footprints!"
She then told me the pool was NEVER filled and it had certainly not been that day.
Ooh-wee-ooh...

Don't knock your story, Msmith, that's pretty eerie! You also get extra credit for being succinct, something of which I am totally incapable.

I thought of a few others....

When I was in junior high school, my best friend and I used to have conversations about some obscure topic, then turn on the radio a few minutes later and the appropriate song would be playing. We're not talking Top 40 songs, either, but songs like the theme from Star Wars several years after the movie played in the theaters. Happened all the time.

I was working on an archaeological dig several years ago here in Japan, and I was forced to quit for a few weeks due to a problem with my finger joints. When I went back to work, I had to take time off again because I developed dizzy spells. My landlord told me that things like this happen all the time on archaeological digs, because the spirits don't like you digging around in their stuff, and I must have psychic tendencies to be picking up on it. Personally, I think it's a load of cr*p, but it was an interesting thought.

A few years after that, the same landlord introduced me to an elderly shaman who lived in the village (she has since passed away, unfortunately). She had been a midwife, and was famous for being able to predict, among other things, the sex of a baby before it was born. While I was living in the village, a young friend of the shaman's came to visit from far away. She was pregnant at the time, and the shaman told her that the baby would be a girl and she would be quite ugly, but would have a special personality. When the woman came back the following year with her baby (a girl), I have to tell you, it was the ugliest baby I have ever seen! But it was the oddest thing about her; even though she was only several months old, she had a strange calmness, kindness and wisdom about her, as though she were an ancient soul in an infant's body.

And how could I forget this one! The same shaman also predicted that I would marry someone from the village. Old people from the country say things like that all the time in Japan, so I just laughed it off. Besides, there were hardly any single men in the village to marry in the first place. Anyway, over the course of the next year or so, I developed a liking for two different guys from the village, but when I asked the shaman, she would just make a face and shake her head. After I had been in the village for a year and a half, the shaman told me that my prince in shining armour was someone from the village that I didn't know yet, and I would meet him within the next two months. She said he would be very thin. Again I scoffed, because there was no one left in the village I hadn't met, not to mention the fact that thin men were a pretty rare commodity there. Six weeks later, around New Year's, I was staying over at a friend's house, when a young man I had never seen walked through the door. He was my friend's cousin, who had come home for the holidays. Incidentally, he was thin as a rail. We started dating the next day, and after a few weeks, we went to the shaman, and she gave us her blessing. Still, I had a lot of doubts about him and about staying in Japan, and we had one major breakup, and I was sure it wouldn't last. But we got together again and worked everything out, and now--no big surprise ending here--he is my darling hubbie!

Mark! I'm still waiting to hear your UFO stories.

Well, This should be another board, with paranormals as a second topic. I'll change this.

Matt, thanks for creating this board, and I like the name change.

Juli, I'll send you my dry cleaning bill very soon. Now stop spitting on me. Armani doesn't come cheap. As for UFO stories, no, I don't really have one, other than that my sister (who saw the ghosts) claims to have seen one once, but that's it. She also claims, on a different subject, to have been with a group of friends in jr. high, all sitting in a circle on the grass, holding hands and levitating however many inches above the ground, and then when a teacher or someone comes by their concentration was broken and they all fell on their collective behinds. She's not a nutsoidal person, though.

MSmith, I've heard of people hearing voices and other ghostly sounds on the Queen Mary.

Sometimes I have slight cases of thinking, for a split second only, of someone or something that I hadn't heard or thought of for a long time, then I'll hear something on tv or the radio or in a book or magazine about that particular subject. Frinstance, Juli, say you were first here 2 years ago but only briefly, and I'd forgotten all about you, but then one day I'll think of you for a split second and then go on Nitcentral that day to one of the various boards I frequent and who should just happen to have posted there but you! That sort of thing. Does that happen to anyone else?

Yes, after my experience on it I read up on it and it turns out that some people have seen a woman in old-fashioned clothing or a bathing suit about to dive in the pool. Creepy...

Anyone ever have an "Old Hag" experiance. It's when you feel a pressing on your chest and can't move. Old hag is the image often seen pressing.

Matt it ain't nice to call your girlfrend an old hag.

Is this "Old Hag" phenomenom related to classic tales of incubi and succubi (plurals for incubus and succubus)? (of course the tales are more elaborate and include seduction, rape, or something somewhere in between.*)

Also cats were never allowed in the same room with sleeping children because it was feared that they would sit on the child's chest and sück her life's breath out.

* Something in between is offered as a possibility only because these are supernatural creatures who can directly influence the thoughts and perceptions of their victims. The seriousness of Rape is not mitigated just because it occurs in the context of a date

Fury, I have no girlfriend.

TomM- An Old hag is unrelatted to nighttime rape demons. It's just "pressing". Incubus are described as sexually attractive demons, while Old hags are witches and the orgin of the term "Nightmare" (I'm assuming Mare is Old English for witch)

NOTE: This is the Mythology page. "Witch" has several definitions depending on which board you are on.

Hmm, I've heard of that, and that there's psychological reasons for it as well as the possibility of it being real, of course.

The "Old Hag" thing sounds possibly like what happened to my brother that time. And come to think of it, I think he was just held down, not choked. Damned selective memory!

I'd love to meet a ghost, or see one, but only a friendly one, of course. I'd hate to come up against an evil, or just mad as hell one. But even with a friendly one it'd still be pretty frightening, unless I could totally sense it wouldn't harm me and in fact, even tried communication with me. Who else would like to see or meet a ghost? And has anyone been checking out my links above yet, and if so, what did you think?

Boo!

Pesti, how about a separate board for reincarnation, or would you rather just keep it on this one?

I've often said I'm openminded and this is one subject on which I am, cuz I'm not sure but I think I recall two events from before this lifetime. They're both pretty much the same thing, in that I can recall watching movies at a local drive-in theater before this body I currently inhabit was born. The two films were Darby O'Gill and the Little People, and The Bridge on the River Kwai. The thing is I seem to remember seeing them with my current family. Mom said she did see Bridge at the drive-in. Anyway, I've never done regressive therapy, nor would I, cuz those therapists can implant false memories and I don't want to risk it. Of course, I could also just be having false memories on my own cuz it was so long ago. Still, if anyone has any reincarnaton stories, I know I'd like to hear them.

Well, I,ll make a compromise. I'll remake this board into a multible topic board.

I belived Jung spoke of inherited memories, but never proved it.

And now that I've got you completely under my power, Pesti, to do as I command...

As moderater, I serve the detizens of my site. I didn't think this would be that big a area. This board and site is expected to evolve to the needs and wants of the posters. Just look at the Jedi Sink, or old boards on DS9. I welcome all suggestions. I also remind you that the outhouse sink now has create a site option, so please use that.

"detizens": pick either "denizens" or "netizens" {colloq.).

Fury, I have no girlfriend.

Awwwww.

Well, I haven't really had any supernatural experiences, but an awful lot of strange coincidences.

That was over half a year ago, yet it's still true.

Really? And you're what, 19? I feel sorry for you. Alone and unobserved... You have friends, right? You once said you had an imaginary friend named Shadow or something. You also once said your only brush with romance was a crush you ahd since you were 9. Are both of these true?

Friends, yes. The other majors, and some people from grade school I talk to via the web. The crush is true as well.

Well, are you going to show up tomorrow at 1pm (board time) on PestiChat? I hope to see you there.