So, Halloween is coming up soon, and I've been watching a lot of those shows about haunted places on tv, and it made me want to ask... have any of you guy ever had a real "paranormal" experience?

As a person with a strong interest in the sciences, I have a hard time believing that ghosts, etc. are real, as I believe people work themselves up into a frenzy over nothing, and that there's a scientific explanation for everything, but even I have to admit that some things that I've experienced before have just been down right freaky.

The one event that stands out to me most happened when I was a child, staying over at my grandmother's house. There had been no reason or evidence to believe that her house or her land was haunted. It wasn't on top of an Indian burial ground, no one died there (that we knew of), it was just a blank patch of land in town when she ordered a house to be built there when I was about 8 or so. Anyways, I would stay up late watching tv as a kid, and the room that the tv was in was next to a bathroom that always had the door open and the window was always closed. I remember one night while I was watching tv, I saw the bathroom light come on - no other light was on, just the bathroom light. Oooh-kay? I thought my grandmother or grandfather had walked into the bathroom for something and I just didn't see them walk past the room I was in because I was so focused on watching tv. The light went out about 20 seconds or so later. I watched for them to walk out, but no one ever did, and there was no way my grandparents could have moved that fast out of the room. I looked in the bathroom, and no one was there... o.O

So tell me, whether you believe or not... Has anything "paranormal" ever happened to you?

I never used to believe in paranormal things, but I've seen too many things to chalk it up to coincidence. So yeah, I believe.

My house is downright ghosted. I've seen shadowy figures appear (full on three dimensional black forms), had things move on their own, that sort of thing. There's also a glowing line that occasionally appears in my living room, and it's always just before something creepy goes down.

I'll set things down and they'll be moved into weird places as well. The instance that sticks out in particular for me is one time I set my sketchbook down to grab some water and when I came back, it wasn't where I left it. I looked around for it for forever, and eventually I found it beneath the kitchen sink, of all places.

And it's not something that happened to me, but I'd still like to share. My friend used to talk about her past life when she was young. She would talk to her mom about her husband and children (she was like 3-5 years old at this time), and describe their appearances and how much she missed them. She could name them, and would talk about how she had died, which she would say happened in a car crash during heavy rain, and apparently it really stressed her out because she didn't know if her children had survived the crash. This friend's mom looked into it and apparently she found an obituary of the woman my friend claimed to be, detailing the accident, her kids, her husband, et cetera.

She also likes to tell the story of how she mortally frightened her grandma. She was in a child's pool (still around 5 years old or so) when it began to lightning and thunder. Her grandma told her to get out and she refused. Her grandma told her that the lightning could strike her to which she replied "Don't worry, if I die I can just come back!" As she tells it, her grandma nearly had a heart attack.

My partner has also seen apparitions!

Oh yeah, I've had some experiences. None in the house I currently live in but my grandma's house was haunted without a doubt. My grandma herself was witness to many things. At night on several occasions she would have the sensation of someone sitting down on her bed; she could literally see the indentation of someone being there. She also claimed to have seen a man (full apparition) sitting in her hallway more than once. He wore a brown suit and a hat and, here's the creepy thing. A friend and myself were over to visit her once and we were drawing pictures. For whatever reason we drew this exact man (keep in mind we knew nothing about any of this at the time) Downright scared the hell out of my grandma. Shortly after my grandma lost her beloved cat she saw a pure white, almost transparent kitten outside of her window (a window far too high for any cat to reach); when she went out to look for it there was nothing there. I've always found this last one sweet instead of scary.

As for me, I would stay over at my grandma's house almost every weekend as a kid. Occasionally I would take my cat with me; as you may or may not know animals are said to be very sensitive to the paranormal, cats in particular and mine was no exception. Once I was standing in the downstairs holding her, facing a room which I would later find out had a creepy past, when she suddenly got very tense and started to growl. Without warning she flew from my arms and bolted upstairs. She'd never acted this way before. When I went to get her, she stood up on her back legs hissing and swatting, she refused to go back downstairs. Something clearly scared her in that room. As I would later find out she wasn't the first to have an experience in that room and when my mom was a kid she and some friends used to play with the ouija board and mess around with the paranormal in that very same room. Coincidence? I'm not so sure.

Another scary story happened when my mom and I myself were coming up the stairs and we heard whispering in the walls. No joke, it was too muffled to make out the words but it was clearly whispering. My mom at first thought perhaps it was my grandma's voice coming through the vents but when we got upstairs, no. She was nowhere near the vents and was busy in another room. Perhaps the scariest experience for me was the time I was in the living room at her house, laying down for a nap (I would often sleep on the floor on a roll out bed when I stayed over) All of a sudden I felt an intense pressure on my body, as if something was holding me down. I couldn't move, couldn't get up and it actually hurt. I honestly felt as if I was about to black out but it stopped as suddenly as it started.

I've never known the whole history on the property but I do know many arrowheads have been found in the surrounding woods (my grandma's house is literally at the top of a long, winding hill and surrounded by forest) Perhaps it was built on sacred grounds. It's something I've never done the research on but I'd be very curious to find out. Nonetheless; whatever the reasons, I know the things I've experienced and my family has experienced defy logic but can't be denied.

I rented a house last year that was pretty creepy and some unexplained things happened there. A couple of weeks after we moved in, we would hear footsteps when we were all in our rooms. The footsteps sounded like heavy boots. One of my roommates, Stacey, had the back bedroom and our rooms were basically separated by a door. She heard some footsteps in front of her door and she said someone was trying to open her locked door. It stopped after a couple of tries.

My roommate, Bailey, said she saw someone on the couch in the middle of the night. She thought it was one of us and when she returned to her room after using the restroom, they were gone. She asked us about it, but it wasn't any of us and we didn't have anyone over. I'm a little unsure of her story because she takes ambien for her insomnia and it can make you hallucinate.

My boyfriend was installing blinds in my room, my roommate Ari's room and our bathroom. He was in Ari's room putting up her blinds and he had everything laid on her bed. He was about to start installing the blinds and he suddenly hit something on the back of his neck. When he looked to see what it was, it was one of the pieces for the blinds. He didn't feel threatened, just a little weirded out. Then he went to install blinds in the bathroom and heard footsteps in the hallway behind him. He stepped out and took a couple of pictures in our kitchen and in one picture, there was a white mist in one and in another, you can see something that vaguely resembles a face. He would also see shadows walking behind us in the reflection our windows in the living room. It couldn't have been anyone wandering outside because the driveway dipped down and if it was a person, they would have to be at least 10 feet tall to reach the window.

It was really creepy, but it died down after we got settled in the house. I would still hear footsteps, but I just ignored it :P

Gracious, you guys have some scary stories! :o

I'll share another of mine with you all ^.^ Well, the small town where I used to live, my mom worked at a police department. That's all well and good, but there were upper stories that no one was allowed into; it used to be a place where people lived above the station, but they had to move out because it had become too dangerous to live in, the floors were weakening, and they were afraid someone was going to get hurt. Sometimes my dad and I would go to visit her at work, and I was a very curious kid, so I /needed/ to know what was up there. How can you not as a kid, want to go into a place that says "Do Not Enter," after all? So one day, my mom got tired of hearing about it, and she sent me up there with my dad and a couple of flash lights (yes I know, probably not a wise thing to do, but my dad was cool with it.) So we clambered up the stair to the second floor. We couldn't see very much as it was dark up there, and the lights didn't work anymore. It was mostly a lot of dust though! Nothing really special happened until we got to the third floor, a gymnasium. My dad and I were standing still next to each other, and we heard footsteps echoing throughout the room, but neither of us were moving. The footsteps sounded like they were coming from all the way across the gym. I started getting a cold chill and I told him we had to leave right then and there, so we tailed it out of there as quickly as was safe, and I told my mom all about what happened. She told me that the gymnasium at the third floor used to be a room full of cells for prisoners, but the people who moved there had converted into a gymnasium, and that inmates had died up there before o.O