Viti

It's all kind of silly and vague nothing like "Get off the plane it's going to crash!"

My Grandmother on three occasions dreamed about a person and later that day would receive the news that the person had died. I am wary of this as memory of exactly WHEN she had told us of the dream is so subjective. Several of us remember her telling us of the dreams before the verifying phone calls...but memory is wacky.

One night, I was telling my Mom goodbye before going out and she screamed "You are not leaving this house!" I was shocked as there was nothing unusual about me going out and she knew the people picking me up pretty well. I asked her what the hell was wrong with her and she called me a whore and made a racist remark about one of the people I was leaving with. My mother had never made a racist remark of any kind....ever and hasn't since and has never, ever called me names or used the word whore. I told her she was nuts and left.

Anyway we got into a bad car accident that night. Luckily we were all only bruised, cut and scared (the car flipped over and landed on the roof). I got home and she was still up and was crying with here head in her hands saying she didn't know where any of her awful words had come from and all she knew was she did not want me leaving the house that night...said it was one of the strongest feelings she had ever had and she was tempted to physically restrain me. Then she looked up and saw me all cut up and bruised.

Make of it what you will, anecdotes are not proof of anything. I know my mother and know that something happened there...I can't explain what though nor expect anyone to believe it.

Starspun

How does something like that affect you? It appears to be a genuine paranormal occurrence on a personal level and not something dismissed with a slight wave of the hand. Has the experience shaped any new views that you previously did not hold?
Just curious....

I don't think your experience with the unexplainable would fall into the ghostly spirit category, but, it is an odd occurrence. How could someone even attempt to expalin that instance of precognition?
Anyway, I don't like mysteries. I like factual answers'.

Viti

Starspun...it goes into my mental "that was weird" file. It didn't affect me in any deep down way because I expect weirdness...I don't think it is possible to know everything about a universe this size. Sorry, I just accept mystery as part of the fun!

My Mom was more affected, but more horrified and confused by the things she said than the actual unexplained aspects. I think it made her feel a bit out of control of herself (does that make sense?)

cricket

Well, maybe your mother is above flaky behavior, but for most people I know, this story wouldn't constitute proof of precognition.

People sometimes lash out and say things that are inappropriate and out of character. Especially those who are worried or upset (maybe 'cause the kids are going out...)

Especially people wig out when they're PMSing, or premenopausal.

Especially people lose their cool if they are mothers of teenage girls.

AND coincidentally teenagers get into wrecks a lot, and get banged up or worse.

So your mother was worried, acted weird, lashed out, you went out anyway, had a wreck?

I'm not sure I'm convinced about the precognition experience. JMHO

Viti

Cricket...I know, I didn't expect it to be convincing...I can't reproduce it and I can't prove any of the things you mentioned weren't factors. Just an anomoly that I remember because it was the only time anything remotely like that happened.

cricket

I don't know all the details like you do... just wanted to tell you my thoughts. I hope you don't mind. I admit I may be wrong; just trying to figure it all out.

Even if someone gets off a plane and then it crashes, I am unimpressed.

I am a firm believer in coincidence.

How many times have people de-planed and then it didn't crash?

It's hard to say because people don't discuss this. They only talk about the rare occasions that their ‘sixth sense' was correct.

And in hindsight, vague premonitions are twisted into something that is oh-so-meaningful!

Such as calling one's daughter a whore... what does that have to do with a wreck?

I realize she didn't know why she was upset, so she couldn't say "the car will be belly-up at the corner of Main and Elm"... but still...what does the racist remark prove? Surely such a remark doesn't deter teens from going out with friends (and hence, getting into the envisioned wreck).

I think she was at her all-time low (everyone has an all-time low, even reasonable people ) She was nightmarishly uncivil at that moment, and must have been in the worst mood of her life. She must have felt terrible about her words, since she's not one to make nasty remarks. She must have felt... in retrospect... that the accident helped to make sense of her earlier tirade. It gave it *meaning* --- which may have helped her forgive herself.

This is just my opinion, of course! Just noodling on this... I hope I'm not stepping on toes... just being overly analytical here.

Viti

cricket...no problem at all didn't mean to sound rude to you (damn typing just can't get tone over real well)!

I am a skeptic believe me...that is why I used the term "seemingly" precognitive. I agree it is easy to ascribe meaning to coincidence...especially when whatever it is happens to you.

I just sort of threw my story out there as something weird that happened and make the point that it's all subjective.

Theist explanation = Godidit

New Age explanation = She is obviously clairvoiyant (Akashic someorother, Spirit guide told her...)

Pantheist explanation = She temporarily was tapped into the Universal Consciousness or All

Hard core skeptical explanation = She had PMS and you were in a wreck, stupid Can you make it happen in a controlled environment? Prove it and get Randi's million dollars

My explantion = I don't know, that was weird, what's on HBO tonight?

I am sure we all have stories. My friend at work insists she was caught and carried by some unseen force when she began to fall down some stairs. She is a no nonsense person and more or less apathetic religiously.

The Lone Ranger

Well, I’ve never heard of any cases where anyone has been able to demonstrate the existence of any “supernatural” or “paranormal” phenomena. For years now, the James Randi Foundation has offered a reward of over $1,000,000 to anyone who could do so – so far, all takers have failed. As LadyShea has pointed out, sleep paralysis and associated hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences can explain a great many “supernatural” phenomena. And there are a great many things about the working of the human brain that we understand very poorly at the moment.

Both Carl Sagan (in The Demon-Haunted World) and Richard Dawkins (in Unweaving the Rainbow) have pointed out that people tend to remember things which confirm their beliefs, while forgetting or dismissing things which do not. Thus, we remember the 1% of the time that we happen to be thinking of a particular person and that person calls us, but forget the 99% of the time that we’re thinking of that person and they don’t call. Also, memory is by no means a passive process of recollection – we actively reconstruct our memories. And, as psychologists have repeatedly shown, we tend to re-construct our memories in such a way as to confirm our beliefs. (As every police detective is well aware, the human memory is a very unreliable thing, much as we’d like to believe otherwise.)

As Dawkins has pointed out in Unweaving the Rainbow, the average human is simply terrible at estimating the probability of two or more events occurring coincidentally. Events which most people would regard as “too improbable to be due to chance” actually occur quite often.

As Nicholas Humphrey has pointed out in Leaps of Faith, ghosts and “paranormal” phenomena seem to have some rather odd properties. First of all, they’re surprisingly rare (considering the literally billions of people who have lived and died, if ghosts existed, isn’t it odd that they’re so rare?). Second, when knowledgeable investigators test the claims of such beings/phenomena, they consistently fail to find any evidence that they exist. (Many “psychics” claim that their “powers” won’t work in the presence of skeptics, that they work only in the presence of true believers. This excuse, of course, makes their claims untestable and therefore irrefutable. How convenient for them.) Anyway, the point is that if ghosts or “paranormal” phenomena do exist, it’s simply amazing that despite decades of diligent searching, no one has been able to provide any real evidence for that fact.

Of course, there are a great many things that we don’t (yet) know about the universe around us. This in no way implies that there things out there which cannot, in principle, be explained rationally though.

***

For what it’s worth, a couple of personal experiences might be of interest. When I was an undergraduate, I worked for the college as a security guard. Mostly, the job involved going through the campus buildings at night and making sure they were properly locked up. The campus was over 150 years old at the time, and like a lot of college campuses, it had a few buildings which were supposedly haunted. Several of the guards had reported seeing and/or hearing spooky things in some of the buildings, and there were actually a few guards who refused to enter certain buildings after dark. I’ve always been a pretty laid-back kind of guy, and certainly wasn’t bothered by a few “unexplainable” occurrences, so the task of locking up certain buildings after dark often fell upon me. (A friend once gave me what I thought was a great compliment: She said that “if you were going through Dana Hall late one night and a ghost jumped out and said ‘boo!,’ you’d demand to see its ID, and if it didn’t have one, you’d throw it out of the building.”)

Anyway, one of the persistent claims was that one room in Dana Hall was haunted. Several people had reported seeing a glowing outline of what appeared to be a woman’s body on the wall of that room late at night. Well, one night I was locking up Dana when I went into that room, and there it was a glowing figure on the wall that looked quite a lot like a woman wearing a cloak or shroud. Naturally, this bore investigation. I went up to the figure to have a look at it, noting that it seemed to shimmer somewhat. When I stood directly in front of it, the figure disappeared. In a few moments, I was able to track down the source of the “apparition.” As it turned out, there was a small hole in one of the leaded windows high above the floor, and when the moonlight shone through it at the proper angle, the “figure” was projected onto the wall – and since there was a tree just outside the window, movement of its branches caused the figure to shimmer.

New Garden was another building on campus that was supposed to be haunted. Since important records were kept in this building, the procedure for locking it up went like this: first, we were to lock all the outside doors, then the stairwells on the ground floor; finally, we were to ride the elevator to the top floor and lock it there, so that if anyone broke into the building, they couldn’t use either the stairwells or elevator to gain access to the upper floors. Well, several guards had reported hearing the elevator start up after they had locked it on the top floor, which was supposedly impossible. Consequently, several guards refused to enter New Garden after dark.

One night, after I had turned off all the lights, locked all the doors, and locked the elevator on the top floor, I was making my way down the North stairwell (unlocking the doors to go through, then locking them again behind me – a tedious procedure) when I heard the elevator start up. Naturally, I ran down to the next floor and got there just as the elevator arrived, but it continued on down. So, I ran down to the ground floor and arrived just before the elevator did. I stood in front of the elevator doors with my flashlight raised high (we carried those big Mag-lites, which are designed to be used as a defensive weapon, if necessary) and as they opened I confronted – a very surprised janitor. It turns out that he had (illegally) used his key to enter the building to retrieve some things that he’d forgotten, then decided to unlock the elevator and ride it down, rather than go through all the stairwell doors.

Of course, I don’t know if forgetful janitors could explain all the strange behaviors of the elevator in New Garden, but the point is that the phenomenon turned out to have a perfectly prosaic explanation (at least in this case) when someone took the time to investigate it. So did the “ghost” of Dana Hall.

I suspect that this is the case with most (indeed, very likely all) such “ghostly” occurrences.

Anyway, that's my $0.02. Good night all,

Michael

cricket

LOL!

Even I do! Though no matter what happens, I explain it to myself in non-superstitious ways. I attribute strange happenings to coincidence or to brain tricks. Or I decide there's a reasonable answer but I just don't know it yet.

Which is why I'm ashamed to say I'm afraid of ghosts. I don't believe in them at all. Not at ALL. Yet I will not pitch a tent near my family graveyard, I will not sleep in the bed & breakfast room that's rumored to be haunted, I will not read scary books anymore.

It's so silly. There are very few things I fear; why should this be one of them when I know it isn't real?

The Lone Ranger

cricket:
Several of my friends have claimed (or complained, in some cases) that I'm afraid of nothing. Yet, even so, I'm not overly fond of graveyards. Why? I suspect it's because I don't particularly enjoy being so forcefully reminded that I'll die someday.

That's my theory anyway. 'Night,

Michael