My college is traditional on the list of 10 most haunted colleges in America. And sure as the night follows day, I experienced an encounter one night that I’ll never forget. However, I was sworn to secrecy so I haven’t discussed it since that night 25 years ago 
For firsthand experiences, I don’t have anything supernatural to share besides what I think of as a lot of small world experiences. You know, running into people in far flung parts of the country, where it seems impossible that you’d cross paths at that place and at that exact time.
A story about someone else having a “feeling”: When the kids were wee, I took my 2, plus another mom’s 2 to a nearby forest preserve to play. The kids were goofing around playing fort in the hedges and I was sitting at a picnic table by myself enjoying the sunshine.
A young man walked from the parking lot directly towards me, and I suddenly felt very afraid. I realized I was all alone in this clearing and the only other people were the four young children, who were currently out of sight.
I held my hand up in a stop sign and told him not to come any closer. I called the kids, dialed 911 on my cell, held my hand up again at the man and told him to stay put. He didn’t move. I asked the dispatcher at 911 to please stay on the line with me as the kids & I scurried back to the car. Everything was fine, the dispatcher was great, and the man did not follow us.
When dropping the kids off at the other mom’s house, I filled her in on the encounter and she looked shocked and turned white. She hesitantly told me that while I was gone, she got this really strong feeling that I was in trouble. She was freaked out by it more than I was — probably because she is the one that had the experience of sensing something like that. I wasn’t so sure to believe her, but the look of shock on her face was so immediate and seemed true.
I was on vacation with my now DH when we were dating. We were at the airport to come home when he said he just HAD to call his grandmother (with whom he was extremely close). We were in kind of a hurry to board (no cellphones then), so I began to get a little irritated that we were going to have to delay boarding for some kind of random “feeling that something is very very wrong.” I really didn’t believe in that kind of thing. But he insisted and found a payphone. Not reaching his grandmother, he phoned his mom, who told him she had taken very ill and was in the hospital. Since we were in Mexico, his mother had no way to reach us.
That was weird, and he has never had another feeling similar (at least that he has ever told me).
My dad was an engineer monitoring radar in a remote location overseas back in the 1950s.
He saw something that couldn’t be explained–a UFO moving in ways that aircraft can’t move. Although he is a very “scientific” person, dad was always interested in UFOs because of that experience.
While dad was en-route to that job, his older brother talked him into missing his flight–not at all the kind of thing my punctual engineer dad would do. His brother was an alcoholic who just wanted to visit longer, have a few more drinks. His brother convinced him that he could get another flight in a day or two. The original flight went down in the Pacific/was never found. (Tomorrow happens to be the anniversary of the crash.) When dad showed up a couple days later, his boss said “What are you doing here? We thought you were dead!”
When I was a teenager, I was babysitting in an old house that had a back stairway with a “servants’ quarters” over the kitchen. The kids (about 4 and 6yo) told me once that they thought the house was haunted because they heard noises up there, but I didn’t think much of it. One particular night the kids went to bed as usual. I watched TV for awhile, then went to get a snack in the kitchen–on the opposite side of the house. I very clearly heard footsteps in the room above me. I ran upstairs immediately to catch the kids–I was sure they were trying to spook me. I caught them --sound asleep in their beds. I went back to the living room, turned on all the lights, turned the TV up loud. Never went back in that kitchen.
A few months ago I heard H walking around the foot of our bed, tripping on something on the floor. He doesn’t ever get up at night. I was sort of startled/annoyed that he woke me up, and I said, “What are you doing?!” in a harsh tone. Then I saw H sound asleep next to me. I can’t explain it. I would swear that an adult person was right there.
It wasn’t really scary, though. I tried to explain it away.
Decades ago I visited an old girls boarding school which had closed. It also used to be a civil war hospital. It gave me a weird feeling that I couldn’t shake. Years later, I looked it up online. Turns out many people have claimed it is haunted.
I have a bunch more related to my brother who died in an accident. Too many strange coincidences involving his name and date of death appearing over and over. Could all these be coincidences?? I think one of these incidents helped me avoid an accident on the highway. I was “alerted” (maybe by my brother?) to someone texting and driving who was about to swerve into my lane.
I think Ouija boards are fake, but creepy. I wouldn’t have one in my house, but we did play with them as kids and nothing interesting happened.
I’m always intrigued by those kinds of stories. Whenever I have had to change a flight last minute, I have a fleeting thought of something like that happening-but the problem is you don’t know if you are changing from the doomed flight or TO the doomed flight! 
I never believed in any of that until more recently in my life. In fact, I was a huge fan of that guy Randy who used to disprove all the psychics, etc. But then two things happen:
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I had a child who reacted to my thoughts and knew things she shouldn’t know. She suddenly became afraid of planes on 9/11 and we hadn’t had the TV on all morning. By the time she was 3, all of that was gone.
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I lived in a haunted house. Books would fall off shelves. Doors would open or shut. We heard a child crying upstairs when everyone was downstairs. Even guests in our house occasionally witnessed these things. We went through a period of months where clocks and watches would change time overnight. And once we actually had a white fog in a corner. I remember turning to my daughter and asking her if she saw it to make sure I wasn’t just losing my mind. (Certainly everything else happening made me think I was!)
I was with my dad when he passed away. My watch stopped at the exact minute he died. Coincidence?
Some of these stories are pretty wild.
When I was 20, the love of my life at that time (over 6 years together) was killed in a tragic accident in our college town. Naturally, this was a huge event in my life, one that I’ve never completely gotten over, even as I went on to find happiness with DH and our girls. Anyway, a few weeks after it happened, I awoke in the middle of the night with consternation because I kept hearing his favorite song over and over in my head. Disturbed, I got up to turn on the radio so that another song might banish it from my brain. When I turned on the radio, that song was playing. I froze for a moment, then changed the channel. Yep, same song was playing. I told my best friend about it and she insisted that it was a sign that he was okay and not to worry about him. I told her it was just a very odd coincidence. But I’ve wondered about it for years. The lyrics of the song, by the way, make reference to being “in paradise.”
A few months ago, this childhood best friend was meeting with a medium about a personal issue she was having when allegedly she received a message from a close departed relative via the medium. At some point in the conversation, the medium told her that someone else was interrupting. It was a “he” and he wanted my friend to to tell ME that “he still loves me.” The medium asked for some details and they were given-mainly some general details about cause of death and some other things that if pressed, you couldn’t really determine to be totally unique. My friend has always been very spiritual, a strong believer in supernatural things and has told me stories similar to ones in this thread, and others, where she felt something was very wrong (her mom had died at that moment), she has seen departed loved ones after death, etc. In fact, right after this accident, she had told me that she saw my boyfriend in the crowd smiling at us when we got off the plane in Dallas after we had been informed about it (several of us from our home town came right home after it happened). I didn’t see him, but I wasn’t really open to any of this kind of stuff and probably would have fainted if I had. I still don’t know what I think about her story about the medium.
I think some people are just very open to these possibilities, so they are ready for them when they happen. Others, like me, are either fearful or skeptical, or maybe both, so these sentiments may block us from seeing them or believing them even when we do experience them.
Who knows.
When my mom died almost immediately we had some strange occurrences. My sister would set a paper towel on the counter in prep for breakfast and it always was moved overnight to the other side of the counter. The first couple times she chalked it up to her imagination figuring she was just forgetful. But she told me about it so I could witness it. Sure enough by next morning it was moved. That happened about 5 nights total.
Then at daylight savings time when the clocks were to move forward we had one very old battery driven clock over a desk that was really hard to reach. We had a discussion about it. We left the room. Came back in about an hour later to see it reset to the new time. All we could say was “thanks Mom!”
I was talking with a friend in a hotel room about my experiences and she replied that when her aunt died that pictures would fall off walls and objects would move. No sooner had she said that when a heavy lamp on the desk violently slid a foot or so and fell to the floor. I’d be thinking I was crazy but both of us saw it slide (and yes, the desk was level)
According to my mother, I was born with a connection to a source of information outside of myself, which diminished to her relief after illness with high fever. It’s still there, although I resist it. There’s something scary about the connection. My brain argues against any information received from what I’ve come to think of as a river of consciousness. I know I’m not supposed to use it for evil purposes or financial gain. How do I know? I don’t know.
I was sitting at a bar in my twenties. Some guy beside me was pressing his suit. Hoping to put him off, without any of my usual concern (alcohol) about dipping into the river, I told him I knew he was born on August 21. He produced his driver’s license at my request (argumentative brain). Yep. Away he flew.
There is something that exists outside of us. I think of the good part of it as God. I try not to think about the other part of it.
@socaldad2002, I agree that there may not be any compelling evidence of extraterrestrial visitors, but I believe the odds are in all that 40 billion light year universe there are other sentient beings of some sort out there.
As for me, I go through spurts of what seems to be precognition, although I’ve had no inkling of major calamities to come in my own life (cancer, serious car accidents, etc.). One of my clearest recollections, about 15 years ago, was that night after night I dreamed that there was a train wreck, seeing the cars buckled and torn apart off the tracks with snow drifting in from the night sky through the twisted roofs. It doesn’t snow often where I live, but the next week there was a deadly train accident about three miles from me one night, and it was snowing hard at the time.
And as a rational, very non-New Agey person I’ve yet to explain why I feel so drawn to houses, cars, clothes, music, etc. from the 1920s and '30s, particularly the Dust Bowl. It’s more than just liking these things or being a history buff, but that they feel “right” somehow and familiar, and I almost think, “I remember that” even though I really have no memory of a specific past life. So I generally brush that off, but I will admit one of the primary factors in choosing the college I went to was because the buildings in the area of campus where I’d be living were built between 1880 and 1915, and somehow felt like home.
We used to play with the Ouija board all the time growing up. We discovered that we could use cards or a lightweight album cover and get it to move as a platen if a board wasn’t around. Everyone at the circle had to believe in it or nothing would happen. Just tips of fingers. You could always tell if someone tried to forcibly move it. Worked best with my sister. We could control it by concentrating on a specific answer. Sometimes we’d think different answers and it would go in circles. It was fun to test out. Mind over matter sort of thing. Sometimes we’d ask a question and just wait to see what happened. Pretty innocuous mostly.
Once we got really weird answers and asked a name and it was German sounding. Someone long dead who was giving history. We quit.
The last time I ever tried it was at a slumber party as a teen. There were 5 or 6 of us
As teen girls we asked the initials of who we would marry (expecting to know them). Nope. We each got initials of nobody we knew. Blew it off.
Then the answers got faster coming and got a bit scary at the speed. Almost hard to keep your fingers on it. We asked a name. Let’s just say we dropped it like a hot potato and none of us ever played with it again.
Oh—I know that at least three of us did marry someone with the initials. Me included.
Don’t mess with ouija boards.
When I was in college we played with a ouija board one night and supposedly contacted a “spirit” named D.J. Supert. I can’t believe I still remember that name now, 50 years later. Anyway, he said he was a Civil War soldier and started telling us about his life. Our college was near a cemetery in Virginia, where more than a few graves were from the 1800s. We decided to grab some flashlights and walk up the hill to the cemetery around midnight and look for a grave with Supert on the headstone. I’d like to say we found one but we never did. It was a pretty spooky night, though!
I worked for awhile in a building that was, and still is, haunted. Had to do some weekend work there once when hardly anybody else was there. I saw and heard things that were pretty unusual. Often the sounds of somebody typing a couple of cubicle rows away from me. Got up multiple times to check and nobody was there. Saw lots of ‘shadow people’ out of the corner of my eye.
Talked later to the security guards at that building. They had a whole bunch of tales that they shared w/me of strange supernatural stuff they’d encountered while doing rounds there. All of them have had multiple run ins with a little girl dressed in late 1800s/early 1900s clothing with an old fashioned hairstyle running through the building and laughing. Sometimes even coming up to them as they’re sitting at the security desk. Other employees have seen this child figure peek her head over the cubicle wall. Always late in the day when hardly anybody else is there.
A coworker used to frequently see shadows & orbs in one part of the building where we all sat. One time, she swears that she saw two following me around behind me. I didn’t believe her at the time, but after all of the weird stuff that one weekend, oh trust me. I believed her then!
I am pretty intuitive . I once thought about a former patient who I had taken care of 8 years before. He had a traumatic accident. later that night I saw him on the TV news about him going to college. I hadn’t thought about him in a long time and I wasn’t working at the same place.
I once mentioned a board game to a former boyfriend who went away to college and came home on weekends. He didn’t call me one weekend. Turns out he confessed he had actually come home that weekend, played that board game with another girl. He thought I knew that he was home. I don’t know why I mentioned the board game (it was pretty obscure and I never played it with him).
I am with Nrds I am pretty anxious/afraid of visitations etc… and I think I am closed to the possibilities. I am more feeling sensitive, so I don’t know if this is just a form of emotional intelligence. My kids would say I am psychic because I seemed to know a lot of things about them. LOL
Another form, is that I am pretty perceptive. I can read most people right away. I cant figure out how people buy into a person, when I know they are idiots. (a nicer word) however I think this is not supernatural
I think this thread is really interesting. I wish I had some of these abilities talked about in the stories.
I think its interesting that, while reading this thread it kept turning off and redirecting so I had to load it again! hmmm
My Dad like smiley faces. He’d send me letters with a little smiley face at the bottom, make smiley faces when peeling potatoes by cutting out the eyes and adding a mouth, etc. He also played a trick on his grandkids where he would get a rock, put a grandkid’s name on it with a smiley face, and then throw it out in the yard. Then he’d take the kid on a walk around the yard, and “find” the rock and exclaim “Oh my gosh grandkid! This rock has your name on it!” I have a collection of those rocks he “found” in the yard.
A few days after he died, I was making eggs for my five year old and she was helping. She handed me an egg from the carton on the counter and I looked at it and saw that it was mottled. I told her to put that one back and give me another bc I didn’t quite like how it looked. A few seconds later she says “Look Mommy, a smiley face!” She pointed to the carton and the mottled egg she put back had a perfect smiley face right on top oriented in our direction. Of course I took a photo of it, then blew out the contents and saved it. Unfortunately, the smiley face faded as the egg shell dried. but I still kept it. ( I’ll post the photo in my avatar later - I’m on my iPad now. )
The story continues. A couple of weeks later, I’m asked to go on a medical mission to China. I really am not feeling it so soon after my Dads death, but I decide to go. During the mission, I met a young Chinese woman and though neither of us spoke each other’s language well, we became friends. We both had young Chinese daughters and I gave her a coloring book of Chinese folk art that I had created as a gift to her daughter (one page from that coloring book is my avatar). A couple of days later she gives me a box, tells me it’s a gift, and then has to quickly go off to work. So I go sit down with some other young Chinese members of the team and opened the gift. It’s a porcelain egg holder like this:
I just burst out crying and the Chinese people were worried and didn’t understand what was going on. A few of them were fluent in English and I explained about my Dad, and the egg, and how this was such a perfect and meaningful gift for me that I couldn’t control my emotions. They translated the story to the other folks who went to go get my friend. She came, and the story was told again, and soon all of us were crying and hugging each other over such an amazing thing.
So now, of course, the egg is in a display cabinet inside the egg holder. No one will ever convince me that my Dad wasn’t behind all of this.
@LeastComplicated, What a great story you shared. You reminded me of a couple of things that happened that I believe my mom was responsible for. In the hospital just before my mom died 5 years ago, I asked her to “please send me a message when you get there, so I’ll know you’re OK”. She was very skeptical, but did her best to humor me. I assured her that when she arrived at her destination, there would likely be a kiosk where you could arrange to have messages sent to loved ones… 
She got a chuckle out of that idea. I asked her to send me a bird. She wanted to know exactly what kind of bird… An Eastern Phoebe, I said… (they are my favorites). One had nested over her back door many years before, but we hadn’t seen any on her property since then. Three days after she died, I finally forced myself to go over to her house and start ‘taking care of things’. When I entered the house, I heard a tapping sound. There was a bird tapping on the kitchen window. At first, I just thought it was very sweet (I do really love birds!),but then I realized just what kind of bird it was. An Eastern Phoebe. I burst into tears and it just stared at me for about ten seconds and flew off. I didn’t see it again.
A couple of years ago, I was having a particularly bad week… I was really just feeling a lot of self-doubt, and kind of lost, and really missing my mom. The light bulb in my bedside lamp blew, so I went to the basement to get a new one. When I pulled the box of bulbs off the shelf, something slid off the top of the box and hit me in the face. It was an envelope. When I picked it up, I saw that it was addressed to me, from my mom. It had a stamp, but no postmark. It had not been opened. In the letter, she said how much she loved me and that she would always be there for me, no matter what I needed. She mentioned how proud she was of me, and how she admired the relationship that my daughter and I have. She told me that I was a great mom. It was exactly what I needed at that moment and I have no idea how it ended up there, because I’d never seen it before… but I believe less and less in coincidence as time goes on.
@cameo43 Loved your stories also! Wow! Thanks for sharing!
I also had one more visit from my dad (that involved birds) a few years later when I was having a hard time also. I was going through a very difficult time at work and I was emotionally spent. One morning I had to go somewhere and walked up to my car and there was a cardinal feather lying on the ground beside the driver’s door. It was a lovely feather in great condition. When my dad was alive, he would collect cardinal feathers from around his birdfeeder and when he had a few, he’d send them to me because he knew I liked them. So when I saw that feather, I knew he was telling me that everything would be OK and that he loved me. Not quite a letter, but I got the message!
Sadly, I haven’t heard from him again. Or maybe I’m just not paying attention.
I see the egg:)