Do You Believe in Ghosts? How about Live ones?

I remember having strange experiences as a child in our family home. Things that I could not explain, but never really questioned too hard. I as a 'daddy's girl'. My father was my world, he was my hero and my best friend. My bedroom door had a full length panel of patterned glass. Although my view was a little distorted, I could see out into the hallway and, if it's own door was opened, into the kitchen which was directly accross from my room. Despite the distorted view, it was easy for me to tell who was passing my door by their build, shape, hair color, clothing etc. My sister was clearly much shorter than either of my parents, my mother was of average height with a fuller figure whilst my father was tall and slim; one of the reason that I was often said to be more like my father than my mother. On more than one occasion I saw my father pass by my door and had the urge to go see him. I would leave my room in the direction which he had gone and look for him. Turning to the left out of my room, the hallway led to my sister's room at the end, a toilet on the right and my parents' room on the left. With the toilet door open and clearly no-one inside, I went into my parents' room, it too was empty. I quickly looked into my sister's room but my dad was not in their either. When my parents purchased the building in which we lived it had been necessary to replace the roof, my father took advantage of this and had a full sized snooker table craned into the loft. The staircase leading up to my fathers snooker room was in one corner of their bedroom. I climbed the stairs and found no lights on at the top; nonetheless I switched them on and looked around. When I failed to find him there, I went back down the staircase and ran to the other end of the house. Through the sitting room was a storage area that had a staircase leading down into the family business premises on the ground floor of the property. Down I went and into the front shop. I asked the lady who happened to be working in the shop that day if she knew where my dad was, and was told that he was in one of the machine rooms. There were several machine rooms; my parents had at some time decided to produce their own brand of garments and a variety of types of knitting machines were required for various purposes. It was in the farthest room that I finally found my dad that day. I was confused as to how he had managed to pass me upstairs without my seeing him and to get here so much quicker than I. There was no possibility that he could have passed by me. I asked him if he had been upstairs a little while ago but he replied that he hadn't been in the house since breakfast.

Had this only happened on a single occasion I might eventually have dismissed it, but it occurred on three separate occasions and stayed in my memory. My father died when I was eight years old however and I had no more experiences of seeing him after that. If I were to have seen him after his death then perhaps I would be more inclined to believe in the existence of ghosts in the traditional sense. We moved from that house just a few months after my father's death, to a house where my grandmother claimed to see "something ghostly".

Many years later whilst working late one evening I had a similar experience. I worked as a technologist in a contract safety testing laboratory on the outskirts of a well know historical city. It was around 11pm - midnight, the windows of the lab were filled with the pitch black of night, something that I'll admit I found spooky because of the location of the laboratory. Standing by the peninsular bench in the centre of the room, I saw a colleague, I'll call him Tony, pass by the lab door. Knowing that the only two people supposed to be in the building were myself and Aretha (not her real name), the girl standing by my side, I went to investigate and to ask Tony what he was doing there. I followed in the direction that I had seen Tony go, all the way to the entrance of the building yet did not find him. I checked in every office and laboratory on the way back yet still could not find him. Again, as with my father, Tony was not there nor had he been there at all that evening.

When we talked of it the following day we discovered that other members of staff and the cleaning crew had experienced similar events. One cleaner in particular told of the Scientific Director passing her in the corridor one evening, but completely ignoring her when she spoke to him. As he wasn't normally the type to ignore people, she passed comment on it the next day, only to be told that the man in question was currently abroad on holiday.

ghostly

Jenolan Caves - THE GHOSTLY APPARITION

Moonlight Apparition Poster

More ghostly artwork here.

These experiences are something that I was never able to explain yet don't doubt for a second were real. Perhaps what I saw were Odbringer or the Odic Force, a hypothetical vital energy or lifeforce proposed by Baron Carl von Reichenbach during the nineteenth centur). He proposed that the force was allied to electricity, magnetism, and heat, a force which he thought was radiated by most substances. If there is indeed a vital energy, couldn't somehow traces of it be left behind? Maybe it was simply some form of residual electrical energy, or mybe it was a glitch in the matrix (lol). Being from a scientific background I know only too well that we don't have all the answers to all of the questions. Maybe some day someone will explain it in a way that I believe is scientifically sound.

I Talk to Ghosts

Haunted House mousepad

Ghost Town

More ghost gifts here.