Friend of The Toast Julia Carrie Wong on Alicia Garza and the Bay Area roots of Black Lives Matter:
#BlackLivesMatter remains contested ground, both on- and offline. Young activists protesting in the streets of Ferguson, Staten Island, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Oakland have strong opinions on what the movement is and who it includes, while older generations of Civil Rights leaders, politicians, and pundits often struggle to keep pace.
That’s a weighty, unexpected fate for a phrase that Garza coined in a Facebook post two years ago. At the time, she was a respected Bay Area activist and community organizer. On the night of July 13, 2013, she was having drinks with her partner and some friends at Room 389 on Grand Avenue in Oakland, mourning the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the Florida man who’d shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. “#blacklivesmatter” she posted on Facebook at 7:14 p.m. that night. Then, five minutes later, she posted again: “black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”
The next day, Garza joined dozens of other families at Sole Space, the downtown Oakland shoe store and cultural space whose owner’s practice of opening the storefront to the community in the aftermath of police shootings, non-indictments, and light sentences has become a depressingly frequent tradition.
Can I be real a second? I was saying on Twitter that the scary thing about feeling like I have Experienced a Real Encounter With God is that now I’m super worried that ghosts might be real too? Like, God was a fun surprise, but I don’t know if I can check in to any old hotels on moors anymore, in case something JINGLES AT ME or bleeds from the ceiling onto my bed! And then a bunch of NORMAL PEOPLE I KNOW messaged me their ghost encounters, and I am FREAKING MY SHIT OUT.
So, um, have you WITH YOUR OWN EYES (not, like, “my aunt Agnes did, and she would never lie”) seen a ghost or God-forbid GHOSTS?
Let’s hear it. NO GOD TALK, GHOSTS ONLY.
(I love stuff like the ghost stories on Jez and Reddit and everything, but for some reason I’m like “the Toasties will tell me the truth.”)
Jess Zimmerman is on the GBBO watching team now:
“Last week was cake week, and the entire country went mental,” she told us. “We were fixated on the screen like” — and here you’ll need to imagine an adorable Irish woman leaning forward and making a comically wide-eyed face — “will the chocolate shavings adhere?!”
If you imagine the face and the accent well enough, you’ll understand why that pitch was impossible to ignore. In the spirit of experimentation, we parked our jetlagged butts in front of a rerun of Great British Bake Off that very day. (It was season 4, featuring the luminous Ruby Tandoh and Kimberley Wilson with her thousand-watt smile — an excellent introduction, especially if you’re on a ladies’ vacation and feeling inclined to think warm thoughts about dazzling women.) By the end of the trip, we were feverishly rushing to Marks & Spencer to get a small Victoria sponge before the newest episode came on.
Time Magazine has a massive piece on forgiveness and pain and healing and grief in the families left behind by the Charleston massacre, and I hope you read it, but it’s wrenchingly sad:
This scene doesn’t figure in Anthony’s account of that day, though he speaks of June 17 at length while his crab cake sits untouched on the plate in front of him. He doesn’t mention his frantic dash up Calhoun Street through the jam of police cruisers with their lights flashing, or the cop hurrying over to stop him, or the detective blocking his path and saying something about a very fluid situation. He doesn’t mention the fear, the anguish, the shock. Perhaps he would have talked about these things four months ago, when summer was coming down thick and sweaty over Charleston and that day was still a jagged wound. But the air is soft with the melancholy of autumn now, the pain is more of a vise and less of a dagger, and what he chooses to remember—if memory is even a choice—is Myra radiant just beyond his helpless reach, and the door closing.
OMG, Rachel Monroe wrote about our beloved “Death In…” books:
The books are satisfying in the same way that other accounts of peril in the wilderness are. But while most of those adventure stories center on crampon- wearing superhumans, the “Death in …” books feature characters with more familiar foibles. They get so excited when they catch a fish that they stand up in the boat. They try to impress their girlfriends. They slip on the ice. They want a closer look at the waterfall. They think the storm doesn’t look that bad.
This fundamental relatability makes reading these books an immensely taxing experience, a workout for your mirror neurons; it’s impossible not to identify with these people, in their hubris, clumsiness and bad decisions. The physical horror of their predicaments makes for years’ worth of nightmare fodder: the father who wanted to freak out his daughter by pretending to fall into the Grand Canyon — and then lost his balance and actually did; the man who was burned so badly in a Yellowstone hot spring that when rescuers tried to take off his boots, his skin came off with them, forming two perfect socks of flesh. But not every story is so dramatic: Death also arrives by way of a can of spoiled peaches, a slippery rock, a shard of glass in the river.
Kara Brown spoke to the amazing woman who read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen during the Trump rally:
Was it just a coincidence that you had Citizen on you?
I was just reading the book at the time. I actually wanted to bring two books. It was The Alchemist and that book, but I forgot The Alchemist on my table. I just started to read it. Then I was like, I’m in the middle, I’m on camera, so why not use the opportunity to promote a great book? I didn’t expect to get in an argument with the people behind me.
Yes, explain that exchange.
I got tapped on the shoulder. I think it was a couple. The man, he was mad but not as mad as his maybe-spouse. He had a more calm demeanor, just like, if you don’t want to be here, leave. They both said it but her’s was more from a place of genuine disgust and anger. I feel like he was a mouthpiece for her. And he probably was kind of mad, but I don’t think he would have tapped me on the shoulder if it wasn’t for the woman. The woman kept saying, “If you don’t wanna be here then leave. You didn’t even stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.” I said, “I do want to be here, that’s why I’m here. You don’t know who I am. I’m reading my book because I’m uninterested. Did you not just see what happened? This person disrespects women, minorities, everybody and you’re still supporting him. He’s not saying anything of substance.” If I met this couple at an event or a dinner party, I would think they were nice people. They probably are nice people. But I don’t think they have any right to tell me what to do. The lady, actually, she mumbled something. I didn’t hear but my friend told me the next day that she said, “I’m so glad you’re not my daughter,” or something along those lines. And I was thinking, “I’m glad I’m not your daughter either!”
NOW, THIS IS AN ACTUAL RELIGIOUS SCANDAL (Santas lurking in your Jewish chocolate!)
Australian paramedics have stopped asking patients who the current Prime Minister is, because who can keep track?
“We would ask patients that question because it gave us an idea of their conscious level and ability to recall events,” Mr Abood said. “But the country’s prime ministers are changing so often, it’s no longer a good indication of their mental status.”
Mr Abood once asked a patient to name the prime minister, only to be told: “I haven’t watched the news today.”
He said: “I’ve resorted back to asking them what they had for their previous meal. It’s a much safer question.”
Utah state child welfare officials on Wednesday were wrangling with a ruling by a juvenile court judge who ordered a baby to be taken from lesbian foster parents and instead placed with a heterosexual couple, saying it was for the child’s wellbeing.
Judge Scott Johansen’s order on Tuesday raised concerns at the Utah Division of Child and Family Services, said agency spokeswoman Ashley Sumner.
Missy, obviously:
[doorbell] WIFE: That’s probably Bob ME: Bob from work or Bob the cat who thinks he’s a lizard? W: Just get the door pic.twitter.com/LVprZJYKka
— Kalvin (@KalvinMacleod) November 10, 2015
I have never seen a ghost, and lean more toward the not-believing-in-them side. But I have two very trustworthy coworkers who swear that have seen a ghost in my old workplace (a very old building in Charleston, SC that used to be a morgue, among other things). The rumor was that we had a ghost that would pull your hair if you mishandled the archives!
I did not believe in ghosts until a couple of years ago when a good friend and her cousin told me about a series of encounters on their small-town Ontario farm including 1.) a ghost dog, 2.) a malevolent spirit that haunted their house and once drew my friend (as a child) towards it into an eerie light until her brother commanded it to stop, 3.) that same brother constantly having pre-cognizant dreams that occasionally, like, saved lives? But he is also a pragmatic farmer and so actively avoids talking about his uncanny psychic abilities?
D:
I really want to watch this TV show.
It’s when eminently pragmatic people are gifted with second sight that I’m inclined to believe. TV psychic? No. Farmer who treats it like an aspect of himself that needs no discussion? Yes. Also, would read this book.
Yes. My mother once told me that her grandmother had second sight, and that she sometimes had dreams that made her think she might have inherited it. My mother’s a very pragmatic, non-dramatic, non-religious person, and her telling me completely seriously that she might have second sight just made me go “huh, I guess that makes sense.” (It certainly explains my teenage years, when she always somehow knew where I was even when I really tried to avoid that.)
I *want* to believe in ghosts because the world would be so much more interesting if they exist. I haven’t ever had any experiences to make me believe though.
A fellow Charleston toastie!!!!!
Eeeeeeeee!!!!!
But about ghosts, I have one story about my cat who died when I was away at college. I grew up reading books to this cat all the time and we would sit and read for hours. I got back for a break from school, after my cat had died and my parents had acquired a set of kitten twin brothers. The twins would never sit or sleep in dead cat’s favorite spots even though they were prime sunbeam and cozy realty. I’m sitting on my bed reading, as I do, and I feel a cat jump on the bed, walk across the bedspread and curl up behind my knees. I haven’t even looked up from my book, I reach down to scritch some kitty ears and my hand hits nothing. No cat has been on my bed and rested against my legs. I like to think that was my cat, being a ghost, sitting to read with me one last time. Good kitty.
I wish my cat Murphy would come back as a ghost–I like to think his consciousness has been reincarnated into my current orange cat. Cat ghost is best ghost. And yay for Charleston Toasties! The Fireproof Building is the supposedly haunted one I was talking about.
I was not expecting this thread to make me cry! Good kitty, indeed.
My live cats do this. I feel a cat arrive on the bed, even hear it purr, then reach down and nobody’s there. I think they can project a friendly presence even if they can’t be bothered to get up and move.
I fully support this ghost.
Aaron Burr is supposed to haunt the house of the friends who sheltered him after he shot Hamilton. I mean, the house has been torn down and a bed and Breakfast replaced it, but Aaron Burr is an adaptive man. He manifests and stares at some people, and if someone is particularly well spoken and fun he’ll invisibly catch their sleeve when they try to leave.
Look, that’s not a great story, let me share an excerpt from his diary I call “Aaron Burr drank too much tea”.
“I did go to bed at 10, promising myself a rich sleep. Lay two hours vigil; that cursed one single dish of tea! Note: My bed had undergone a thorough ablution and there were no bugs or insects. Got up and attempted to light candle, but in vain; had flint and matches but only some shreds of punk which would not catch. Recollected a gun which I had on my late journey; filled the pan with powder and was just going to flash it when it occurred that though I had not loaded it someone else might; tried and found in it a very heavy charge! What a fine alarm it would have made if I had fired! Then poured out some powder on a piece of paper, put the shreds of punk with it and after fifty essays succeeded in firing the powder ; but it being dark, had put more powder than intended; my shirt caught fire, the papers on my table caught fire, burnt my fingers to a blister (the left hand, fortunately); it seemed like a general conflagration. Succeeded, however, in lighting my candle and passed the night till 5 this morning in smoking, reading, and writing this.”
This has been circulating on tumblr. When I looked it up, the next paragraph is on the book he read – feminist theory written by a man – which he dismisses as someone trying and failing to be sympathetic to the oppressed.
That is a delightful excerpt!
I have never seen a ghost, or experienced anything I would call a ghost.
However, that’s no fun, so here’s a story:
This Halloween, I was staying with friends at their new house, and on Friday night, we were hard at work carving pumpkins in their amazing new kitchen. We were listening to The Black Tapes on the bluetooth speakers at my suggestion. On this episode, the narrator was accompanying some ghost hunters, and at this moment, a ghost hunter was instructing a haunt to “turn off the light.” Suddenly, we hear a thud and the whole house loses power– all except the bluetooth speaker, where the story continues.
There was no ghost, though. Just a raccoon who sacrificed his own life for the sake of flawless dramatic timing. Blew up a transformer.
I’m now imaging the raccoon was a showman at heart, and wanted to give his life to create the one perfect theatrical experience. And now his memory lives on!
PRETTY sure a ghost made the raccoon do it.
Well, the same thing happened the next day, so either the replacement transformer they put in was faulty, OR it was the ghost of the raccoon come back to have his revenge.
That story summarizes why I don’t believe in ghosts. There’s just too much weird shit that happens WITHOUT ghostly intervention. And humans are terrible at distinguishing real and imagined threats.
I have had a couple of Real Encounters with G-d, but have never had any encounters at all with ghosts. I am inclined to disbelieve their existences, but appreciate the stories they inspire.
This is only my experience, which may not be so helpful after all.
I LOVE ghost stories but I also feel like… how come there are so few ghosts of colour? And poor ghosts? Ya know? Everyone’s got a rich white ghost lady, surely if ghosts were real the place would just be crawling with slaves and kitchen maids still going through their daily drudgery?
If the whole country watched GBBO as the half-time show for the Super Bowl, I think we’d all be a lot better off.
(I am always up for an involved discussion about GBBO because it remains the actual best reality show of all time)
And i am here, as always, for my gorgeous queer feminist queen:
My girlfriend and I both have a crush on her. And Martha.
But Martha is an actual cinnamon roll so you can’t blame us.
and she is wRITING A COOKBOOK.
Martha! I felt almost maternal towards her.
Yes! I’m not caught up on this season, but Kimberly is a delightful ball of sunshine in human form!
My favourite thing about it is how lovely and supportive all the contestants seem to be! The show is also directly responsible for my finally getting over my Thing about pate a choux and troubleshooting the recipe until I perfected it.
….there’s a whole lot of gougeres in the freezer now.
“….there’s a whole lot of gougeres in the freezer now. ”
Time for a savory croquembouche.
yesss will now be googling savory cream/mousse recipes all weekend
I’ve been in a months-long battle with myself over buying James’ books, even though a) I don’t really bake that much, if at all, and b) the measurements are bound to be all metric and deeply confusing. But James! amazon.co.uk! Bread! Science-y baking!
All you need is a scale and foreign recipes are yours to conquer! I’m fond of this one: http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/200181…
I’m not comfortable sharing details of ~~my ghost story, because they would out me to any mutual friends who read the Toast (I know they are out there!) and it’s not something I talk about a lot, but I received messages from and had a text conversation with someone who is very, very dear to me in the hours between the time she died and the time I learned that she had died.
Whaaaaaaaaaaat
Ughhhh I need to know mooooore now! What a tease!
This reminds me of an experience I had in 2001. My parents and I had gone for the weekend to visit friends a few hours away, and Saturday night I had the craziest dream. A very dear family friend had been battling cancer for the past year, & it felt like I was sucked in & observed my mom’s dream of her talking to our friend on her death bed.
When we all woke up Sunday morning, both my mom & I seemed unusually melancholy & we didn’t even talk about what we dreamt, but we knew we had to go home ASAP. We almost rudely left our friends to drive home, only to hear that our friend had passed that morning when we returned. 🙁 That was when my mom recounted her dream – which lined up precisely with what I dream-observed?? – & I had an internal freak-out bc wtf?!?!?!?
i find dream stories like this easier to believe somehow. each human body has an electric current and field so, theoretically, we all have the potential of sharing energy. and, also, i’ve had a few such dreams myself.
the most recent was that i dreamt i came home with groceries and left the door open behind me because my hands were full. i put the bags in the kitchen and when i turned around to go close the door, there was a cat sitting in my path. he was white with some black splotches, most notably a perfect black star in the middle of his chest. he refused to leave so i went and bought cat stuff and he stayed with me forever.
the next day at work (IRL) my coworker said she’d gotten a new kitten the evening before. she came in from doing some stuff in the yard and left the door open because her dogs hadn’t yet followed her inside. she washed her hands in the kitchen sink and when she turned to check on the dogs and close the door, she was startled to see not her dogs but a cat…
me: white. with a black star.
her: right in the middle of his forehead. how did you know that?
me: i dreamt about it last night. he made himself at home so you went and bought cat stuff and now he’s yours.
her: … yes. and that’s kinda creepy.
yes. yes it is.
Everyone had better keep an eye on that cat. O_O
Whaaaaat, real life Texts from a Ghost!?
I think that’s beautiful and wonderful and what an amazing thing that you were able to experience it.
It’s something that really brings me a lot of comfort, now, and I’m very grateful for it.
Please tell the wonderful Jess Zimmerman that it’s a stately home, not a mansion.
God I was half-hoping this would be moderated. Thankyou for letting a pedantic Brit embarrass themselves.
No! This is important information! We Americans often forget there’s a difference between the two.
re: GHOSTS– If the dudes from Ghost Adventures are real, and unexplained light orbs are electromagnetic ghost fields that can show up in cameras, then YES DEFINITELY. I recently went wine tasting in VA wine country and was filming slow motion video & pictures on my phone of the great fall scenery, majestic views etc. When we were going through the footages later that night, I noticed a white orb in every one of a series of 5 shots, and in the slow motion video, the orb MOVES and expands in size and kind of floats around in a way that is not dust or bugs? And is REALLY DISCONCERTING.
Notably, pre-wine country, that particular area of VA used to be either plantations or Civil War battlefields, so ANY NUMBER OF GHOSTS could be just floating around the countryside.
If someone tells me how to upload videos I’ll def post it bc it is FREAKY
Upload to youtube, post it as unlisted, share the link here?
Remember that in addition to this video, the orb was in 5 other still photos…
GREAT ADVICE— LOOK AT THIS VIDEO, THOUGHTS?! https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtube_gdata…
Well, I think that’s fucking amazing, does that count as a thought?
YES! It was SO STRANGE.
I saw something very similar in the backyard of where I lived during college, in Maryland. There was a giant sunroom that stuck out from the house like a peninsula, so you could see the entire fenced-in backyard through the windows. One night, there was this floating white orb thing sort of… loping? through the backyard. It moved in a wave-like pattern, almost like someone very tall and with very long legs was carrying it, the rise and fall of someone’s stride. But it covered too much ground too fast to be an actual person casually walking through my backyard (which would be a little scary). I pointed it out to my best friend/roommate and she was like “wtf” but now she claims she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I did go outside immediately to check that there wasn’t a person out there, but nothing.
I mean, it could very well have been some weird headlights-from-the-road-line-up-perfectly-and-reflected-weird-off-the-windows sort of thing, but I dunno. Was weird.
(Also, I don’t know why the site won’t show my IntenseDebate account. Says I’m logged in on wordpress/intensedebate, but the toast says I’m not.)
Do you have an adblocker on? Sometimes you have to whitelist IntenseDebate or it screws up that part.
I do have an adblocker on, and I just whitelisted IntenseDebate (you beautiful warriors have been whitelisted for ages), but that didn’t work. However… I just dusted off my old Internet Explorer, and it’s letting me log in!
Anyway, I’m glad sharing weird orb/maybe ghost stories has pulled me out of six months of lurking. Hooray for commenting, and thank you, Nicole!
so, not to be a buzzkill…but i’m pretty sure that’s just the reflection of the sun on some internal part of the lens. i’m a physicist, and going back to when i learned optics, the angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. In other words, when you point your camera straight at the sun, the “orb” would show up close to the position of the sun. If you moved your camera away from the sun, the “orb” and the sun should move in opposite directions in your shot. When you don’t have the sun in the shot, there shouldn’t be an “orb”. I think this is consistent with the motion in the video. Sorry to ruin the fun, I’m the absolute worst.
No, this is great, science us please!
I don’t know if this is going to reassure you, Nicole! I’ve seen/felt several ghosts before. The first was when I was a child, sleeping on the top (aka best) bunk in the room I shared with my sister. I sat up in the middle of the night, and saw and old lady at the foot of my bed. I remember thinking for a moment that she might have been standing on top of the big dollhouses we kept down there… and then I realized she was all white and kinda see-through, and I freaked out and hid under the covers for an hour. When I looked, she was gone. But the next morning, my Grandmother (who lived downstairs) had me describe her. After I’d mentioned her hair, her glasses, etc, my Grandmother pulled out a picture… of my great-grandmother, who I had never met or seen before, because she had passed away just before my birth… and who looked exactly like the woman I’d seen at the foot of my bed.
I have also had sort of ‘experiences’, especially when I was younger. After my grandmother died, I would see her rocking chair moving on it’s own a lot, especially at night. I’d smell her perfume. My dog would sit in the hallway in her home and her head would move from the left, slowly to the right, as if she were watching someone cross from one door to the other side of the hallway. Once, while driving late at night on a foggy winding road, my ex-husband and I both felt as if someone was sitting in the backseat of the car. This went on for a good ten minutes, this odd feeling like someone was there watching me, this weird pressure… until finally I shouted ‘leave us alone!’. I felt a flash of pain at the back of my neck, and then the sense of a presence was gone… but I had a red mark (like a rug burn almost) across the back of my neck that lingered for several days.
The longest-running of my experiences was what I called the “shadow man” as a child. I used to see him standing by the doorway or at the foot of my bed, just watching me. Not every night, but most of them. I could feel him there, even with my eyes closed. Nothing malevolent, just a ‘presence’. As I got into my teenaged years, the more uncomfortable it made me. But the older I got, the less I saw him, though he followed through several living spaces. My first (shared) childhood bedroom, my second bedroom, my college dorm, (I never saw him when I was staying downstairs in my grandmother’s old home, I like to think she kept him away), my first apartment, and my second apartment. I haven’t seen him since I got divorced, which is when I think I first started truly feeling like an “adult”. But once or twice I kind of almost feel him still.
WELP, sorry! Haha.
I felt a flash of pain at the back of my neck, and then the sense of a presence was gone… but I had a red mark (like a rug burn almost) across the back of my neck that lingered for several days.
It is not at all the same thing, but my first thought was a Discworld reference: the Summoning Dark!
You made my day with these stories. I love hearing other people’s ghost stories and knowing that a fellow Toastie experienced these things first hand is just the best. THANK YOU!
Oh, you’re welcome! I love hearing other people’s ghosts stories, too, haha. I have more but they’re more “experiences” than stories. Like how whenever I’m going through a rough period, I dream about that same Grandmother. I go downstairs to her house (in the dream) and she’s there sort of floating and we sit down at her table and have tea and talk. I never remember what we talk about, but I always wake up feeling so much better.
She used to say that the people in her family could always see the ghosts of their dead relatives. She, my Dad (her son), and my sister and I all have our own stories of things like that.
Holy crapballs, these are all goosebump-inducing!
Yep!! In retrospect my first ghost was the least scariest (she was just watching me, she didn’t DO anything), but at the time I was a kid (I must have been no older than 9, because I was still in my original childhood bedroom) and it was just terrifying to me.
As a Friday treat, this was Sansa and her sibs when they were a week old. Sansa is rocking the pink collar.
PUPPY PILE OH MY GOOOOOOOOD
Holy shitballs.
ohhhh nooooo they are too SMOL and FURRY and CHUBBLY
Too many cute bellies and tails and faces and toebeans and everything!
the cuteness overload actually caused me to gasp out loud. OHMYGOD!
(Posting this here since I won’t be around for the Open Thread until late. Feel free to transfer this to the OT and discuss it over there)
In continuation of our Master of None discussion from Wednesday, I asked this person on Tumblr about the antiblack aspects of the show, and was directed to a post by someone else: http://reclaimthebindi.co.vu/search/master-of-non….
I don’t know, you guys. What do you think? I interpreted this scene as some form of “one minority ‘making fun’ of the other since we’re all sitting in the same boat”. But I’m white, so I’m obviously not in a position to make a decision about this.
I’d really like to know what the mindset behind this scene was, though…
I feel like having a #problematic character is different from having a show that’s racially insensitive. The show makes it pretty clear that Dev has a bit of a blind spot about race – for example – he gets mad that if there are 2 Indian guys, it becomes an “Indian show” whereas he has no problem calling the movie he’s in the “Black Virus” movie.
It’s the same with Gender – he’s quick to call out the obvious stalking, and what not but he’s unable to understand the more insidious forms of sexism, like when the dude forgets to shake the women’s hands. I feel like the show is self aware and pointed about these things.
Ahhh this is a really tought one to unpack. I don’t know if I’d say it’s anti-black, but it definitely marginalizes black experiences? (Okay, so the character is saying something anti-black.)
There is the definitely this frustration among Asian Americans that it’s okay to make jokes about our appearance, the accents of immigrants, etc. in a way that is not acceptable to do of other communities of color, and unfortunately that has been expressed (in the past and now) in away that is anti-black.
note: I think it can be discussed in a way that isn’t anti-Black and doesn’t get into Oppression Olympics, but I think it’s a tricky line to walk. I think what Suey Park was trying to do with #CancelColbert was a good example of the frustration and how to do it without immediately going to “if you made jokes like this about Black people, you’d get pilloried.”
I haven’t seen Master of None yet so YMMV, but I suspect that is the underlying foundation of that scene.
ETA: also there are a lot of anti-Black sentiments (unconscious or not) among Asian Americans that we’ve picked up as being part of the US because it’s pretty much part of the cultural DNA *and* that doesn’t make it okay. tl;dr, I wouldn’t be a surprised if there were anti-Black elements in this show, although I’d hope that it’s being critiqued and skewered.
This critique is going to make me look at Master of None pretty closely though when I do get to seeing it. (I am trying to catch up on s1 of Arrow and the Flash.)
This is really true as well. And the fact that there hasn’t been much public discussion about this issue makes it even harder to unpack the tension between the two communities.
Yeah! I mean, there have been discussions back and forth at the local level, but I think it’d be really hard to have one with a national scope. (one example: conversations between LA’s Korean and Black communities after the riots in the 90s) There have been tensions but there have also been some good things to come out of it too. I have some friends doing this sort of work in Baltimore.
Our communities are just so freaking big and broad (both Asian American and Black communities) that I can’t even imagine having a good one at a national level.
Working hypothesis: 35% of all “ghost” encounters are just levitating, wall-climbing cats.
MISSY ELLIOT
EEeeeeeeeeEEEEeeeeeeP I have never been so happy.
MISSY! I say let her do the whole superbowl halftime show this year. And every year.
STRONG AGREE.
I had no idea how much I missed her until I saw that she had a new video and FLIPPED OUT. Hells yes.
Also, I would like that mirror outfit, please.
Clearly from the radical future.
I want very badly to read an essay about Missy Elliot’s work as an oblique kind of Afrofuturism.
I am not the one to write it but that does sounds brilliant.
She’s so totally afrofuturism! I mean she was literally in space in Sock It 2 Me, and may I also present:
<DIV style=”OVERFLOW: auto”>
(Someone taught me how to embed images in the Red Pill Blue Pill thread and now I am dangerous.)
I am all about living in the Missy Elliott Afrofture!
THAT VIDEO. It’s so good I had to listen to the song again because I couldn’t pay attention to both at once. She’s a genius and a national treasure and I’m going to be her disco ball outfit for Halloween in 2016.
EEEEE indeed! I have been waiting on tenterhooks for this ever since the half-time show in that football thingy (I don’t watch sports but OBVIOUSLY I looked up and watched (obsessively over and over again) the half-time show when I heard that The One, The Only MISDEMEANOR had been on.) And even though m7y expectations were ever so high, I am blown away. On a scale of one to ten I give it TWENTY TWERKING MARIONNETTES.
I don’t know about seeing actual impressive ghosts (my sister maintains she’s seen a woman standing in the upstairs hallway of my parents’ house and my youngest brother has apparently seen a Victorian woman from the waist up as he came down the stairs),but I saw something with someone else which sort of increases its credibility. Maybe? I know I’d have been far more inclined to dismiss it if I had been alone.
My mother and I saw a bizarre mass of swirling red and white lights in the yard while standing on the porch of her (at the time) new house. I still can’t explain it or even properly describe it. It was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen and utterly terrifying at the same time, but try telling someone talking about ghosts “well, I saw a really strange light show once? like, it was sparkly and swirly, man.” Not exactly super impressive.
I once saw a ‘dancing’ light show in the middle of a plowed field. I was taking care of the animals on a farm while the owners were away, and just after dark, as I was going back to the house after making sure all gates, etc. were secure, I saw what I first thought were fireflies out in the fields beyond the horse and cow lots. I stopped to look, because, fireflies!
nope. They seemed about the *size* of fireflies, and some were the whitish/greenish/yellowish of fireflies, but others were dark red and dark blue and maybe some other colors, but the overall impression was red and blue and green and yellow and white. Kinda sorta like LED Christmas tree lights (this was long before those, though). And they did sort of swirl and dance and line up in rows, but staying in about the same location for awhile. When they started to head toward the lots and sheds, I backed up to the porch and got the dog out of the house.
The dog and I watched the lights as they did another little dance on the barbed wire fence between the plowed field and the farthest cow lot. Not sure what I would have done if they had come closer, but they did a little dance on the fence, then started floating back into the field and as they did, they faded away.
So when the owners came back, I asked if there were any houses across that field (I didn’t think so, but you never know), and they said ‘no’, then, ‘oh, you saw the lights’. Ok then. Apparently there was or had been a family cemetery somewhere in that direction, but the graves had all been moved in the 20s or 30s, but no one could remember exactly where it had been or when people first started seeing the lights. So ghosts? Geologic weirdness? This was/is in the Kansas Flint Hills area.
Mine was in the mountains of central Vermont. And my first thought on seeing the initial red light was ‘firefly from hell’ and then all of a sudden there were more and they were red and white and they just sort of rose up, swirled and sparked then vanished. So weird, but at least that sort of thing has been seen by other people too in other places.
The Flint Hills are spooky as all get out at night/all the time. I feel more freaked out by your story because it happened there.
Exactly! When I used to write, I wrote some horrorish stories using the Flint Hills and other areas of Kansas as a background. But I’ve only seen those lights that one time at that one farm.
I would love to go to Tallgrass Prairie and do stargazing (they allow hiking at night, but no camping), but I don’t think I could bring myself to do it alone, because once you get away from the visitor’s center you are out in the middle of nowhere, and it’s too hard to get anyone else to go hiking in the daytime, much less at night, ha!
When I was a kid there was a month where I would see this other kid out of the corner of my eye – he was maybe a bit older than me at the time, so like maybe 10? He was wearing a flannel shirt and black jeans and boots had a dirty blond mullet. I remember being confused because, like… he can’t be a ghost because ghosts were old? And he clearly was wearing modern clothes? I would see him out of the corner of my eye when I walked past my sister’s room, he was standing half-behind the door and peeping out and I got the sense he was sad and wanted to join in with playing etc but couldn’t. I figured he was shy, because I was too.
I would be more inclined to doubt that this is real – it’s easy to mistake things out of the corner of your eye – but being so confused about the clothes thing I paid attention and I am MOSTLY sure I saw him. After a couple of weeks of this, I saw him a couple of times with an older woman standing behind him, wearing a pink nightgown. She would have her hand on his shoulder and be sort of trying to gently nudge him backwards but he didn’t want to go. Eventually they weren’t there anymore.
Also I went through a period where I would see black cats out of the corner of my eye, always trying to sneak up on me. I mentioned this to my partner and he said, basically, that it was because his ex has an affinity with cat spirits and she was mad at us. There are other stories about this but they aren’t mine to tell and I’m basically trying not to believe them because they freak me out. Anyway, he resolved the issue with her and I stopped seeing the cats. It was REALLY freaky you guys. I often see things out the corner of my eye when I am tired and this was different. But also all of this sounds like just a thing my brain made up to make sense of shapes? So idek.
I’m finally commenting because GHOSTS.
I worked as a ghost tour guide in Savannah, GA (and wrote about the experience for Broadly) and I never saw anything remotely ghostly.
Then again, if I was a ghost, I wouldn’t hang around anywhere that was popular with annoying tourists.
But the people were the ones in the city that could do actual harm.
That’s why I feel that those ghost hunting shows are so absurd (entertaining, but absurd). If you were a ghost why would you appear/make noises/ talk into a fancy static machine when there’s an entire room full of annoying people? and a camera crew? I would hide out of spite.
I would hide until all their batteries were drained and THEN I’d spook them. #trololololBOO
Did anyone else read the Gawker scary stories this year? The one that bothered me most was the suicide one–it implies that if you commit suicide you go to Hell, or some other bad place. It disturbed me because of the stigma of mental illness and the anger family and friends can feel toward suicidal people… I guess I’m not sure about all my complicated feelings, but I just can’t believe that everyone who is in so much pain they commit suicide go to a hell of some sort–I don’t even believe in a hell not on earth. Anyone else bothered by that one?
As someone who struggles with severe depression and has attempted suicide a few times, that one really made me upset.
I’ve struggled with depression too–I’m glad I’m not alone on my feelings about that story. I don’t even fully believe in such things and it made me upset.
Yup, that one was terrifying and disturbing in a way I was not at all prepared for. I am totally up for fun-spooky, but that one was just really sad.
Could someone post a link? I also have Feelings about this.
Oh thanks for the heads up. I had this bookmarked to read later but my dad, who was Catholic, suicided and… yeah nah.
Honestly, his death made me want to start believing again because DAMMIT there BETTER be a god and a heaven because he BETTER be somewhere feeling better now. Or…. or ELSE. So there.
One time I was talking on the phone around 3AM in the morning, in my house alone, because I didn’t live with anyone at the time, and the house was very far away from any neighbors. Like, not even shouting distance. So I’m just sitting on my bed, chatting away on my cellphone. All of the sudden someone scream-whispers in my room “STOP TALKING”. All the blood drained from my body and I dropped the phone and sat freaked out in bed for about 30 seconds while my friend on the other end of the line is like “hello? hi? what’s going on? are you okay?”
My dad’s pretty open to ghost-type stuff. He has a few good stories, mostly about generations-old family members sitting on the corner of his bed checking out the newer generations, doors slamming when no one’s home and there’s no wind to do that thing doors do when windows are open, that kinda stuff.
oh my god D: D: D:
Oh my goodness nope nope nope
aaaaaaaaaaa
don’t know if it would be better or worse if this were a ghost or one of those stories about people secretly living in other people’s houses
While I feel for you on being terrified, part of me is lumping this ghost in with those live people that hate cell phones. “*YOU* SHUT UP, GHOST, YOU DIDN’T EVEN HAVE WIFI WHEN YOU WERE ALIVE!”
I work in a university’s Special Collections, and we supposedly have two ghosts, although I haven’t seen either yet. One is a former library director who was described to me by our department head as being cranky. She goes around our secured rare books floor stealing thin pamphlets and stuff in tiny folders to hide them from us when researchers come in asking for a particular copy of something. I have been given *explicit instructions* to wave politely and say hello if I see her, and then go about my business. Right now we’re missing one of our Poor Sarahs, and the head of our department has tried to appease her with offerings, but like, I want to see this ghost because I have not gotten to see this ghost, or any ghost.
Super interesting to me is that students have a totally separate set of ghost stories and ghosts who supposedly haunt the reading rooms than the staff.
I don’t believe in ghosts, and my partner does. A few summers ago we were driving from San Francisco to Portland, and stopped at a ocean side motel in Crescent City. We have been driving a while through thick fog, in the dark, sliding between redwoods, and got to the motel late. We had to get out keys from a lock box. No one around. Everything was very dark, but you could hear the ocean. The room is sparse, a little out dated, fine. I wake up in the middle of the night with this feeling, that someone is in the room. Don’t know how, but a very very distinct idea that a child is standing in the corner. I actually just put the covers over my head until morning. Never mentioned it to my partner, since I know he is like actually scared by the idea of ghosts. A year later, ghosts come up at some party. And he mentions feelings like he saw one at that motel!! And we have never talked about it. So, I don’t know maybe they are real! (Or more likely, we were tired and at a creepy hotel so had ghost dreams)
Speaking of Death In unexpected places, when I was a kid…young, I think, seven? Nine? I had something like a book or a magazine in which I read a story about a family that went on a picnic and ate food from a dented can, and they all got botulism and died on their picnic.
I’ve got a personal anxiety that overtakes me whenever I do something nice or sort of picaresque with my family — “oh we’re going for a walk”, or “oh, let me stop and get Valentine’s flowers on the way home from work” — because I suddenly experience a massive and overpowering fear that I’m likely to die now, at the most melodramatically-appropriate moment.
Sure, of course, I could die at any time, for basically any reason, but dying from botulism on my baby’s first picnic is the kind of heart-wrenchingly pointless death that’s going to make the news.
I’m starting to wonder if that old book or magazine or whatever was formative. I haven’t thought about it in decades, but I distinctly remember being upset about that poor family for a week afterwards.
I’ve got a personal anxiety that overtakes me whenever I do something nice or sort of picaresque with my family — “oh we’re going for a walk”, or “oh, let me stop and get Valentine’s flowers on the way home from work” — because I suddenly experience a massive and overpowering fear that I’m likely to die now, at the most melodramatically-appropriate moment.
Yeah, me too, but I blame Criminal Minds for that.
I have this problem, too! Reading the news does not help.
I ALSO READ THIS STORY. WHERE ON EARTH WAS IT PUBLISHED?
I don’t think what I saw was a ghost — but instead maybe somehow a memory got caught on whatever counts for film in supernatural instances? I was staying in a beach house and I saw a woman on our veranda thing and she wasn’t anyone who was staying in the beach house and the more I looked at her, the more I realized that (a) she wasn’t affected by the environment (there was a wind blowing, a pretty strong wind, but her VERY mother’s-day-at-Target housecoat wasn’t moving in the wind); and (b) she was both there, as in I could see her, but ::not:: there, as in I don’t think if I had said, “Ahem,” she’d have noticed me at all. And then, the final reason why I am convinced I saw something supernatural is she disappeared before my eyes — sort of just became a little like smoke? And then vanished. So, this very quotidian moment was captured for some reason and happened to replay for me on a windy night at the beach.
I have never seen a ghost. I don’t believe in ghosts as malevolent spirits (or benevolent, or neutral either). But I do believe that we as humans can be very sensitive to suggestion and atmosphere and some of us perhaps are better at not exactly extra sensory perception, but sensitivity, perhaps. I studied a year at UC Irvine with a professor who was doing experiments in paranormal psychology. We didn’t find any evidence of ghosts in the haunted houses we studied.
And yet, when I have visited some places, like the jail in Warrenton, VA, I felt …something. I felt oppressed and cold, especially when we were on the tour and stopped in the inner courtyard where prisoners were hanged. Not everyone on the tour felt this. But a few of us did.
Scientists point out that we are tremendously suggestible. If some of us expect or are told something is scary, we will reliably be scared.
I myself have had some unexplainable but odd coincidences. I knew my father had died before my sister called to tell me. I know who is calling if it is a family member before i look at the phone.
I knew my daughter was sick at school before I was told. I think this just means that I am more observant than most people. Or maybe I just remember the times when I anticipated something and was correct, but forget the times i thought something was going to happen and it didn’t.
My rational brain says there are no ghosts, only misunderstood phenomena.
My irrational brain says,but what about that time you got chills at the civil war battlefield?
I have to find on the side of no ghosts, there’s just stuff we don’t understand yet.
This is more the way I think. Every time I read something new about how physics behaves at a quantum level I think that what some people perceive as ghosts (on a spiritual plane) might be something explainable, if no less unnerving.
I tend to go this way during my waking hours and one thing I’ve been mindful of is the knowledge that humans are really into finding patterns in everything, even when it’s not justified. Oh, stupid brain..
My family is very pragmatic and non-spiritual, but we do have a handful of stories of family unexplained phenomena, and all of them are about one family member knowing something was going on with/ would happen to another family member before they could possibly have known. Eg, when me mom was seven she came to her parents and said her stomach hurt. Her dad and older siblings were like “well, did you eat too much candy?” but my grandmother– generally so blase about parenting that it bordered on neglect– was like “it’s appendicitis, we’re going to the hospital,” and of course it was.
I believe that many people are observant on a subconscious level– little mini-cues like the tone of someone’s voice and the color of their skin that are so subtle you don’t consciously notice a difference from the norm, can add up until you get a feeling that your sister is keeping a secret from her husband and you don’t know where that feeling came from.
I have also gotten the sick feeling you describe as having at the jail– once very badly, in a historic slave pen– and it’s definitely separate from my personal horror at the place, but I tend to suspect, per my theory, that I’m picking up on the sadness and discomfort of the other visitors around me.
I remember reading an Agatha Christie novel, and someone mentions intuition. Poirot responds that he thinks that what’s actually happening is that we’re observing a number of clues and synthesizing them without realizing it. I’ve always liked that idea; like maybe my sense is actually based on things I’m seeing but can’t articulate.
I read about a crazy study in which cortically blind patients had their brains scanned while being “shown” pictures of
A) someone looking away
B) someone staring straight at them
And even though they formed no mental image of what was in front of them, their amygdalas (the part of the brain that assesses threats) reacted strongly to the picture of someone staring at them. They felt threatened, even though they didn’t consciously know why.
It’s sort of comforting to know that parts of my brain might be looking out for me, giving me clues, even when I’m not aware of it.
Have you read Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World? It’s fabulous. He talks about how prone humans are to hallucinations, hearing voices, the blurred lines between reality and dreams … and the great lengths people go to in order to trick others. Very enlightening.
I’m atheist but I very much believe in ghosts. I rationalize this by thinking of them as other-worldly, other-dimensionly beings we don’t fully understand yet, and maybe they don’t really get us either– like universes crossing wires or something. I have never seen a full-fledged “ghost,” but I Want To Believe, and I’ve had too many small experiences for me to fully discount it.
Actually, the other day i had something weird happen. I was driving back to my parents’ after going to a concert (bday weekend, their place was closer to the venue). GoogleMaps was taking me home this bonkers way but I was already stressed and I didn’t want to fuck with it. The ‘rents are out in the boonies, and I’m all alone on this dark, semi-windy road thinking about all of the creepy Jez stories I read the week before, and then I see a county sign start to rock violently back and forth. Like, at least three feet each way, really rapidly. When I get close enough that I can read it, it stops dead, and I don’t see anyone around it (but there is a semi parked in front of it). I wasn’t tired/fucked up, so I wasn’t hallucinating. I was pretty freaked out, and then these bags that I’ve had in my trunk for forever shifted. I start to freak myself out more, thinking maybe something was hitching a ride. So I say, all super casual, “If you’re in here, I hope you like Nicki Minaj,” and that at least made me feel better.
I made my parents drive by the next day and the sign was gone, so it was probably just teenagers being stupid, but it also could have not been that, so…?????
The Oz Prime Minister story gave me some good giggles 🙂
My mom was convinced that our old house was haunted, so she and her Moon Circle (yes, I know) held an exorcism/cleansing. I knew about none of this at the time or for years afterward, but the following events occurred shortly thereafter: i) my dad got (and stayed) sober; and ii) I stopped getting bullied at school (after eight merciless years). I also stopped being petrified of the dark.
So, who knows, is what I’m saying.
I want to know more about this Moon Circle! This sounds like something I could get VERY INTO in my crone years.
No ghost stories personally, but I did once have a premonition? It was kind of banal, but my family was in the midst of some uncertainty over whether a work thing would happen with my dad and we’d be moving overseas. Lots of negotiations between companies stretching over months etc., and many previous projects of the sort had fallen through. So one day I was riding in the passenger seat of my mom’s car and just … knew we’d end up moving. This was about a year before we actually did.
It seems dumb and like, yeah you would have just conveniently forgotten if you’d been wrong, but the feeling was so external. It truly felt like someone had just told me what was going to happen. So that was weird.
I have a vaguely similar story! Once in high school, I was heading out on a Saturday to see a movie with my friend (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider if I remember correctly, quality stuff) – as I was leaving, my mom waved, then said “Bye” in an oddly serious tone. Then when I got to my car, I went to put my key in the door, and something stopped me – not anything physical, but I was overwhelmed with this feeling that something was wrong, and if I went to this movie something very bad would happen. I just stood outside my car for a few minutes, key hovering, but I couldn’t will myself to open the door.
Finally, I gave up, turned around and went back in the house. “I decided not to go to the movie,” I said, and my mom looked up at me, ran over and hugged me! After a moment’s discussion, she told me that she had felt the EXACT same feeling that I had as I walked out – that was why she had said goodbye in a strange way, because she was scared but didn’t want to stop me for what seemed to be a frivolous reason. I called my friend to cancel (he was cool about it), stayed home, and had a lovely day.
Obviously, I have no idea if anything would have happened if I’d gone to the movie – it’s just still so strange to me that my mom and I both had SUCH strong feelings independent of each other.
I don’t really believe in ghosts, but I’m pretty sure that cat has just seen one?
I worked at a daycare center some people said was haunted. One kid in particular casually mentioned a man hanging around by the cubbies on a couple of occasions when there clearly was no real, flesh-and-blood man there. My coworkers chalked this up to GHOSTS. I chalked it up to the kid being a kid, on account of how he demonstrably existed and had a healthy imagination. Who knows, though. Some of the very young children (as in pre-verbal) would point at random places and giggle, which again: kids. Or ghosts! But probably kids.
But I’m genuinely fascinated by all things paranormal and would absolutely LOVE to have my mind changed on this. I actually stayed late one night, after dark and alone, because I was curious. One of my coworkers told me not to do this because whenever she was alone in the house she got a bad feeling, especially after dark. But I figured if there WAS a ghost there it had to be a friendly one, since it had never done any harm and the kids didn’t seem scared.
I turned off the lights and walked around in the dark for a good hour or so, listening to the house and the rain, trying to enter a receptive state of mind. I even asked the thing to give me a sign. Not a damn thing happened. No cold spots, no weird sounds – not even a sense of being watched. I am the worst ghost hunter. I have the psychic sensitivity of a rock.
KIDS! Sometimes I’ll be holding my son and he’ll look behind me/over my shoulder like he’s looking at someone, and I’ll get creeped out and slowly turn my head to look, and of course there’s nothing/nobody there (or IS there?!?!). Also, I have my dad’s ashes up in the closet, and my son is now 3 and we still haven’t really talked to him about my dad, but when he was a little over a year old he pointed up at the closet and said “Grandpa” and it was freaky!
I like to imagine some frustrated ghost trailing around after you trying to spook you out, while you are all just ???? and the ghost is like ‘freaking BOOO already!’
Ugh. This ghost thing though. I have so much I want to write about my family and their odd relationship to the dead (at least I think it’s odd. I definitely get odd looks when I try to explain it.) but it’s so much. Maybe I’ll submit it as a longer actual thing, presumptuous as that may be. But tis almost the season for Xmas ghosts. I am all about Xmas ghosts, guys.
I have so much I want to write about my family and their odd relationship to the dead (at least I think it’s odd. I definitely get odd looks when I try to explain it.) but it’s so much.
WELP SOUNDS LIKE A TOAST ARTICLE TO ME
Dare I presume…
I would totally sponsor that article, just saying.
I would one hundred percent read that.
PLS DO
I haven’t really encountered ghosts, though I know some people who swear they have. I can say I have felt like I was in the presence of something evil and malevolent and have had to pray very hard to feel better. I get that feeling around certain people sometimes too.
My mom does not believe in ghosts but believes she was haunted by a demon during her pregnancy with me. When I consider that my mom is a fairly sane and rational person, her belief about this makes her experience that much more disturbing.
Oh I have a cracker of a ghost story.
So my family lived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for five years. We were the number 2 family on base; we lived in an old pre-war house with maid’s quarters and a butler’s kitchen. I found this hilarious and begged my mother to let me sleep in the maid’s quarters because my own room but to no avail.
At night, every night, there was what sounded like creaking wicker and squeaky wheels right above my head. The room above was empty, we used it for storage. I pretended it was a basket full of kittens.
I spent a day in the GTMO museum and rifled through some old photos and letters.
Turns out, FDR stayed in our house during his visit to GTMO.
he slept in my room.
This is officially the only ghost story I believe. If FDR ever feels like haunting me he has my welcome. Bring Eleanor, too! The only thing we have to fear… is ghosts.
Although … his wheelchair wasn’t wicker, most of the ones at the time were but FDR made a homemade one out of a sturdier kitchen chair. So not sure who’s ghost this was but maybe not FDR. 😉
Have you read Katie Coyle’s story “Fear Itself” from One Story? It’s about a malevolently haunted wax statue of FDR, and it is amazing.
Many moons ago a friend of a friend had a whirlwind romance with a young lady where they fell in love at first sight, moved in with each other within a few months, etc etc and everything was lovely except she had a lot of health problems and ended up having to go in for very serious surgery. She wouldn’t let him come to the hospital so while it was going on he was just sitting at home freaking out and occasionally getting updates over the phone from a nurse. While he was waiting he thought he saw her/sensed her/whatever standing outside his window and a little later he got a call from the nurse saying that she had briefly died on the table but they were able to resuscitate her and the surgery ended up going fine. He was going around to everybody saying how the experience made him believe in God and everybody was so amazed and it was like a Hallmark movie basically until it transpired that the lady had never actually been sick but was a pathological liar who had stolen medical supplies to support the ruse and during the “surgery” called him from a burner phone putting on a fake voice to pretend to be the nurse and had actually been standing outside his apartment the whole time and then it was more like a Lifetime movie.
THAT IS AMAZING. I want to see that movie asap.
That is a HELL of a story. Nice.
This is one of the wildest things I’ve ever read!
What a wild ride of a story!
WHAT
My current thoughts of “WOW, this is AMAZING” are now for a thoroughly different reason than they were at the beginning of your story.
OH MY GOD.
I have not seen a ghost, but my freshman dorm was in one of the (supposedly) most haunted buildings in my state. I was on 2nd floor, and the ghosting was supposed to happen on 4th floor, as the building used to be a nunnery, and the 4th floor was the hospital area? Apparently? I mean, I heard this all through the grapevine, so who knows what the real story was.
Anyway, I got very paranoid after my friend, who came to visit me, had sex with a different friend, who came to visit someone else, in the 4th floor stairwell. I mean, I figured nun ghosts, if they were there, would disapprove and might smite me. Nothing happened, though. So that was nice. Friends on the 4th floor told me that their posters kept falling down and things would move around a bit, but that could be happenstance. That, or I am just on team nun ghost for not turning an already pretty shit freshman year into a horror movie.
I mean it depends on the nuns, I guess? Maybe they were like ‘yeah, get it gurl!’
Ok, this is going to be long, but its a REAL (never thought I would say this) ghost story, so bear with me.
My Serbian grandma, or Baka, was our everything. She was our matriarch, and the rest of us all fit into her like Russian nesting dolls – very similar, but not as formidable as the one who served as our home. The day of her funeral, my cousin, her oldest grandchild, had her baby. It was the first great-grandchild in our family, and we all thought it was very fitting (and exactly how Baka would have wanted it) to have one life enter as another exits.
Before her death, I was in an abusive relationship with a boy from my high school. My Baka didn’t know the details, but having been in an abusive marriage herself for many years, I think she could read between the lines. I didn’t have bruises, but she knew my spirit and could see that what was once audacious and bold was now fragile, unsure, and broken like a bird with paper wings. She told me to leave. I didn’t listen.
A few weeks after the funeral, I was still with this boyfriend. In my hometown, to get to the mainland from my little neighborhood, you need to cross a bridge that goes over a river. The entire bridge is about two miles from start to finish. I was about to ascend the bridge, when I just felt something with me. You could call it a presence. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw, sitting in the backseat, my Baka. She wasn’t translucent or hollow – she was an actual solid mass. Same olive flesh, same comically massive, ornate glasses. Different expression this time. In her life, despite all of her hardships, she was always cackling with laughter. Now she looked at me intently, with concern deepening her wrinkles. I was, as you could imagine, shocked. I held her gaze for what felt like a very long time. Finally, I remembered I was driving, and averted my eyes back to the road. I was halfway over the bridge, so I’d probably gone a mile. When I looked back in my rear view mirror, she was gone. I finally broke down and couldn’t take the threats and manipulation from my boyfriend anymore. I ended things, but I never saw my Baka again.
That was all very weird, but this is weirdER. My cousin’s child, Bella, who was born on the day of my Baka’s funeral, is awesome. Super bubbly, effervescent, confident and lovely. When she was very little (maybe 3 or 4), she would have these weird premonitions where she would be driving in the car with my cousin, and tell her to pull over. My cousin would ask why, and Bella would tell her, because so-and-so relative is about to call, and their horse died. A few minutes later, my cousin’s phone would ring, and HAND TO BIBLE, a relative would indeed call with news of a dead horse. Sounds super ominous and spooky, but if you knew Bella, you would be more fascinated by this than freaked.
One night, Bella was at the dinner table with her parents and being very chatty (her usual demeanor). My Baka had been a really talented artist. She painted watercolor scenes of the Adriatic, of flowers, of pottery and of us. In my cousin’s house, there is a painting hanging that my Baka had done before her passing. Bella suddenly stops mid-chatter, and turns to look that the painting. My cousin and her husband laugh. Its unusual for Bella to take a breath when she’s feeling talkative. They asked her, Bella, what are you looking at? What’s over there? She turned back around, and I swear to G, she told them – “Baka says hi.”
Again. This all sound SUPER FREAKING FREAKY if you don’t know my Baka. But imagine the warmest person who’s very existence feels like being tucked in at night coming back to watch over you when they’re gone. It was actually very comforting seeing her, and knowing Bella, who was never able to meet my Baka, is connected to her too. I just wish I could see her again.
My dad also swears he saw the grim reaper right before his father passed away, but f*ck that noise, that’s too much.
Whole post = A+ story, would read again.
Last line = nope nope nope nope nope
Just got to this part: “She was our matriarch, and the rest of us all fit into her like Russian nesting dolls” and that is such a touching sentiment, I really love it. Now on to read the rest of the story!
I am the killjoy who likes to point out how terribly malleable, fallible, and suggestible our human brains can be, and how often ghost stories seem to come out of times of extremely heightened emotional experiences: death of a loved one, moving to a new place, birth of a baby, visiting places where you know intense trauma occurred, etc. I know we’re supposed to believe our own eyes and stuff, but it’s not ghosts, it’s just the human brain playing with you, or you’re misunderstanding different environmental phenomena.
That said, I love love love all tv shows that feature people or actors relaying their personal experiences with ghosts because, again, killjoy and schadenfreude, and inevitably the stories go: “I just moved to this super old house after my divorce and birth of our third child and my mom died and I heard noises that are TOTALLY UNEXPLAINABLE,” or they describe classic sleep paralysis symptoms, or you know, someone visits them in a dream and that is not at ALL their own subconscious desperately wanting to see their dead relative again. It’s just so obviously in their heads (which is awesome! Human brains are so bizarre!). I get to talk back to the tv people in the same way I shame the spoiled people on House Hunters.
I was super fun at sleepovers. #foreveralone
I am here for ghost are not real and brains are weird. #foreveralonetogether
*steeples fingers* Excellent.
Also, I should probably have noted that being raised completely without religion probably contributes to my feelings on this stuff. I also grew up directly across the street from the cemetery in a very old town and nothing weird ever happened. Very few trick-or-treaters, though.
I feel the same way you do about ghosts (well, except enjoying watching shows with people talking about them, I find those boring). I was raised in a very religious environment and actually did believe in God for the first 20 or so years of my life. However, I was also always told that when people died their souls Did Not Stick Around and immediately shuffled off to heaven/hell thus ghosts do not exist. Now I just can’t get behind the idea for the reasons you listed above.
Yes, thank you. I don’t believe in gods or ghosts and was starting to feel pretty damn alienated from what I thought was a pretty reasonable place on the internet just now.
I’m kind of shocked? I didn’t expect the topics of ghosts to be raised seriously around here, let alone this kind of response.
I mean, it’s possible to be “reasonable” or whatever and enjoy ghost stories for the creepy factor/emotional resonance/whatever? Is the Toast just not ~rational~ enough for you?
Well, sure. You can enjoy a ghost story without believing it. (Hello, Crimson Peak!)
That really doesn’t seem to be what’s going on, so yeah, it’s not [scare quotes]rational/[scare quotes] enough for me. I may eventually drift away from this space if this atmosphere persists. That’s how things are, sometimes.
So much this. If Emily Yoffe were still Dear Prudence, I think she’d advise us that our loved one needs a full medical workup.
I mean…you can just not read the ghost comments if you don’t want to feel alienated? And someone can still be “reasonable” and think ghost stories are fun? I just am really hurt by this impulse by atheists to dismiss anyone who doesn’t approach everything 100% scientifically all. the. time. And I thought the whole point of The Toast was that we could have dialogue about this stuff and not separate into camps of believers talking about ghosts and atheists belittling believers?
I think you need to read this thread a little closer. Fun is not the issue. I personally don’t believe in gods or ghosts, but stories about either thing can be fun when done well.
I mean, to turn what you’re saying around, I am really hurt by this impulse by believers to assume that people who don’t believe are coldhearted scientists who are Missing Out on Fun.
When it’s one of the owners of the site, it’s hard to just skip it like it doesn’t matter. Also, being an atheist and being a person who doesn’t believe in ghosts aren’t the same thing.
My people!
+1
I’ve only ever seen one segment of a ghost-hunting show, but it was amazing, because the ghost hunter announced to the homeowner, “I don’t think the house is haunted, but I do think you are really angry.” He didn’t know what to say to that.
Lol that IS amazing
I feel like I’ve also seen a few of those stories where there was obviously mental illness at play? I still cringe remembering one Discovery special where this lady’s teenage son was becoming very withdrawn, talking a lot about demons, reporting hallucinations, appeared to be possesed– so naturally they conclude the house is haunted. Don’t take the kid to the doctor or anything, just call a priest. /:
Oooof, yes. There are a few of those specials where I’m just, “Um, schizophrenia usually manifests around this age. Um, please please please take them to a doctor.” I don’t understand how you go to “Ghosts!” instead of “Neurologist!”
And why are the ghosts and possession-demons only ever susceptible to counterattacks via Christianity?
When I worked for the local Catholic diocese as a receptionist, I had the fun of dealing with calls and walkins who were clearly suffering from serious mental health issues, who wanted to speak to a priest about their demon encounters/exorcism/premonitions/etc. Surprisingly, the approach was to listen and validate their experiences, and then to direct them to proper mental health resources. The priest who deals with (what the Church feels are) “real” demonic possessions/exorcisms would often approach it as “well, that’s not really how demons work, it sounds like you need to see a doctor,” which I always thought was pretty compassionate. Some of these people were very, very frightened, clearly, and I hope they all got some form of care 🙁
This is why, I think, sometimes things like exorcisms do give some relief–they put a comprehensible narrative frame around symptoms, but ALSO they give the suffering person a sense that their community, or a trusted authority figure, recognizes their pain and cares about it. That latter benefit–which must reduce stress, with all its physical concomitants–is something that most encounters with the health care system do NOT provide.
We can be alone together, because that is exactly where my brain (that magnificent organ, full of real mysteries) goes!
God I know, brains are the best/worst! I mean, we can CATCH BALLS and DRAW STUFF and PLAY PIANOS but also HAVE PANIC ATTACKS and VERTIGO, they are amazing!!!!
You know, I experienced sleep paralysis semi-frequently through my childhood, but not ONCE did I ever get the crazy visions of demons or whatever with it that seems to be popularly mentioned. I feel like I missed out. 🙁
Carbon monoxide poisoning is also a possibility.
Really? I didn’t know that!
Yeah. This article has a couple of examples: http://www.nbcnews.com/health/see-ghosts-there-ma…
I have so many CO detector alarms all over my house it’s embarrassing. And possibly useless! Sigh.
*raises fist in solidarity*
I try not to ruin other people’s stories because, eh, not important enough to me for others to be rationalist about ghosts..
I like to talk about the science behind paranormal perceptions too, but I try to not combine my traits of being an atheist and an asshole into being an asshole atheist, because no one likes those people! It helps that rational explanations aren’t boring to me, they’re just as cool as real ghosts would be. (Well, almost.)
For example, I’ve had a meaningful dream where I made peace with a dead relative, and I’ve tried to read tarot cards. I have no reason to believe that any of these things are “real”, but I don’t need them to be real to be meaningful. It’s awe-inspiring that the human mind exists and has a sense of “meaning”, and, yes, it picks up stuff from its environment and builds explanations that aren’t true sometimes, and that’s really cool.
I don’t think my actual dead grandfather visited me in a dream, but I do believe that the brain activity that generates the “self” I experience as “me” generated a dream about him that made me feel emotions that I experienced as relevant to our relationship and personally meaningful to me, which gave me a sense of closure that I appreciated. What’s not to like about that? The natural world has plenty of wonder, I don’t need to jump to supernatural conclusions when these treasures are already at my fingertips.
Beautifully put.
I have had believers opine to me that athiests will never get to feel a sense of wonder.
But what could be more wonder-inducing that knowing (“knowing”) that a piece of meat soaking in chemicals and bombarded by electrical impulses could produce the sensation of wonder? The world is all the more impressive to me in it’s randomness than a creator has ever been.
Yes! I’ve had legit spiritual experiences in natural history museums. I’m such a dork I actually tear up when I think about the sublime beauty (and, uh, hilarious comedy, sometimes) of evolution. How dumb is that? I don’t know, but I’d never give it up for “nah, it was all put here by someone, no, we can’t find out how it happened, it’s a mystery”.
Supernatural explanations often feel just as unimaginative to me as rational explanations are to believers. They feel it’s dull to just say “it’s because of physics” instead of considering all the awesome supernatural stories that you could read into it, and I feel it’s super dull to jump to “a wizard did it” instead of trying to find out the actual cause. I mean, not having found the physical cause means you have to look harder or give up, not that you’re officially allowed to assume whatever you want! Unless you LIKE the story you tell about it and are okay with your explanation being fictional, of course.
Fiction is great, it tells other kinds of “truths” than facts do. I’d never rag on fiction. I just don’t want to have to pretend that it might be factually true, because that’s so beside the point of what fiction is for. And what facts are for, of course, but really, it’s an insult to stories as well.
This was really beautiful.
Thanks 🙂 I tend to geek out about this a lot, but it’s actually important to me, so it’s great that I can put it on the Toast instead of pestering my partner…
You guys, I am hella Christian and I feel EXACTLY the same way as you. I mean, if I really believe an infinitely creative God actually created the world, then it follows that real-world, physical-plane science should be the best place to experience the wonder and awe of truth. Sorry, I guess that’s kind of #notallbelievers, but I am a religious person who is totally on team amazing meat brain. That’s what incarnation means. Like carne asada. God is meat.
I’m also an atheist who regularly experiences wonder, especially as a geologist with an appreciation of Deep Time.
Um yes Deep Time is the best. THE BEST. Have you read “The Island of the Colourblind” by Oliver Sacks? The second half of that book has some amazing chapters about a super old tree species on Guam, and I think that’s where I learned about Deep Time. This is why I love Sacks, he was so unashamed about his love of nature and sense of wonder.
If love means paying attention, science is anything but cold. It’s a non-judgmental appreciation of the world just the way it is, and a desire to find out more. Isn’t that what love is? Acceptance and desire? Sacks (a doctor) always talked about “romantic science”, and I really feel that he gave me permission to be this dorkily in love with the world.
YES THIS. Honestly I don’t know why that is less exciting than ghosts? Isn’t is AMAZING that our brains all do similar things in sleep paralysis/when they think we’re going to die? It’s amazing!
I have been seriously indulging in the ghostery in this thread because I LOVE it. And I figure it’s basically because humans have evolved to love stories like this – making meaning where there’s none is what humans do. I get this pure little dopamine hit, and sharing community ghost stories makes me feel connected and close to others. And look at how many in here are touching stories about love and connection even as we lose each other! I personally find it quite easy to be super into ghost stories while actually not really believing that such things are possible.
Ghost stories: was recently in an old, reputedly haunted hotel in the Ozarks. Looking at photos later, found one image that featured a reflection on a surface that looked like a face, with two eyes and a gaping mouth.
It was creepy.
(No one was standing where a reflection could occur.)
THIS ISN’T A GHOST STORY but my roommate just fucked up her rim/struts after swerving to avoid hitting a black cat on her way to work; FRIDAY THE 13TH IS REAL
I once got lost on a long, winding road on the way home from my rural college at night. A black cat runs across the road. Dumb cat! You’re gonna get hurt! A few minutes later, a black cat runs IN BETWEEN my front and back wheels. I was so scared that I had hit it, so I was looking in the rear-view mirror for a long, long time. Finally I pull my eyes back to the road ahead, and the road is twisting through an old graveyard, a HUGE orange moon hanging above the trees. As I’m thinking “god, this is spooky” the biggest black cat I have ever seen in my life walks out into the middle of the road.
I just made a u-turn in the middle of the road and drove the other way.
oh man that literally sounds like something from Spooky Stories to Tell in the Dark; I also would have nope’d out of there.
I did not realise that was about a car until I got to the word ‘swerving’ and I was very confused and disturbed.
I haven’t *seen* a ghost, but my senior year of college I lived in a place that used to be a mortuary. Two things happened that I usually recount when my friends tell SPOOPY GHOST STORIES:
1) I was working on a paper late one night and my roommate was asleep. I heard him doing this weird chanting in his sleep. I have no idea what it was, but it definitely was something that wasn’t English but had a rhythm to it. I was a little weirded out, but didn’t think of it until the next day, when he said he had this dream in which he felt like someone was on top of him.
2) I liked to meditate a lot back then, so I figured I would try doing it in the apartment. Did the whole aspect of calming myself, finding myself in a trance-like state, and then I felt something brush against me, which jarred me out of it. I found a rather big cut on my arm, which was weird since there was nothing nearby which could have made that.
I decided just to go for walks instead after that.
Sawbones reference FTW!
I have a more positive, but less dramatic, sort-of-ghost story. So my aunt lives in a very old house that’s been in the family for a very long time, and the family has a few “Oh, isn’t that odd, maybe it’s Granny’s ghost”-type stories about that house. I visited this house for the first time in high school. We arrived at night. The front entry is both huge and dark (lots of dark wood), and I learned that I would be sleeping in a small room that opened directly onto the giant, forbidding room. I was a very easily terrified teenager (I am still a very easily terrified adult), and I was not looking forward to sleeping in a large, open, haunted space.
But instead of feeling terrified that night, I had this calming, overwhelming sense of love and safety. It’s hard to describe why this felt like something supernatural, but it really felt like something was looking out for me as I stayed there. But my main point is, Nicole, even if ghosts are real (which I’m not convinced about myself), this means there are kind and loving ghosts out there too! And that is an encouraging thought.
yes! I don’t know if I really believe in ghosts in the “haunted hotel spoooky” sense but I’ve always sort of thought — most people are pretty decent, why would the only ones that stuck around be the terrible mean ones out to scare you?
my own experience is absolutely one that can be explained away as “the mind playing tricks” except for the deep, overwhelming feeling of love that accompanied it — a peaceful feeling my anxiety-ridden brain does not ever produce, whether awake/asleep/medicated/ what have you.
My brother died 4 years ago, quite suddenly and fairly tragically. (He was 31 and I was 24 at the time). He and I were very close; my family is generally sort of in each other’s pockets but losing him devasted me (and still does, every day). About a year after he died I went to bed just like normal. I always sleep with my bedroom door open, and I woke up in the night to see him passing my room, on the way out the front door. I was shocked and sort of… electrified? I got up and called out “aren’t you going to say goodbye?” and started sobbing. And he came over and hugged me — and it was his</> hug, the way we hugged each other when things were the worst. My parents are English and we’re not a very physically demonstrative family, but it was like my bones remembered him. He didn’t say anything, and walked out the front door. I woke up on my couch and had clearly been crying for hours. Its a moment I think of often, and it brings me some peace to think that maybe he did the best he could to say goodbye.
I have no real-ass ghost stories to share, but I’ve always tread the line of being intrigued/terrified of (western) ghost and possession/exorcism stories. I didn’t grow up hearing/learning of any Viet ghost stories, but as I got older I would try to rationalize with myself that if there were ghosts out there to do harm, than likewise my own ancestors would be able to help keep me safe from any possessions or supernatural nonsense, even if they were a continent and an ocean away.
Aside: I’m actually agnostic and don’t have any spiritual beliefs, but in that highly suggestible time before falling asleep I’ve needed to come up with something to put my mind at ease so I can sleep, particularly in an empty house/apt, My mother has always taken care to keep up a picture and offerings to my ba ngoai and I will probably do the same thing for my grandparents when I get older, and while I tend to think of it as a non-spiritual/cultural way of remembering your deceased relatives, there is a spiritual aspect too..
All of that being said, my scaredy cat tendencies towards ghosts (esp malevolent spirits) were encouraged along significantly by a series of night terrors I had in high school and college, which included sensations of being smothered, being held down, eldritch music, mysteriously vague presences in the room while I sleep, sleep paralysis, and one particularly memorable time, having my hands pulled on like something was trying to pull me through the headboard. [I think that last one was my subconscious tugging on an old memory of a ST:TNG episode where Riker and a bunch of other people were getting abducted by other aliens.)
I haven’t had sleep paralysis/night terrors in a few years now, but that is partly because I’ve taught myself to recognize some of the initial “tells” (mostly the eldritch music and the inability to move) and can force myself to calm down and relax. It can be terrifying though. Thank god for the internet and the blogosphere for helping me find a link to it in my early 20s.
Fellow youthful night terrors sufferer here, with fun added sleepwalking and this horrible thing of knowing I was asleep and dreaming and walking around and not making sense but not being able to wake up. I’m glad I mostly grew out of it, though I do still sometimes get that initial “tell,” like you said, but I can mostly think through it and calm myself down now. It sucks, and it’s something I can still recall SO vividly and it was so awful and scary and just the worst sensation in the world.
I do still have very vivid nightmares as well as a fair amount of insomnia, hypnic jerking, and those kinds of dreams where they’re super repetitive and unrestful (if you know what I mean?), so I also need to have a pretty strict “calm down and think about fun/funny things” routine before bed. I find Bob’s Burgers to be really good for this, as well as some episodes of How I Met Your Mother. Cheerful, soothing, nothing with heavy topics or characters that make me very angry (Ross Geller, I’m looking at you!). I also enjoy reading Texts From Last Night before bed, which makes me laugh.
My husband had night-terrors with sleep walking when he was little. His mom has some crayyyzzeee stories about him getting up and interacting with his nightmares. Apparently someone she knew suggested exorcism and she was like NOPE. So she found out what it really was and dealt with it really well. The strange thing is (possible trigger warning) he totally suppressed the memory of it, and then when he was a teenager he had a memory cascade where it all came back to him at once, like you sometimes hear about with victims of childhood abuse. Then he was able to verify the memories with his mom and dad. Brains are intense! He still occasionally sits up bolt right in bed while dreaming, but it’s no big deal.
I’ve been scrolling through the comments to see if anyone else experienced this. I also do the combo night terrors/sleep paralysis routinely.
I can remember (and only recently connected this dot) being very young – like 5, 6, 7 years old – and my sleep paralysis would be accompanied by ~something~ screaming at me. It would fade in and fade out over what felt like 30-minutes at a time, just ocsillating in volume like whatever it was got closer and farther away by turns. It would make my ears hurt and the only way I could make it stop was eventually willing my body to jerk myself awake.
I still get the paralysis, but now only with the feeling that someone is in the room, or is sitting on my bed. And still the only way I can get out of it is to mentally will myself to abruptly sit up in my sleep, which is easier said than done.
I get it, it’s just your brain doing weird things, but still, uugggghhh, I do not like it.
Additionally, my mother has vaguely prescient dreams and premonitions that she chalks up to “her gut,” and two of my aunts claim to have experienced a time when one of them was attacked by something malevolent and unseen and the other commanded it to let go. And it did, whatever it was. So I don’t know what to make of all that, but I do see a recurring theme of people saying it’s something that’s “in their family” so.
Maybe we’re just genetically prone to suggestion or whatever. I kinda don’t like that it might be more than suggestion, because all of my experiences have felt generally negative, if not outright malevolent. No kindly grandmother guardian angel-types for us…
Yes, I was so relived when I learned what Sleep Paralysis was. Most times, now, I’m able to calm myself down by going, “Okay, just sleep paralysis, ignore this sensation of terror, you’re good.” Still had an incident a month or so ago, though, where I completely freaked out even though I logically knew what had to be going on.
The fact that I know exactly what it is sadly does not stop the creepy “someone is staring at me in the dark in my bedroom” feeling. Which is much worse now that divorce – as I don’t have anyone else in bed with me that I have some vague faith would wake up if i were to be murdered.
My response to both ghosts and Death In books:
Seth Cohen would LOVE those stealth Santa chocolates.
Excuse me while I close the office door, since I’m now crying at my desk reading the Emmanuel AME forgiveness story.
So good! And so considered and delicate.
I have a few stories about ghosts, but here’s one in particular (although nobody involved saw anything in the most technical physical literal sense of seeing something and it’s probably not the flashiest story I’ve got):
In my parents’ house, where my family has lived since I was three months old, we have a basement that’s mostly a finished rec room, but also has a long narrow laundry/storage room that runs the length of one of the sides. It’s not a perfect rectangle, since the room extends under the stairs and then back, making the back end wider than the front end where the door is.
At some point as young children, my younger brother and I mutually developed a fear of a man in the back in the far back corner of the room who we both started referring to–without discussing it first–as The Mummy. (About this time, I also developed a hardcore fear of mummies for awhile. Not actual Egyptian mummies whose photos I had seen in books, but the way-less-scary kids’ movie mummies who were wrapped in bandages.)
To turn on the lights in there, you flipped the lightswitch to a single bare bulb in the first half of the room, then had to go in and walk into the second half to pull a chain that went up to the second bulb that illuminated the back half. If one of us had to go get something from the pantry shelves in the back, the other would stand in the doorway and spot them. If one of us had to go alone, as soon as we had what we needed, we’d pull the chain and run.
Eventually that stopped as we got older and neither of us though about it much again, so that wouldn’t have all been worth mentioning, except.
Except.
When I was in eighth or ninth grade, I had some friends over for a sleepover. One of them was a girl from my Scout troop who had never been over before. At some point in the night, the two of us go into the laundry room to get some more soda or snacks from the old refrigerator in there, and as we’re doing that I notice her looking at that back corner.
I shoot her a questions look and she says, “So, um . . . You do know there’s a guy there, right?”
Flash forward again to college. My best friend from school is not particularly given to belief in ghosts and is usually the rational skeptic. Since she lives a couple states away, she’s visited several times over the course of the past couple years and slept on the day bed in the finished half of the basement.
One time, she casually mentions my basement being pretty creepy. I ask her what she means.
“I think it’s haunted,” she tells me. “I mean, he doesn’t really bother me or anything, but I think there’s a man in the laundry room.”
A couple years later, my new boyfriend (and now fiancé) is hanging out with me in the basement for probably the first time. His knowledge of the layout of my house is pretty nonexistent at this point, and at one point, he turns to look at the back corner of the rec room that shares its wall with that corner of the laundry and says, “What’s over there?”
I ask what he means.
“Is there another room down here? There’s something on the other side of that wall.”
Like I said, I don’t know that that’s the flashiest story I’ve got, but it’s the one with the highest number of unrelated people corroborating it.
While I’m thinking about random moments from my childhood like that, I also remember overhearing something my mother was saying to my father in hushed tones once when I was quite young: “Sometimes, early in the morning, after you go to work, I hear someone walking around upstairs, so I think one of the kids must be awake, but when I go up and look, they’re both still fast asleep.”
I didn’t hear my father’s reply (probably something about the house settling or the plumbing or something), but my mother responded more insistently, “No, no, it sounds exactly like someone walking up and down the hallway. I can hear footsteps.”
NO NO NO. I’m sitting in a brightly lit, loud coffee shop and this story made me want to jump out of my skin, and I can’t look in any of the corners of the shop.
People STANDING IN CORNERS has a 100% scare rate.
OMG this HAS to be a standing wave of infrasound! I wrote a long comment that fell to page 2 because it took me so long to verify everything, so look for me on page 2 if you want nerd explanations. The gist of it is that certain frequencies of sound are below our range of hearing, but they (creepily) resonate with our bodies, making our flesh, organs and even eyes vibrate a little. This feels awful, so we feel terrified and creeped out. Little things in our peripheral vision seem like they’re big and moving because the eye vibrates, and the brain interprets this as “that’s a person”, because movement is a huge part of what makes the brain conclude that something’s alive.
You know how you can make noise by blowing on a pipe? That works for bigger rooms too. If you have something that vibrates with the right frequency, and you have a room of the right shape and size (for example, a long, narrow basement), the entire room can be turned into such a pipe, i.e. a resonance box. Now, if the room becomes a resonance box for one of the creepy infrasound frequencies, you wouldn’t hear a thing, but you would sense the effects of the vibrations – chills down your spine, nausea, fear, visions of strange people caused by the brain misinterpreting eye vibrations. Certain spots of the room will feel extra creepy, because that’s where the sound wave peaks. And lots of people would be able to pick up on it.
I bet this is what’s going on in your basement!
WHOA. I did not know this was a thing, but I love it (and am somewhat comforted). Infrasound! Who knew?!
Ooooh like at Orkneyjar!?
Okay I am 100% here for ghosts but can we also talk about how some ghost encounters might just be our brains feeling weird about sounds?
I read that and I was like yes, this makes sense, all is clear and logical, but then the strange swirling lights happened to me and my mother and unless our brains were both having the same damn reaction at the same damn time nothing makes sense any more. Science, why have you forsaken me?
I may be the only person who sees something possibly paranormal and reacts with righteous anger. How dare it be weird and inexplicable on my turf?
The building I work in (former morgue) is supposedly haunted! I don’t believe in ghosts and I’ve never had any odd or unexplainable experiences here, but it is a really good reason to not work overtime.
When I was 23, the first thing my mother said to my new boyfriend upon meeting him was some random babbling about the ghost she was sure haunted our townhouse. While I died inside, my boyfriend was like, “Hey, at least your family is interesting.” Reader, I married him.
My mother still tells us about her ghosts.
Anyway, ghosts are real but they aren’t really the spirits of the departed, they’re just psychic echoes of the most traumatic and troubled parts of consciousness that were unable to dissipate at death and are now trapped in the world, gradually decaying and hunting for sources of emotional fuel to sustain themselves.
For the most part your gods cannot protect you, but you can cast hungry spirits into the Outer Darkness if you have made appropriate compacts with the Powers that dwell therein.
Okay, I told you my story on Twitter, but here it goes again:
I used to work in a historic house. People always asked us about ghosts but a) I had never really had any “there is a ghost here” experiences in that house and b) the official policy of the NPS is that there are not ghosts.
One day, a visitor had some bowel incontinence. The Ranger who led her tour cleaned up some of it, but it happened in multiple areas of the home and he was not emotionally equipped to deal with it (cleaning up human excrement is not explicitly in the job description – definitely “other duties as assigned”), and that was the last tour of the day. So the next morning, the site manager and I go in to make sure it’s all been properly dealt with, and I swear that there was this incredibly ANGRY energy to the house. As soon as we were done and everything was cleaned again, the atmosphere changed back to the normal way the house felt.
I’ve also had the “there is someone else in the room with me right now [beyond the people I know are physically here]” feelings before.
I am TOTALLY willing to write all these feelings off as weird brain glitches similar to the way you sometimes feel your phone vibrating in your pocket when you know it’s on your desk. I don’t really believe in ghosts, per se, but I am willing to believe that strong emotions leave an echo.
(I also had a roommate in college who definitely believed in ghosts, including believing that we had one in our campus apartment, and who once asked me to walk her across campus [along a dark, wooded path] because I had a “strong presence” and ghosts wouldn’t bother her while I was with her. Which I love as a way of saying “well, of course you’ve never seen a ghost, you scare them off” to someone who doesn’t believe because there is no evidence.)
I love that the NPS has an official policy that there are not ghosts.
I mean, that doesn’t stop some Rangers from telling ghost stories, but officially you are supposed to stick to established facts.
I love the idea of the ghosts being mad that someone POOPED in their HOUSE. Their house! Their floors! That they scrubbed on their hands and knees for thirty years!
When we were buying our current house, we had to decide really quick whether to offer or not. We laid out a list of pros and cons and it was heavily in pro. And then I said ‘but… I’m worried that the house doesn’t want us to buy it’ I tend to make decisions with my head and not involve feelings at all so my boyfriend was a bit taken aback but said he also thought the house seemed mad. Like not angry, more irritable and resentful.
As soon as all our stuff was packed away and we’d cleaned, the feeling started dissapating. We’ve since found out that the couple who lived there before we’re having some marital issues. I wish I knew who owned it before them.
I do occasionally get the same feeling now if we’ve started a big project and it takes more than a week to finish and the tools etc are left in a mess. This is my usual mo so I don’t THINK it’s self generated, but… Well it probably is.
My farmhouse from 1847 definitely had a miserable/not nice ghost upstairs. She left after our daughter was born in the living room. (On purpose).
My freakiest ghost story was when I was about 20 and living in an apartment and quit my job, needed to move, wasn’t sure whether to get married or not. I reas my tarot cards and they all came up rebirth. I did it again. Same thing. Got my neighbors, did a reading for them, same thing. Was very very sure that this was NOT our reading and we were getting some other message. We were. Woman downstairs died of a chronic illness that night, at that time. It was only a 4 unit building, she lived in the ground floor.
I heartily appreciate a good tarot and ghosty story.
I used to be all about ghosts, and then a few years ago I was prescribed Ambien. It didn’t help with sleep at all, it only made me hallucinate, which really steamed my beans! But ever since, YEARS later, I swear I still have occasional ambien flashbacks and catch glimpses of stupid impossible stuff happening in my peripheral vision.
This is all a roundabout way of saying that these days I don’t trust my sensory perception any farther than I can throw it, and since perception is an abstract concept, I can’t throw it far at all. So a ghost could materialize in front of my face and perform an entire one-act play, and I’d automatically chalk it up to “gosh, brains are weird huh.”
“which really steamed my beans!”
HELLO this is the best phrase I’ve ever heard
I have Mystery Science Theater 3000 to thank for that ol’ chestnut 🙂 https://youtu.be/ESoXNCJlYq4?t=739
OMG ghosts!
So, I’ve had two ghostly experiences as an adult, although in neither of them did I actually see like, a person.
1. I had just moved in to a very old (maybe 100 years or so?) house in a small Southern town. It was summertime, and hot and muggy, so I wasn’t wearing any clothes when sleeping those days. This is relevant because I made very sure to firmly close and lock my bedroom door at night, since my room was right by the front door of the house, and I didn’t want any of my roommates or their friends accidentally stumbling in there by accident.
One night, I sort of suddenly wake up, disoriented, with the scary feeling that someone is watching me. It’s really dark, but I look up and I see that my bedroom door is ALL THE WAY OPEN – like, 180 degrees, touching the wall, and I sense but can’t see anything looking at me. I scream bloody murder, and then the door slams shut, and I hear another door in the house slam. At this point, I naturally think that a PERSON was in my house and has exited, but I’m so scared I just stay in bed, doing stuff on my phone until the sun comes up. At that point, I check all the doors in the house and they’re all locked FROM THE INSIDE. I ask all my roommates if they heard anything or say anything, and none of them (all three) did. I conclude: ghost. And then proceed to spend the next few nights sleeping over at other people’s houses.
2. My husband and I are spending the 2nd night of our honeymoon at the Columns hotel in New Orleans. Due to a massive blowout we had on the highway on the way over, we were delayed in getting there several hours and arrived at the hotel at like, 2 in the morning. Obviously we went straight to sleep.
I wake up because I feel a heavy weight at the foot of the bed, as if someone suddenly, heavily sat down on the end of it. I assume my husband got up to go to the bathroom or something and I call out his name in the dark. I can still feel the weight on the bed. He mumbles a response but it comes from the side, instead of in front of me — he’s still sleeping next to me. I haven’t felt the weight at the foot of the bed subside, but I’m now very scared and just roll into my husband’s back, burying my face and mentally willing the ghost to chill out, I’m going back to sleep.
The next morning I Google the hotel and find out that among the spirits haunting the hotel is supposedly the proprietor. Apparently, he likes to come into people’s rooms and check to make sure they’re comfortable.
I also apparently used to see the ghost of my great-grandfather when I was a baby and my parents had just gotten divorced, but I don’t remember it, and those are second-hand stories according to my mom and her friend.
Something resting on your feet in bed sounds completely terrifying, but I love the idea that the proprietor was checking up on things but is suuper awkward! “How are things, guests? Comfortable? Um, if I sit on your feet here, while you sleep? How about now?”
“Can I get you guys anything? Some snacks? A condom? Let me know!”
OMG that first one, I am shaking. Doors opening/shutting when you KNOW they shouldn’t is one of the top seemingly-innocuous-but-actually-terrifying things that can possibly happen.
I worked in the small, creepy museum at my small, southern women’s college. The museum was partially built into the basement of another building & contained a lot of victorian artifacts, and LOTS of mourning gear, since the death of a young girl is instrumental in my college’s ~history~. Most of my job was just sitting at the visitor’s desk, doing homework (or fucking around on the computer) until the 1-2 visitors per month would show up.
One day, in the fall when the days were getting shorter, I was sitting at the visitor’s desk, reading. I slowly became aware of the sound of loud breathing just behind my left ear. The building is old, and it’s partially built under another building, so I just told myself it was the pipes, or noise from the office upstairs, or something else. I forced myself not to move my head. The breathing got louder and louder, and even though I was boring holes through my book with my eyes, the only thing I could focus on was the sound of breathing. It wasn’t til I felt the hot breath on my neck that I finally dropped my book and spun around.
Of course, there was nothing there. Just an empty coat rack and a glass case of turn-of-the-century yearbooks.
My other “ghost” story I have is from the same job:
It was mid-October, and I came in to the museum, walked past the bathroom, down the rows of glass cases, threw my stuff down behind the desk, fucked around on tumblr for a while, and then had to pee. I got up, walked back past the glass cases, stopped to fix my boot strap, got up, continued to walk toward the bathroom. I guess finally looked straight ahead of me, because my heart dropped to the ground. Standing in front of me was a ghost, a little shorter than me, but only 2 arm-lengths away. I stood, stock-still. My body went hot, then cold, then REALLY hot. The ghost didn’t move. It just stood there, with its arms slightly raised. I don’t think I even blinked. I just stood there, sweat dripping down my neck, for what seemed like minutes.
Finally, my brain caught up to my eyes & I realized it was the mannequin we use to advertise Ghost Tours. It is like, a cloth mannequin covered with a sheet. The least convincing ghost in the world. I must have walked right past it when coming in, but I just didn’t notice it.
“Whatcha reading??”
A few times when I was 11-13, I woke up to see a glowing shape just hanging around my camp bed. And after trying to explain it away as swamp gas, I decided that they were ghosts. Alas, I in fact (particularly when stressed, like say being bullied at camp) have episodes of sleep paralysis. It’s just that now as an adult I dream up being trapped in fire, or debt collectors coming to kill me.
I don’t want to believe in ghosts, and I don’t think that their existence is supported by any evidence/makes sense, but if I’m alone and something freaks me out sufficiently, I can’t honestly say that I don’t believe. My mom definitely believes in ghosts and had the house I grew up in blessed because she was convinced that a particular corner of it was haunted. The bedroom used to be located there and she said something would show up at night and it scared the shit out of her, so that corner got converted to a reading nook and the bedroom moved elsewhere. I never experienced anything weird in that corner, or anywhere else in the house for that matter, though it probably helps that I grew up in an area with enormous cane spiders and roaches and tropical centipedes that occasionally got in the house, so I was too busy being scared of those to worry about ghosts. My mom did say that once she got it blessed, the scary thing went away and this all happened when I was a child, so I can’t say how credible any of this is.
I do have another ghost-y story that I was told by a friend and her mom. The friend’s mom makes wine, so we were all going to help out and we needed to collect fruit. So we go to this little cemetery near where she lives that has a bunch of pear trees to get pears and the friend tells us that her mom and her mom’s friend who was a professional ghost hunter went out to the cemetery at night to see if they could detect any ghosty-type stuff. They don’t see anything and her mom ends up tripping and getting her foot stuck in a hole, so they decide its a wash and that they should just leave before one of them breaks an ankle. It turns out that when the ghost-hunter friend was reviewing the footage, right when her mom tripped, there was a voice saying “got you bitch” which freaks the ghost-hunter friend out so badly that he quits ghost-hunting entirely and refuses to drink the pear wine from the cemetery pears.
I am so taken by the idea of cemetery pear wine!!!
The one time I saw a ghost I didn’t know, I wrote a poem about it, which is now sadly out of print. So creepy story first and less creepy stories afterward.
There was a weird little access road between where my friends lived and my apartment that seemed to change lengths. The car odometer would sometimes read 7/10 of a mile, sometimes 1.1 miles, or somewhere in that range. And it *seemed* longer than it was – you’d be driving along like “shouldn’t I have gone under the overpass by now?”
There was some gang activity in the area, and burned-up cars started showing up under said overpass. One would be there, get tagged and towed, and another would show up in a few days. We assumed it was linked to the car theft ring the police had put out a warning about and weren’t too worried about it.
Until one night I was driving to my friend’s place and saw a dude standing next to one. Being a good citizen, I wanted nothing to do with all of that. It was cold out and all my windows were rolled up, but when I passed the guy I swear I heard him say “my cousin” in kind of a pleading tone. And when I looked back, he was gone. I flipped shit. I still get creeped out on the rare occasion I’m in that part of town.
The more fun ghost stories: a friend of ours died in the Nashville flood. He had worked staff forever for an event we do every year. For years after he died we would all hear him laughing – happy laugh, not creepy laugh – both in person and *over the staff radios*. Since anyone who got caught pranking us on that would have been summarily murdered, we conclude it was him. Same event was a favorite of a beloved elder who always had her hair dyed in a distinctive color and worn in a distinctive style. I’ve seen her head in the crowd every year since she passed away. I always check the dinner line to make sure it’s not just someone I don’t know with a similar style. it is not, unless they somehow go the entire event without eating any of the food they paid for.
Nicole, my own I don’t believe in ghosts but here’s my ghost story story is so long, Intense Debate won’t let me submit it as a comment, so I’ve put it on my own blog: We have to call her something.
When I was very young, I sometimes had difficulty distinguishing memories of dreams from things that had actually happened. So, one Halloween, someone held me up to the kitchen window to point out someone at the neighbor’s house who was dressed in a very scary costume, and later I had a dream about an even scarier ghoul at that house, and for a long time I was convinced that both experiences were real.
I still occasionally get a touch of that when I’m ill and have fever dreams; quite recently (as in the last week, during a cold I’m still not quite over), I dreamt that the internet had gained sentience, a la Skynet, and simply took over. Everyone got a phone call from the internet saying that it would be running things now, and that we should be reassured that its intentions were benevolent because if they weren’t then the internet would simply let climate change run rampant until organic life died out. I remember feeling so relieved when I woke up in the middle of the night because the internet had things in hand.
I have ghost pictures in my old cellphone from when I lived in Japan. They are black and white, blurry photos of part of a face: one eye, part of a nose, part of a mouth. I did not take them. I do not remember taking them. But I remember where I was when the time stamp says they were taken: I was on a ferry in the middle of the Korea Straits and my phone was turned off and was in my pocket.
I’ve also long felt our apartment (it’s in an over 100-year old building) is haunted, though the ghosts seem friendly. A few months ago, my wife was taking a shower after we’d put our son to bed in his crib. He started crying, so I went towards his room. Before I got there I very distinctly heard a voice, in his room, say, “It’s okay, it’s okay” and then he stopped crying and went to sleep.
Ah, the Appalachian Trail Game, I remember it well.
[You have found a bear-dog.]
[You are attacked by mosquitos. Health: Poor]
[Your crappy nylon tent keeps out no rain at all. Health: Bad]
[Your camp is invaded by raccoons. They steal 13 pounds of food, while the bear-dog does NOTHING.]
[You are attacked by folksingers. Health: Critical]
[You have died of dysentery.]
I’ve only had one ~supernatural experience~ and its less “spooky” and more “my mother is a superstitious Irish Catholic wacko who reads too much into things” sooooo…
But my favorite ghost story didn’t happen to me, but my Aunt. My grandparents had just bought a house on Cape Cod that had been built in the early 1700’s. The realtor had kindly told them after they had already signed the papers that everybody that had ever lived there said it was haunted, but oh well!!! My aunt was staying alone in the house one night before everybody else moved in, because she was waiting for some furniture to be delivered the next day. The house was still basically empty. She was sleeping on an air mattress in one of the bedrooms upstairs, and woke up in the middle of the night and looked across the hall to the room directly across from her (both doors were open). She says that she saw, in the middle of the empty room, a group of fishermen sitting around a table playing cards. She kept opening and closing her eyes, pinching herself, etc and they were still there, drinking and laughing and playing cards. I think this is my favorite ghost story because a) my aunt is a very rational person, so I believe it, and b) it seems like such a pleasant group of ghosts to have in your house! I never knew this story til I was older because they didn’t want me to freak out every time we visited my grandparents, but I kind of wish I had, I would have been more on the lookout!
Between the Missy video and all the recent articles about GBBO my brain is going in 5 million directions and I am overwhelmed with happiness.
The Time article on Charleston and forgiveness is just astounding. I am so, so grateful that at no point did the author move around to Roof’s POV or how he might interpret forgiveness – instead it was entirely about the victims, survivors, and their families. Even the “least forgiving” of them speaks so eloquently and righteously that I am ashamed of my incapacity and/or unwillingness to forgive the people who have wronged me.
Ooh, ghosts! Plz let me ruin OR ENHANCE your supernatural experiences through the power of science!
Note: this is not an asshole atheist post, please feel free to believe that the powers that be found it fitting to install a back door to the Beyond in the human body 🙂
What is up with haunted houses? Why do people feel so creeped out in certain places? Chills down your back, the sense that someone is watching…
Well, some bright minds figured out that certain wavelengths of sound cause the body to resonate. You may have heard the urban legend about a “brown note” that makes people crap themselves? This note tunes you in to the supernatural.
The deep bass notes, below the deepest bass you can hear, are called infrasound. Your ears can’t register them, so they’re silent to you. But the frequencies around 18 Hz and below resonate with your body, turning you into a resonant chamber and your organs into violin strings, making you feel uneasy, nauseous and scared. They may resonate with your actual eyeball, smudging stuff in your peripheral vision, making you see movement and shapes and thus “people” in the corner of your eye – or enabling you to see who’s always There, if you prefer. (Complex or irregular movement is interpreted as “alive” by our brains.)
If you have a room of a certain shape and size, and something that vibrates with the right frequency, you can create a standing wave. That’s when an entire sound wave gets trapped in place. Sounds bounce around (echo), and if the room is twice as big as the wave, the entire room becomes a resonance box. It’s like standing inside a flute with only one note. And if the note is in the infrasound register, it also makes you resonate with it, especially if you’re standing at the spot where the peak of the sound wave meets the peak of the echo wave. A room like that will feel creepy as heck, definitely haunted. The noise could come from a machine somewhere, the ventilation system, from the wind blowing through cracks or whatever – if the right type of noise is trapped in a room of the right shape and size, the creepy sound wave will be formed, and you experience the room as haunted because inaudible noise is vibrating the hell out of your organs.
Bonus: you don’t need a standing wave to experience these sensations, of course. Standing waves just explain why certain rooms feel haunted while others don’t. Anything big enough that vibrates and makes noise could create infrasound frequencies. Volcanoes, earthquakes, explosions, the roars of large animals, wind turbines, huge subwoofers. A big pipe organ will do. When the organist plays, you may experience awe or fear of god not solely because you’re in church and the music is pretty, but also because 18 Hz sound waves make your body sing.
Here’s a fun read that takes you through the discovery story: http://www.cracked.com/article_18828_the-creepy-s…
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasound
Why yes it is my life goal to become The Toast’s resident scientist, why do you ask
Wow, that is really interesting and you explained it clearly. (Please make a point of being the resident scientist!)
I am taking an undergrad physics course with lab right now, and we JUST did our standing wave lab last night, and this is the coolest thing ever.
So here I am to add a ‘Yes, and…” and a Yes, but…”
I had one truly terrifying experience in Utah that has all the hallmarks of an encounter with Super Low Frequency – shared feelings of terror, dread, a sense of imminent doom, hallucinations – all of which dissipated when we left. It was a harrowing experience, but it can be explained. (It was dark, so we couldn’t see what might have been resonating – maybe the wind through rocks?)
But – I’ve had experiences which were straight-up inexplicable. When my sister and I were nine and ten, we were home alone, watching TV – and the bathroom sink began running full force. The bathroom door was in full view of the living room sofa – we would have seen someone enter, if anyone were there. When we turned off the water, both faucets had been cranked all the way open. It only happened once, but I’ve never been able to figure out an explanation for it.
When I was older, I worked at a summer camp. For about two weeks, there were mysterious red marks that appeared throughout the pool building – first, a full red handprint in one of the bathroom stalls – not blood, not paint, more the texture of lipstick, but not the smell. When I rubbed it with my fingers, they were stained with red pigment, which was hard to wash off. I was roommates with the lifeguard, the only person with a key to the pool building; we both thought it was a practical joke and decided not to tell anyone, in hopes that the prankster would reveal themselves by asking about the red smudges and smears that were revealing themselves in multiple places inside the building.
Nobody asked, yet the marks kept appearing, in the oddest places – in the back of a closet, on the edge of a crash door, under a bag of styrofoam peanuts, on a floor that had been scrubbed clean just a half-hour before.
The marks stopped appearing after two weeks.
We never found out who did it, we never found out why, and I’ve never come across any oily pigmented (it never dried either!) substance to match the marks in the pool building. It’s a mystery!
Last, we rented a lake house in Japan for a week, and, for the first two nights, the attic light kept turning on and off during the night. Nobody was up there, there was no practical cause of the light going on and off, (I checked the wiring, the switch, the socket, and the bulb) and there was no explanation- I tried my best to find one, because I would choose Science over Spirits every day, if I could.
So yes, Low Frequency can explain the things you feel, but not the documentable things that happen.
Usually, people think that shared sensations is the hardest thing to explain, like why multiple people indepentently can feel that a certain room is haunted or see ghosts in the shadows. Physical, observable events often have more obvious explanations. Screwy plumbing, weird electrical wiring. Human memory is fallible, we forget who opened which doors and who moved what to where. (And let’s not forget sleep paralysis and even straight up hallucinations, which are way more common than people think.)
Other people’s strange habits can make you think you’re going crazy. My mom couldn’t understand how the same stain could appear in the same spot every day and doubted her sanity until she discovered that I rested my spoon there while making breakfast every morning and then forgot to wipe the counter.
A specific person may not be able to figure out what’s causing a certain event, but that doesn’t point to ghosts, it just means that this person couldn’t figure it out. There are so many things I can’t figure out, simply because I’m not an expert or because I don’t videotape every moment of my life.
Wait – are you The Boy Who Couldn’t Shiver?
also, I most definitely can shiver
Also, I have even more opinions on ghosts! I think that people think of supernational and paranormal phenomena as being on a likeliness spectrum. Everyone knows that some things are supernatural, not “real” real, and that supernatural stuff may not exist, but they still feel that some things are more likely to be real… even though everything supernatural may well be unreal.
I’d say that on the modern Western unreality spectrum you get gods and souls on the “most likely to maybe exist” side. Then you get ghosts, tarot reading, UFO sightings and horoscopes kind of in the middle – lots of people are sure they’re not real, but there are many believers. The Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot are not widely considered to be real, but they’re more real than Santa Claus.
So, if a strange gift showed up on your doorstep, you might suspect that a deceased relative’s spirit made it come to you or that a poltergeist left it (which seems more real? Not the poltergeist, right?), but you wouldn’t consider even for a second that it may have been left by Santa’s elves or by a leprechaun.
But… why, really?
santa was invented by coca cola
no that’s also a myth
you were invented by coca cola
clearly YOU were invented by pepsi!
also from Sinterklaas who comes on a boat from Spain every November with his blackface helpers
When I am fully awake I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in ghosts. When I am half asleep I definitely believe in them.
There is a scene near the beginning of The Sixth Sense (I’ve only seen it once so I may be misremembering) where the mom walks out of the kitchen for a moment while talking to the kid and when she walks back in all the drawers and cupboards are open and the kid is still sitting at the table. At least once a week I get up in the middle of the night and walk into the bathroom to find all the cabinet doors standing open. Every time I panic and think the ghosts are here. Then I remember that the cat is a jerk who knows how to open cabinets.
Maccabee Santa is perfect for those of us with interfaith lives!
No ghost stories of my own (except grandpa in a dream shortly after his death), but my paramedic story:
Back in ’99 I met some internet friends for the first time – we congregated in Vegas & were heading out to, I think, a chocolate factory, when one of them had a seizure. Now, we’d been posting on the same board for 4 years by then, but didn’t know things like each other’s spouses names.
(Note: friend is fine – it was the casino floor lights / colors that triggered her.)
So the paramedics are asking her about her name, her husband’s name, the president, so on, and she’s confused, they’re confused because none of us can verify her personal info, and finally we say, “Ask her what board she posts on.”
She says “working woman” and we all breath again, knowing she’s going to be fine.
(We were at the ER so long that we also missed the cheesy Australian stripper men, but the paramedics were SUPER-cute, and since I was pregnant they were falling over themselves taking care of me in addition to my friend, so it’s a happy memory.)
The secretly-Santa Maccabee chocolates are a nightmare for me because as a Jew, the only thing I can do in December is not feed into the crazed Christmas commercialism (so I don’t buy ANYTHING christmas-branded) but also the Maccabees were kind of jerks and this would horrify them and their anti-assimilationist stance, so…I am annoyed but also a teensy bit amused.
The Maccabee version of the Elf on the Shelf, though — that would have the Hasmoneans spinning in their graves.
I have never seen a ghost and also 100% do not believe they exist; sorry, I am very boring. (I would also be immensely freaked out if I had some sort of religions encounter, because again, 100% disbelief. It is a scary thought.) I do find Mary Roach’s investigations on the subject interesting, particular the theory that it’s all caused by our brains reacting to stuff we don’t register with our senses, like infrasound.
Great British Bake Off fans, have you all seen the Guardian liveblogs? They are wonderful. http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/the-great… (Annoyingly, there is no obvious URL with all of them linked, but a scroll through this page should bring them up, along with everything else the Guardian has published about the programme.)
MISSYYYY
gosh i love her
Can I be real a second?
For just a millisecond.
*ctrl-F’s both pages of comments, again, because she can’t believe no-one else has said this yet*
THANK YOU THAT IS WHAT I CAME DOWN INTO THE COMMENTS TO SAY
I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT WASHINGTON IN THIS MUSICAL, OKAY
Ghosts! I’ve never been sure what to make of this, but when I was studying abroad in Russia, a couple of friends (one of whom also lived in St. Petersburg, one of whom was visiting from Japan) and I spent a day exploring a vast, beautiful graveyard. It was as large as a park, and we got there mid-afternoon and left as it was getting dark (which was quite early, since it was St. Petersburg in December). While we were there, creeping among the crypts and trying to avoid the wild dogs (which is just…a thing in Russia) we took a lot of photographs.
This is when things start to go awry. Later that night, my visiting friend & I were drugged in a bar, and I didn’t wake up until 5pm next next day. My friend was ok, but obviously we were both very shaken up. Fast forward a couple of months: I’m back home, and I get all the film from my trip developed (I’m pretty sure I just had a few shitty single-use cameras), and am surprised to see that I have no photographs of the cemetery at all. I ask my friends if they have any: the St. Pete friend said all hers were blurred to the point of being unseeable, and the friend visiting from Japan had his camera confiscated at border control. Then, on the one-year anniversary of the day in question, the bar we were drugged in burned to the ground.
I’m not sure there’s a clear takeaway, but I’ve always felt like we disturbed someone, or something.
I pretty much stopped everything to read all of that Time piece on the Charleston massacre. I’ve got chills all over, I feel so — haunted, almost. What a powerful piece. Thank you so much for sharing.
I wish I could believe in ghosts to spite the atheist dudebros in my family, but I tend to just be creeped out by things and try to escape them instead of come up with an explanation for them.
I always had Nicole as Scully and Mallory as Mulder, but it might be time to flip that.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ghost, but I do think I may have heard one. I have this very vivid memory of being three years old and lying in bed, absolutely petrified with terror, because I could hear the sound of drums and marching- you know, like a military parade? And I grew up on the Hamilton Escarpment which saw a not-inconsiderable amount of action during the War of 1812, so it’s possible that I was hearing the echoes of British or American soldiers marching through.
On the other hand, I remember being around the same age and and petrified that there was a monster in my room until I gathered the courage to reach out and turn on the lamp, and it was . . . a pile of laundry. So my perspective might not be ENTIRELY infallible.
Music hallucinations are definitely a thing, and so are hallucinations right before sleep! Hallucinations are way more common than people believe, it’s amazing.
This is one where I didn’t see the ghost, but I was there for the immediate aftermath:
Once upon a time, my ex-boyfriend had a roommate who claimed to be psychic, in addition to being routinely possessed by aliens. NBD — we were all weird goth kids and while his claims were a little beyond the norm, our general crew was Wiccans/outcasts/artists/crazy people, and so we just took it as a sign that he was a creative person and didn’t worry about it too much as long as he kept showering and paying the rent and being fun at parties. One day he came out of the bathroom and claimed that, while he was on the toilet, a beautiful lady in a long white gown had materialized through the shower wall, drifted in the air, pointed frantically at the area above the door, and vanished through the ceiling. The whole apartment building had recently been sold and everyone was getting evicted anyway, so we decided to take a hammer to the drywall and see what was above the door.
Guys, it turned out there was a little hidden vault that had been boarded/plastered over above the door! We found a bottle of whiskey and a bunch of newspapers from the 1930s. Nothing in the newspapers was significant, as far as we could tell, but the whiskey was good and we drank it all. A few weeks later everyone moved out and the whole apartment was remodeled. The lady in white never reappeared.
I mean, I love me some whiskey, but I’m not sure that I’d drink ghost whiskey.
I agree with all of the HEY LOOKIT BRAIN WEIRDNESS explanations and do not believe that ghosts are A Thing, despite believing the dead can and do pray for us, but also I like people’s stories and honestly there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I also wonder if Brain Weirdness is how we see actual spirits and whatnot because the universe and our brains are so complicated and there’s so much we don’t understand about either. The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive!
However, I will say that I was significantly comforted to find that I was experiencing a somewhat explainable thing (I think the wiki page says they don’t full understand sleep paralysis & night terrors) and wasn’t being abducted by spirits/aliens.
I’ve never seen a ghost but it’s possible that I’ve heard a ghost.
The place where I work has quite a few ghost stories going around but I’ve never been a believer so I never worried about any of those stories. Even working nights for 10 years I really didn’t give it much thought.
I work as a security guard and one night as I was on patrol I was walking through one of the buildings which is for the most part empty and dark at night. I was wandering through a cubicle filled office area and I heard very clearly the sound of a baby laughing. Now there should be no babies in the buildings at my work at any time because children aren’t allowed on site and there really shouldn’t be a baby hanging out at night in an empty building.
I looked all around the area where I heard the baby laughter but I couldn’t find anything. A few weeks later a co-worker and I were talking and she mentioned that she and another guard had both heard a baby in the same building (on separate occasions). One of them heard a baby laughing and the other heard a baby crying in the same area where I heard the baby laughing. Then I told her my story and we were both pretty good and freaked out.
Do believe in God, sorta kinda believe in ghosts to the extent that I just scrolled quickly past everyone’s ghost anecdotes without reading them since anything having to do with the occult creeps me out. The stance my church takes on ghosts is that they are evil angels trying to trick people, as dead people don’t have spirits or consciousness that exists past their death (Ecclesiastes 9:5 is usually the verse that gets thrown around re: life after death). I’m an SDAer who cringes at everything that comes out of Ben Carson’s mouth.
That puppy is so adorable!!
Another member of the I-don’t-believe-in-ghosts-but-I’ve-seen-stuff camp here. Specifically, I was staying alone in a hotel room in Tbilisi, Georgia, and was just starting to drift off when I rolled onto my back, opened my eyes, and saw a white figure hanging in the air over me. It didn’t really have a distinct face, but I somehow knew it was a woman. I looked at it bemused and even reached my hand up, where it drifted right through the figure. Suddenly, I snapped into HOLYSHITPANIC mode and I jumped out of bed and ran to the light. I turned around and it was gone. Was it ever really there? Had I actually fallen asleep and that was a dream, even though I’ve never, ever have dreams that lucid or specific to my actual physical surroundings? Who knows?
What I DO know, though, is that, after I die, if I get a few years or decades or whatever to ask God all the questions I have about this life, the very first one will be “WTF happened in that hotel room?”
Re: ghosts, I actually wrote a Toast essay about my own encounter with ghosts when I was a kid living in England that was published on the site last February or so (http://the-toast.net/2015/02/20/ghosts-saw-at-home/), and I STILL stand by the fact that I think it was 100.79% real. I’ve always tried to ascribe to the notion that ghosts are some sort of strange rift in the time-space continuum (i.e., I’m seeing a projected reenactment of some sort of moment in history, thanks to a thin spot in some sort of multiversal dimension wall thing), but I don’t think I’ve still found a way to express how FREAKING TERRIFYING it was.
To make matters worse, my girlfriend relayed to me that her roommate told her that he’s seen a ghost on multiple occasions at their apartment, so any previous or current creeped-out-like feelings I have/had about being in her apartment alone or while up in the middle of the night are now JUSTIFIED and in TWO-FOLD.
PS, before my GF and I met, she actually read my Toast/ghost essay here, which means that if it weren’t for either ghosts or the Toast, we probably wouldn’t be dating. Cheers!
I remember reading and loving your piece when it was published, thank you for writing it.
I lived with my grandma for a year, in the house where my grandpa had died.
Some nights, when I was in my room by myself writing, I felt Grandpa’s presence very strongly. The room was badly insulated and pretty cold during the winter, but I’d feel warmth and weight on the top of my head, as if someone were resting a warm hand there. Or I’d feel an arm across my shoulders. (I am prone to ASMR, and writing is sometimes a trigger for me, so it could be that? But I don’t usually feel pressure on my head or shoulders in ASMR– more a warm tingly / liquidy feeling.)
I don’t remember ever feeling alarmed. It was comforting and peaceful. Though I did occasionally say, “Hey, I would like some alone time,” and then the feeling would go away. Because masturbating in the presence of an invisible, silent roommate who’s related to me was not going to happen.
I’m open to the possibility that I imagined all of it: I was not able to be with Grandpa– whom I loved and admired– when he died, and I felt terrible about it. Part of the reason I was living with Grandma that year was to soak up all the possible Beloved Elder time I could. So I might have wanted to feel reassured that he forgave me, and that he knew I loved him and had wanted to say goodbye.
But I’m also okay with not having an explanation for it.
I grew up in an old Victorian home at the top of a hill overlooking the bay, and I was the first kid in the third family to live in that house. The couple there before us were only there briefly, and didn’t have kids. Before that, it belonged to Ms. Fay, whose great-grandfather had built that home as a wedding present for her grandfather, on land he owned. She watched our neighborhood being built and inhabited by strangers, and she watched over us when we moved in. She never had a family of her own when she was alive, so she used to read me bedtime stories and tuck me in instead. She loved abstract poetry and computers, and would hang out in my dad’s office in the attic all the time, printing out short pieces by e.e. cummings. She was actually really sweet, and in spite of all the crazy things that happened on our block, we never felt like we were in danger, because she was protecting us.
The family that owns the house now rents it out to people instead of living there themselves, because they couldn’t handle our awful next door neighbors. Word on the street is that Ms. Fay stopped showing up shortly after we moved; I think it was because she knew nobody would love her house as much as we did, and she couldn’t bear to watch that happen.
I also went to college for theatre, and it’s a well-known fact that all theaters have ghosts. The cool thing about being in a young college theatre program, though, was that we knew who all our ghosts were. Rebecca and Vera watched over us, made sure to fend off Banquo and the Curse of the Scottish Play, surrounded us with warmth, and played the occasional lighthearted prank on us, at all hours of the day. They were bold creators in life, and they supported bold creators in death. Our main theatre is named for Rebecca, and Vera, who designed the space, has her ashes buried under the stage, downstage center.
You know, I count myself very lucky to have been watched over my whole life by wise, wonderful women who reside beyond the veil. My grandmother comes to me as a butterfly every once in a while, and Rebecca and Vera kept all sorts of terrible things from happening to me, and I firmly believe Ms. Fay follows me around sometimes still, checking in to make sure the bedtime stories paid off.
I haven’t encountered a ghost and didn’t really believe in them, but a musician I am fond of was straight up haunted by his deceased sister in law and… yeah, I don’t know now.
Here is his song about it: https://www.reverbnation.com/pennylarkinscarlpann…
This is a god one not a ghost one so I'm not sure if I'm allowed, by the rules of this thread?? I should note, I am a severely lapsed catholic with no faith to speak of. But one time I was on the bus thinking about how people are awful and about Westboro Baptist Church in particular. And I thought 'They're believers, why don't you do something about them, God??' and then I thought 'Because they're not Mine'. And it was my own head-voice but somehow it was so incredibly external, and it was just this one moment and I knew it wasn't a conversation, just a comment. This was years ago and I still don't believe but also I'm not over it??
Horribly late to this. I don’t exactly believe in ghosts, but I also have no good explanation for some of the stuff I’ve experienced. I have a little bit of a haunting. Things like someone blowing on my neck when there’s no one there and I’m in the center of the room and am decidedly not mistaking it for a draft. Sometimes there’s shouts close to my ears. Sometimes things would go missing, no inthe normal way of things but like I would look everywhere for it and not find it, and then a year later it would turn up in the middle of the floor. One time the window unit AC would turn up all the way to 10 (I always keep it at 5 at the highest) whenever I left that room, even if it was only for a moment. I asked it nicely, but firmly, to stop doing that and it did. And that was the point where I went, “I suppose that I’m not hallucinating or forgetful. Is this a ghost?”
Aside from that I’ve not experinced anything else, which is impressive given I live in a place that’s very haunted. Like it’s so haunted people hardly care to talk about it, because it happens so often and they’ve got jobs to do. But me, I go through very haunted pubs, hosptials, old hotels, churches, graveyards without noticing anything.