Regardless of your religious background, how many of you have had any type of a paranormal or supernatural experience, good or bad?
I've known a number of people who have tried Ouija boards. Most had just creepy feelings, but one had a nasty experience. Mark had always lived in a house that wasn't quite right. There were apparitions of people (one who sat in a small study and wore glasses). And there were footsteps and lights that appeared to be caused by a car backing out of the driveway...only there weren't any cars, nor were there shadows when you held your hand up to see where it was coming from. Mark's mother fell on the stairs one day while carrying a load of laundry. She turned, thinking it was her husband, but alas, no one was there.
Mark's experience with a Ouija came when a French foreign exchange student saw the man in the study. When he got to the dinner table, he seemed to count the places that were set. When he asked if the man in the study was going to be joining them, Mark's family told him it was just an apparition. The student went back to check and returned white as a sheet. A few days later he produced the Ouija board and a small group of Mark's friends and the student attempted to use it. As they were engaged in it, Mark said, he suddenly felt very light headed. Then he felt as though he were falling backward. When he came to, the table was turned on its sides, the chairs toppled and his face hurt.
According to his friends, he leapt up, began to scream obscenities and turned the table over. The others tried to restrain him, but he lit into them and one of his friends hit him in the jaw and then shoved him in the chest, knocking him down. He tried to get up twice, but was pushed back down by the others. Then whatever it was was gone. Mark never used a board after that, but he still had paranormal experiences in the house. After he got back from school, he came in one night from his job delivering pizzas. He found his brother in an agitated state and carrying their dad's .38-caliber revolver. According to his brother, he heard someone running around upstairs and thought it was Mark. The noise continued and Mark's brother went upstairs and, to his amazement, no one was there. But he felt the hair standing up on his neck, so he got his dad's revolver and went downstairs. While he was telling Mark about this, they suddenly heard someone run across the upstairs hallway and then there was a loud crashing sound, as though someone had overturned a dresser. They felt a coldness around them, and at some point they decided to stay put. About a half hour later their dad got there. Telling him the story, they went upstairs and looked around, but there was no overturned dresser or any piece of furniture out of place. Mark's dad took the gun back, but didn't get after the teenager. They were all a little spooked.
This was in Atchison, Kansas. When Mark moved into this big old house, his junior high school teacher told him one of her students had lived in that house. His name was George Dygle, or Digal, and he spent much of his time in the attic, where he played and read. He was a solitary person, the teacher said, and he committed suicide in the attic...by hanging. It sounds like something out of a bad movie, but Mark said he found knife marks in the wood where someone wrote, "G.D." in a number of places. He died a young teenager with no friends. And even though the apparition in the study was an older man with glasses, they nicknamed him "George."
I found Mark to be a credible guy, and the fact that the rest of his family shared some of his experiences added to that credibility. He's dead now, so it's possible he now knows what it's all about. He got more religious as he got older, and he refused to have anything to do with the paranormal world. He told me he just viewed it as a question mark. He couldn't explain why an "evil" spirit would catch his mother on the stairs, but didn't know why a good spirit would still be roaming around an old house.
Any other stories??
I understand the Jehovah's Witnesses have a lot of stock stories. What do you think of the paranormal? Are you more or less inclined to believe in it if you are a former JW?