With today being Halloween, I began to think about a few things, and a question came to me that I'd like to ask.
How many of you have had what you believe to be a paranormal experience? Could be anything from sounds, seeing things, feeling things, scents that shouldn't have been there, anything.
I ask, because as a hobby, I'm into paranormal investigation, and such accounts are very interesting to me. I have had my own experiences that science just can't explain, so I don't investigate with the preconceived idea that all hauntings are soundly disprovable. To get things started, I'll share one of my experiences.
There's a local cemetary near my house that's got a lot of history to it, with graves going back beyond the Civil War. A couple months ago, my mother and sister (who are more into the paranormal stuff than I am) asked me to go along with them to that cemetary after they visited it once before and got some bizarre distortions in some digital photographs they had taken. They wanted me along to have another person with them and my specialty within investigations are audio anomalies called EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon - voices or sounds recorded that were not heard by the person making the recording at the time the recording was made). I took along my digital voice recorder and let it run while we paid our respects to the honored dead, not really following the protocal of asking a series of questions (I'll get to that in a moment). While we were there, we stopped at a grave of interest, and as I stood off to the side while my sister took a picture of the stone (It has some very ornate carving on it) I caught the slightest, faintest aroma of pipe tobacco for only a second. If you've ever smelled it you know what I mean, that minty sweet kind of thick lightly smokey smell. There was no one around, in the cemetary or out, smoking a pipe. We wrapped our visit and returned home, and I sat down to the DVR, listening to the recording. All told there were five sounds that defied explanation recorded that morning. Four of them were distinct voices speaking short phrases. My DVR isn't the best, so the mic couldn't have picked up stray sounds from the street, and there wasn't anyone out anyway. The voices can be heard right before or after one of the three of us spoke, except for one which tried to talk on top of my sister and I.
Three days later, my sister was reading a book written by a local paranormal enthuiast and she learned and told me that the person who's grave I smelled the pipe tobacco near during our investigation was known in life to smoke a pipe.
If I had followed normal protocal, I would have prepared a list of questions to ask the spirits, and walked around the cemetary asking the questions. The idea behind that is to determine if a spirit is "intelligent" that is to say it is aware of things around it (and may even know its deceased). The idea is to have the recorder's voice and an unexplainable one together on a recording, it's more easily proven that the recorder didn't just pick up a stray sound that way I guess. Common questions include asking the spirit to identify itself by name, if its trying to finish something it left undone, stuff like that.
So, anyone else have an encounter they would like to share?
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