DU is a good place to ask this: how many people here believe they have encountered a ghost?

[highplainsdem]

36. A lovely, fairly new house one of my brothers owned in the 1990s was haunted. Very pretty home with

solar panels on the roof and a nice inground pool...and a ghost that would sometimes make noises in the kitchen that sounded like pots and pans being banged around. The master bedroom door would swing all the way open, then all the way shut, with no draft to explain it. I once saw the shoe and lower part of the pant leg of someone climbing the stairs ahead of me, stepping up from the landing just below the second floor hall, as I went up the stairs there, a bit slow following my sister-in-law and mom upstairs so I could see how my niece's room had been redecorated. I was only several steps behind, but when I got to the top of the stairs and went into that bedroom my mom and s-i-l were on the far side of the room, standing there talking, and neither was wearing blue slacks with blue loafers, like what I'd just clearly seen. A friend who was staying there one night was giving her toddler son a bath in the bathroom by the top of those stairs, and was sure she saw someone dressed in blue walk past, but when she checked quickly, no one was there.

A house my family lived in for a couple of years when I was in my teens would have noises of footsteps on another floor - upstairs when you were downstairs, or downstairs if you were upstairs - fairly often when one of us was home alone. All of us experienced that occasionally. Never on the same floor, never on the stairs. Never when two or more people were there, no matter how quiet they were being so you'd hear any footsteps.

The night about 20 years ago after I'd learned that a neighbor had passed away unexpectedly, alone in his home, I was up late reading something on the computer in my bedroom when I looked around and realized a light was on in the living room, since the hallway had more light in it than it should have had from the computer screen and a small desk lamp. I'd turned off all the lights except in my room. I went to check and saw the floor lamp was on behind the chair my neighbor had usually sat in when visiting. There was a very strong scent of vanilla in the air, and no source for it. Gary had needed help getting groceries for a while the year before, after surgery, and when shopping for him I'd been struck by how much he liked vanilla, whether cookies or ice cream or Vanilla Coke. It was the one scent I would have associated with him. Anyway, all trace of that strong scent was gone by the next morning, and I never noticed anything like that again.

My sister once saw the ghost of the man who'd built the old house she bought in the 1970s. She described him and the clothes he was wearing to an elderly neighbor, who had a photo of him in similar oldfashioned clothes.

Lots of other stories, too many to tell, my own experiences and friends' and relatives. A neighbor who was widowed, and one of my aunts after she was widowed, both would wake at times in the middle of the night with the kitchen light on and noises from the kitchen as if their husbands were getting a midnight snack. That aunt's son, when he was staying with her, would also hear the noises in the kitchen. There are stories about ghosts of pets, too.

My last aunt, the last of her generation (not the aunt who heard the noises from her kitchen in Arizona; this was her younger sister in Kansas), passed away 10 days ago. One of my cousins, another of her nieces, has already heard her voice a few times, just saying my cousin's name, and heard her laugh, once. My cousin's never had experiences like that before. I'm glad she's heard her, since my cousin is very Catholic still and worries about Catholic myths like Purgatory (sort of a temporary hell). I'd told her that our aunt, who really knew how to party, was already partying on the other side. I hope her laughter convinced my cousin that she's fine.

These sorts of things are most common - and are comforting - when they're contacts from loved ones. They can be very unsettling if you don't have any idea who the spirit is.

Occasionally they can seem threatening. I posted a thread earlier today about what filmmaker Guillermo del Toro had tweeted about in recent days, which made the news - https://www.democraticunderground.com/10182050893 . But what seems threatening to one person might not seem that way to another. One of my favorite music producers, Tony Visconti, has written about recording at Chateau d'Herouville - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%A2teau_d%27H%C3%A9rouville - where Bowie refused to sleep in the master bedroom, and Tony took it instead, though he felt it was haunted. When he'd been there earlier in the 1970s recording T.Rex, Marc Bolan didn't mind taking the master bedroom. But a young artist who was there fairly recently thought it was haunted.