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Mind Tricks

laddsy

New Blood
L
Joined
Oct 13, 2010
Messages
5
Hi All,

I posted this on another thread and a couple of people thought it might be worth a thread of its own.

"Its really interesting how the mind works and plays tricks on you. I remember last year I started believing in all that Blossom Good-child crap about UFO's. I read so much about it and started believing all the channeling messages. I then started to see UFO's in the sky from the back yard. I told everyone about it only to realise later that it was actually headlights from cars in a nearby street throwing up weird reflections on an antenna of a double story house. Anyway I have a lot more stories like that which most can be easily explained.There are others I cant explain, but I am now sure there is an explanation."

So does anyone else have any stories like this?
 
On another forum I had already posted this ghost story. Since this is the month of October, maybe I can repeat it here.

When I was 12, we moved into what is now my mother's house. Before that, it was rented by a forwarding agency. The front rooms were used as offices and the back rooms were living quarters for the employees since all of them were from another city. One of the workers named Manjarrez died in the house. The remaining employees demanded to move out, claiming that Manjarrez was haunting them, pulling on their blankets, and using his typewriter. They left the house, we moved in. One night, during the first October we were there, I heard the distinct sound of a typewriter being used. I didn't believe in ghosts, but I was really spooked. Manjarrez had come to haunt me! With some fear, I left my bed to investigate. The sound wasn't coming from the front rooms, it was coming from an old desk where my mother kept her typewriter. The pine wood boards of the desk were creaking, probably because that was the first cold night of the year. It didn't sound that much like a typewriter, but before I knew the source of the noise, I could almost hear the little bell ringing at the end of each line.
 
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Ah! A chance to tell my own very favorite ghost story.

I was in my teen years when my grandmother (my Dad's mother) died. We went to the funeral, and then later the graveside service. The cemetary was a small one, bounded by barbed wire fences behind a small church in a very rural area. On one side was the church and its gravel parking lot. Opposite that and to the left (if one was at the church facing the cemetary) were pastures, with a few scattered trees and some trees along the fenceline. To the right was a wooded area.

After the service, several of the family members were standing and talking, in the lot behind the church. It was getting late into the afternoon, moving into dusk. I noticed several people off to one side looking into the pasture on the left. Curious, I walked over to see what they were looking at.

The field there rose slightly to a small hill about fifty yards away, topped by a large tree: an oak of some sort. And right there, clear as day, was the image of a woman, completely white, walking underneath the tree. She appeared to have long hair, and be wearing a robe or gown of some sort, hair, skin and clothing hall white as snow. As we all watched, she would walk a few yards, then disappear. She would reappear, walk back, and disappear again. Here it was, proof of ghosts!

Exciting, eh? Undisputably a ghost. Being young and brave (read: too stupid to think of any possible consequences), I decided to get a closer look, and crossed the fenceline to walk a bit towards the hill.

This was when I discovered my ghost was...not.

It was a cow.

A black and white cow...mostly black, expect the front legs were white, connected by a stripe that crossed over its shoulders. In the low light, and under the tree, that white stripe was all that could be seen. When the cow was facing sideways (compared to us onlookers), the white stripe appeared to be a person. When the cow moved the person appeared to walk. When the cow would turn facing us (or away from us) the white was hidden, making the "woman" appear to disappear.

That was one of the defining moments that led me to skepticism. If I hadn't walked closer and looked, this would have been one of those stories that I (and all those with me) were positive could not be explained a way...it was clearly a ghost or image of a person walking, appearing, and disappearing. I doubt that anyone, with any amount of research, would ever have discovered what we were actually seeing. If anyone had suggested I saw a cow instead of a ghost, I would have laughed at them. That incident really drove home the fact that just because we can't explain something, it does NOT mean there isn't a rational, natural explanation. Even if we wouldn't guess that explanation in a million years :)
 
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Not particularly ghostly, but since I got my iPhone, I often hear and feel it vibrating when it is not. I also frequently hear the default Marimba ringtone when the radio is playing music, only to discover that it wasn't there, once I turn off the radio to answer the phone.

Linda
 
fls said:
Not particularly ghostly, but since I got my iPhone, I often hear and feel it vibrating when it is not. I also frequently hear the default Marimba ringtone when the radio is playing music, only to discover that it wasn't there, once I turn off the radio to answer the phone.

Linda
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My phone is almost always on vibrate as opposed to a ring, and I experience this, too. For a while I thought there was some artefact with the phone such as it telling me I had some message or other that I was simply too technically illiterate to find. Then I realized I felt it even when I did not have the phone on me, but always in the same spot I kept the phone in my pocket.

I wonder what the explanation is...
 
As for ghost stories, I have several that fit the description and were frightening at the time, but the one I will tell is the one for which I still have no mundane explanation, though it is the shortest of them all.

I was in my middle teens, late at night in the Fall (not necessarily near Halloween; I can't recall exactly when). I was the only one in the house still awake and the only one downstairs. It was a chilly night so the window was closed. I was reading "The Amityville Horror" (the first book that ever truly terrified me, though re-reading it later I realized how absolutely poorly written and schlocky it is).

At the point in the story when the lion figurine reappears from the attic on the kitchen table, the window to my room flew open. It was an old sash/counter-weight window, the kind that you manually lift up or pull down.

I jumped as much as I ever have in my life, though I did manage to make myself go look. The exterior screen was down so the interior window was not reachable from the outside. I closed the window again, and it remained closed, but I decided I wouldn't stay downstairs alone anymore or read that book in the dark again...
 
Garrette said:
My phone is almost always on vibrate as opposed to a ring, and I experience this, too. For a while I thought there was some artefact with the phone such as it telling me I had some message or other that I was simply too technically illiterate to find. Then I realized I felt it even when I did not have the phone on me, but always in the same spot I kept the phone in my pocket.

I wonder what the explanation is...
Click to expand...

This is quite a common phenomenon - I get it too (but sadly often miss real calls!).

Google for 'phantom phone vibration', and see Wikipedia.
 
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dlorde said:
This is quite a common phenomenon - I get it too (but sadly often miss real calls!).

Google for 'phantom phone vibration', and see Wikipedia.
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No, no. I understand that phantom ringing and phantom vibrations exist, but my sensory discrimination and prior knowledge of the phenomenon are sufficient precautions against such a thing.

When I feel it vibrate it really is a phantom phone vibrating and your closed-minded naysaying will not change that.



[Insert smiley if I did smilies]
 
About 2 years ago, there were 4 fires set in my street in only one month. Luckily they weren't in houses, but some garbage containers and a car burned down. So I became extra aware of possible fires and fire setters.
Then one day when I looked out my window, I saw that across the street smoke was coming out of an open window. I grabbed my phone and was ready to call 112 (it's our 911) but then I took one more good look. It turned out the window was actually closed and the "smoke" was just a gray metal plate. The roof was diagonal and the window was vertical.. let me just... I see, it's called a "dormer" in English. So it was a dormer with gray, "smoke-like" sides. Even when I should have known what it was (it has always been there) I misinterpreted it quite badly. Just because I was "looking" for smoke or fire, I almost called the fire department for nothing.
 
http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception.html

Hi Laddsy. I think you will enjoy this TED talk. Shermer presents a quick, and very entertaining, overview of some of the basics of how the mind can play tricks on us. In particular, you might enjoy the part about "agenticity", his term to describe our tendency to "infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency, often invisible beings and from the top town." The idea is similar to Daniel Dennett's "intentional stance" and can account for our attribution of plain-old occurrences to souls, gods, ghosts, UFOs, conspiracies, etc.

Btw, I see things all the time :covereyes.

Anne
 
Garrette said:
My phone is almost always on vibrate as opposed to a ring, and I experience this, too. For a while I thought there was some artefact with the phone such as it telling me I had some message or other that I was simply too technically illiterate to find. Then I realized I felt it even when I did not have the phone on me, but always in the same spot I kept the phone in my pocket.

I wonder what the explanation is...
Click to expand...

For my job, I have to carry around a Blackberry in holster on my side and it vibrates everytime I receive an email(which is constant). I can usually feel phantom vibrations at nights and on weekends when I am not wearing it. It's bizarre but not spooky.
 
mactonite said:
For my job, I have to carry around a Blackberry in holster on my side and it vibrates everytime I receive an email(which is constant). I can usually feel phantom vibrations at nights and on weekends when I am not wearing it. It's bizarre but not spooky.
Click to expand...


Same. I hate crackberries...
 
I had a strange mind trick episode last week. I was out for a night fishing with my freind on Chesil Beach (Dorset coast,U.K.) We were standing about 50 yards apart on a steep shingle beach on a particularly dark night, catching nothng much and reaching the point of packing up, when I heard my freind approaching. I was facing seaward listening to his footsteps crunching in the shingle and his distinctive cough breaking through the sound of the waves breaking on the Beach thinking "Good, about time we left I'm cold, bored and hungry" I subconciously estimated him to be within visible distance and said soomething like "You Lightweight, giving up already?"
No answer? I looked his direction but saw nothing. Completely baffled I took a walk over to find him sleeping like a Baby by his Rods. He hadn't moved since we had started fishing four hours ago.
I can only assume that I formed expected sounds out of the noise of the wind and waves aided by my tiredness and desire to go home.
Quite unnerving all in all.
 
One night, a couple of weeks ago, I opened my back door to see my whole backyard eerily lit up. It was like the landing strip on "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". It gave me quite a fright.

And then I realized that the solar lights I'd put in that afternoon had already charged up enough to light up, when the box said they'd need 24-36 hours on first charge.
 
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