So has anyone had a paranormal experience that they would like to share? What happened and where did it happen?

Being an amateur paranormal investigator I've had several. Here's one of my quicker stories. Most are long, too long to type out.

This happened close to 15 years ago. At the time my wife and I were living in a trailer. We were getting ready for bed one night and she was in the bedroom and I was in the other end of the trailer looking for something. I found it and was about to head to the bedroom when I heard a voice that sounded exactly like my Dad! The voice called out to me, called me by name! Well my Dad lived nowhere near us. But I thought I'd check around and look outside. I turned on the outside lights and looked around. There was no one around anywhere that I could see. I never heard that voice again. Very strange. I called my Dad the next day and told him about it. He thought it was strange also. He assured me that it was not him. I figured it wasn't but I needed to check and tell him about it anyway. That was just the tip of the iceberg of the activity that we got while living there. Many other things happened to us. Nothing threatening, but mischievous, and attention getting. I was already interested in the paranormal before we lived there. Had many other experiences in the previous places that I (as had my wife) had lived in before. But after everything that happened to us there we both began to study and investigate. So our hobby of paranormal investigations started there in that trailer.

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BlueSkyKing · M

Amateur, which means you give and accept anecdotes.

Jayghost · 51-55, M

@BlueSkyKing It just means that I'm not a professional. I'm still very much a rookie and don't have a lot of equipment yet. It takes time and more experience to become a professional at this.

BlueSkyKing · M

@Jayghost What kind of equipment is need to investigate the "paranormal" and why hasn’t anyone provided verified evidence yet? It would be a cinch Nobel Prize.

Jayghost · 51-55, M

@BlueSkyKing it's just hard to capture it. Plus ghosts don't haunt on cue either.

BlueSkyKing · M

@Jayghost I ask this often; Define precisely, what is a ghost and how is this known? Are they made of matter? Emit or reflect light?

Why are posts like these in the religious section? One of my favorite adages is: If it’s not science, it’s superstition. Anecdotes are not evidence.

Jayghost · 51-55, M

@BlueSkyKing I totally agree with you. I was a skeptic too until I started having my experiences. My Dad is just like you: he doesn't believe one bit of it, while my Mom is a bit more open, but she hasn't embraced it yet either. Know one really has any answers to any of those questions yet. The field is still young and we are all still learning.

BlueSkyKing · M

@Jayghost Is it really worth the investment of time and money? Skepticism is a rational point of view.

Jayghost · 51-55, M

@BlueSkyKing Very true, but if you have the experiences that my wife and I have had, with no way of explaining them, you start to become a believer. Just like Sherlock Holmes once said: "Whenever you eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth". So we've stuck to that philosophy and it's done us good. We ALWAYS try to find logical explanations to EVERYTHING first before we jump on it and claim it as paranormal. We always try to debunk everything. We are still skeptics at heart.

BlueSkyKing · M

The Dragon In My Garage
by Carl Sagan

"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"

Suppose (I'm following a group therapy approach by the psychologist Richard Franklin) I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!

"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle -- but no dragon.

"Where's the dragon?" you ask.

"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.

"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."

Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."

You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.

Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.

What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. The only thing you've really learned from my insistence that there's a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You'd wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then, why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I've seriously underestimated human fallibility. Imagine that, despite none of the tests being successful, you wish to be scrupulously open-minded. So you don't outright reject the notion that there's a fire-breathing dragon in my garage. You merely put it on hold. Present evidence is strongly against it, but if a new body of data emerge you're prepared to examine it and see if it convinces you. Surely it's unfair of me to be offended at not being believed; or to criticize you for being stodgy and unimaginative -- merely because you rendered the Scottish verdict of "not proved."