Comments for Oma's Denial Of A House Guest: Page 1

Hi kindly refrain--Another theory put forward by several psychical researchers is that of the "apparitional drama". It's another theory I bring up a lot on this site. It explains "hauntings that contain many beings at one time" as a telepathic message sent from the mind of the deceased to the mid-level constituents of the recipients subconscious. There, in conjunction with the "thought form" sent by the deceased, an "apparitional drama" is created. Whatever is dramatically appropriate to the message of this telepathic message then becomes a part of the vision.

With this theory, if other people, animals, inanimate objects (anything really) are appropriate to the intended message being sent, the mid-level constituents of the living persons subconscious, along with the message sent from the deceased persons mind, work collectively to create the vision "seen".

Multiple people can theoretically also be drawn into the apparitional drama because it would be considered dramatically appropriate. This nicely explains how multiple people can experience even elaborate apparitional scenes. I will now step off the podium 😜.

Calamity, that's a very nice compliment.

The flicking in the back was many years before the events of this account took place. That being said, they both have the basement stairwell in common and who says a ghost won't hang around for a long time. I agree that certainly the back flick (if supernatural) was not a residual phenomenon.

My sister's house did indeed have events it did not have prior to this so again, I agree with you, not residual.

Manafon1, of course I don't mind your input. This is an open forum and I am very interested in what insights other's may have.

I also believe that time is not the same type of constraint on the other side. This does make the idea you put forward, about the nature of residual hauntings, on better footing than my "time zombie" one.

If they are "ideas" and not individuals stuck in a loop it also can speak to residual hauntings that contain many beings at the same time. As I said in another post, I just don't buy the, "traumatic imprint" on inanimate objects, idea.

It's okay! It's okay! It's okay! Hehehehe all those sorry's required multiple it's okays! Didn't even notice your typo initially haha! 😆

And to comment on what you said, I wonder if he knew that she was seeing him/ hearing him? And though he may have known in life that she would have been very afraid maybe he thought doing the things that he regularly did, she may have come to know and accept that it was him there... I don't know if they know how much or how little of them is perceived to us on the living side.

I haven't read all the comments on the account yet so forgive me if we have already decided as a group what this truly could have been! 😳

Kindly_Refrain,

I can understand your mother, and her beliefs.

My great grandmother was a God fearing woman, with very close and hard beliefs. As long as I can remember she never talked about ghosts, hauntings etc.
She wouldn't allow it.
Even though she did have a spirit in and around her home.

My deepest condolences for the loss of your Mother.
Thats one of the hardest losses one can have in our lifetime.

Hope to read more of your experiences.

Sincerely
Spiritwaiting

The votey thing's at it again. 2nd1st that happens all the time, think it resets itself after a day or so. It annoys everyone. 😆

I also figured a sleepwalking type trance in ghosts would be temporary, same as in the physical realm.

2nd1st - the site only allows us to vote for the same member a certain number of times. I still haven't figure out how many 😆 Once you have voted for other members, I believe the voting privilege is reinstated.

Tweed, the website is letting me up vote you again. Must be a timer.

I am finding the sleepwalking comparison to repetitive behaviour by non corporeal beings fascinating. It seems a logical comparison. Sleepwalkers will change a pattern when interacted with and so it seems will some non corporeal entities.
Apparently conscious efforts such as the flicking are not contradictory here: just because someone sleep walks doesn't mean that they don't spend much of their time awake.

Kindly Refrain I love what you said here:
"Biblically there are specific prohibitions in interactions with ghosts but this very prohibition acknowledges that ghosts exist."
Both insightful and amusing!

DandK, that sleepwalking insight was very interesting. It does seem there are similarities here.

I agree with Calamity also, that this might not have been residual after all. Or maybe a bit of both.

Kindly_refrain,

What a wonderful account. I have very little to add that hasn't already been said, except maybe that I don't believe it to be a residual haunting necessarily. The simple act of flicking your back as you went down the stairs to the basement shows a purposeful intelligence. Now, I am open to the idea that more than one type of haunting could be occurring, so perhaps some of the phenomena were (was?) residual. However, if you are foreshadowing a move of the haunt to your sister's house next door, that would certainly be an intelligent spirit.

In any case, I enjoy your writing so much, and this post in particular, that this account is going into my favorites.

Calamity 😁

Hi kindly refrain--I hope you don't mind me jumping in to your conversation with DandK but I have thought about the very thing you bring up. Namely the idea of being stuck for an eternity doing repititious, mudane things over and over in a semiconscious state. As I hinted at in a response to Tweed yesterday, as the afterlife is one without the constraints of time, the mechanisms of a thought or dream in the afterlife may be much different to what we perceive in physical life.

These residual or sleepwalking ghosts may just be going over the bits of mundane thoughts that occupy the human brain before it drifts off to sleep. The difference is that if humans occasionally telepathically intercept these "mundane thoughts of the dead" it may appear to us as a weirdly endless repetition, while on the other side it is a mere passing thought.

Why the mundane activities that make up most residual type of hauntings are what our brains pick up is, of course, a complete mystery. It sure is interesting to think about though!

Hello DandK, the frequent flick on the back felt real enough but I can't be sure of its cause.

As far as residual hauntings, I like and don't like the sleepwalking analogy.

I like it because I was never very satisfied with the idea that traumatic events can imprint themselves on a space or on inanimate objects, especially since sound, sight and even smell are noticed in many of these cases all in synch. I find it easier to believe that an intelligent agency must be "projecting" all of this at once. The semiconscious entity allows for that.

I don't like it because I too was a regular sleep walker. My brother, with whom I shared a basement bedroom, told me that I went for walks eight nights in a row once. I would be making my bed on the work bench or trying to kill the people on the TV (he would watch late night TV on the weekends). He told me that he would always guide me back to my bed. I would sometimes remember snatches of the events but never very much. The thought of spending my afterlife doing inane things like that is not really appealing.

DandK--Thanks so much for your superbly detailed description of sleepwalking and the feelings you have while it is taking place. The dresser drawer incident really illustrates how "real" the imagined world is to the sleepwalker. Like your parents, that would have given me a heart attack!

I have encountered sleepwalkers. My sister used to sleepwalk around the house when I was a kid and when spoken to would mumble incomprehensible words. However, she would follow simple directions and if turned in the right direction could find her way back to her room. It was always a bit eerie to me when she would appear out of the dark sleepwalking.

Your description really ties in nicely with the theory of residual ghosts as something closer to sleepwalkers than a tape merely playing over and over again. Thanks for sharing!

Kindly_refrain, thank you for the interesting story. I have to admit that the idea of a residual haunting perplexes me. I just don't see how something will get into an infinite loop if it is an entity. In your case, it seems to me like an entity making himself at home. No harm, except teasing you, if he in fact was the cause of the flicking sensation on your back.

Manafon made an analogy of a residual and a sleepwalker, and that makes sense to me if we now say that a residual is an entity that is in the equivalent of sleep. Maybe these residual entities all around us are living just like we are, but in their own foggy mind.

The whole thought about sleepwalking is something I can wrap my mind around really well, as I'm a sleepwalker, and so is most of my family. I've been sleepwalking the past few nights around the house. To me, I'm unaware that I did anything until my husband asks me why I was standing in the living room in the dark the night before, or some other ridiculous thing. Then I can think back and have a vague feeling that I might remember doing that, but it is foggy, like trying to remember the details of a dream that you can only remember with vague feelings. I've also had episodes where something bad happened while sleepwalking that allowed my brain to understand the reality of what happened so that I could clearly remember it when I woke up, but still not wake me up while it was happening. (You may be wondering about an example of this scenario... I have lots, but an easy one is the time I got lost during sleepwalking around the house and couldn't find my way 'home' which in reality was my bed, but in my state of mind it involved trying to go home. I ended up wandering into my sleeping parent's bedroom. I thought their tall chest of drawers was my bed, so I pulled out the bottom drawer and tried to get in, resulting in their six drawer dresser falling on top of me. It scared the carp out of my parents, but didn't wake me up). I imagine that is how a residual ghost feels. That confusion, yet having a purpose or a need to do something or get somewhere.

Hello again Jazzisepic, it seems I am getting to know some of you folks. I am glad you liked the account.

The house was sold shortly after my mother's death and other than one time, to see the renovations, we have not visited.

My sister still lives next door but the current owner has never mentioned experiencing anything odd there.

Hi 2nd1st, It is nice to find someone else that believes a loved one would be considerate even in ghostly form. It certainly would be easy to assume it was my father otherwise.

No one ever investigated the workbench sounds as the only reports of this occurring were from my mother while she was home alone. Even though she claimed to me that they were house noises, I am sure she would have been to afraid to find out if they had a more novel source. I also don't know if there was a visual component during the audio component as I could not let my curiosity compromise my mother's sense of security in her home.

Hi Kindly refrain.
Wow great story, freaky shadow man!
Do you still go to the house and do you sense anything?

Jazzisepic

Hello Tweed, yes the denial thing is perplexing to me as well.

While denial is not limited to any particular belief system I am surprised how many Christians (which I count myself among) find the existence of ghosts too unsavory to allow.

Biblically there are specific prohibitions in interactions with ghosts but this very prohibition acknowledges that ghosts exist.

As far as my children seeing the shadow, yes it always moved in the same direction and yes it always seemed to move at a good clip. I did not, however, push my mother to elaborate on any details of her observations.

That is a definite possibility Tweed! The way the father was so adamant he never saw her almost suggests, like kindly refrain's mom, that he did. For some people, admitting to seeing a ghost changes how they would prefer to perceive their world. Order and an existing belief system, for some, must be maintained at all costs.

It could also be the father was a bit like Kindly's mother, a bit on the denial side lol.

I should add that when the Cheltenham ghost would appear (especially when it stood by the window) that only some people in the room could see it. The father insisted he never saw it, while the eldest daughter always saw it. The other children of the house saw her multiple times but not always simultaneously. It really suggests that telepathic element that some psychical researchers are so smitten with.

Half an hour, far out! 😲

That's very interesting about the mundane nature of these types of encounters. You're right, it doesn't seem so depressing after all.

Tweed--The Cheltenham ghost had a general "route" that she would take. She would appear by one door, walk down the hallway into the sitting room, stand by the bay window (for up to a half hour) and then walk down another hallway to vanish by a side door. She was also seen descending the stairs, always going down and was spotted upon the grounds of the house. In these latter two cases, she always traced the same route.

The similarities between kindly refrain's account and the Cheltenham case are there. That's why it would have been interesting to see if kindly refrain's apparition might have given some signal if it was directly addressed.

I wouldn't expend too much "human sympathy" for an apparition like the Cheltenham ghost. As time (almost certainly) has no relevance on "the other side" these cases of a ghost repeating actions over and over could just be the consciousness of the ghost going over some mundane event, like a sleeping human sometimes does with mundane daily actions. It's interesting to note that nothing dramatic (outside that they are ghosts) occurred with kindly refrain's ghost, the ghost you saw of the guy walking or the Cheltenham ghost.

Whoah! It's also depressing stuff, I mean how much would it suck to be stuck in some kind of trance. Erugh, frustratingly I have an experience typed up but not yet submitted that might just fall into this category. It took over 10 years to realise this guy was a ghost, he was just some dude walking home in the evening. Admittedly he always struck me as 'odd' but I could never place why. Then one day he walked past me up close, I acknowledged him, and he pretty much vanished. For some reason I still have a hard time believing he was a ghost. Anyway, I wondered if this guy had OCD and that's why he was always walking home.
I wondered the same about Kindly's hallway, workbench ghost. Maybe an actual ghost (by which I mean the person themselves) feels compelled to return to a location and carry out a ritual for anxiety based reasons.

The other thing is that dude walking home always walked briskly, never altered his pace and after that neat vanishing act I wondered if his walking pace was something to do with concentrating energy. Reason I mention that, is because Kindly's mother's hallway visitor flitted past quite fast as well.

Kindly, did that figure always move in the hallway in the same direction? I ask because no one ever saw the dude in the street walking the other way.
Manafon do you know if the Cheltenham ghost always went in the same direction?

Tweed--The idea of getting the attention of a residual apparition has surfaced in a few case studies I have read. My "go to" example, which perfectly illustrates the problem of using the term "residual ghost" as a blanket explanation, is the Cheltenham Ghost. One of the very best documented cases of a recurring apparition on record, this apparition appeared numerous times to the Despard family and their staff.

Over several years this apparition was seen by nearly twenty people. This apparition would seem to fit the classic example of a residual type of ghost. She always traced the same route, and appeared and vanished in the same locations. However, the eldest daughter, who was particularly fascinated by the ghost (and worked in conjunction with the SPR) spoke directly to the apparition on at least two occasions. When she did this the "residual" ghost broke from its pattern and stopped, hesitated and seemed as if ready to speak.

What is really fascinating is that it is clear the apparition heard the words directed at it. Some psychical researchers believe the residual type of apparition may, in some cases at least, be something that might be better termed a somnambulistic apparition. In other words, like a sleepwalker, the apparition is in a type of stupor where it can carry out basic actions like walking and navigating a well known route. When a sleepwalker is directly spoken to, on occasion, the person addressing them may receive a slurred or garbled reply. The sleepwalker may also stop when spoken to. It's as if the residual ghost is repeating certain actions over and over in its mind.

Why this occurs is, of course, a complete mystery but there are enough compelling cases on record that suggest some hauntings that are termed residual may be, more precisely, somnambulistic. It's cool stuff!

Very interesting account. I get why most are defaulting to your father as a likely candidate. But I think you put it well with

"he would have known that this would frighten my mother and would have been to considerate of her to scare her by making noises or walking around."

My dad died when I was young so people immediately default to him as prime suspect when it comes to my own occurrences. But I don't buy that for the same reasons you describe. He would never do anything that he knew would terrify me.

I'm also interested in the both visual and audio components of your story. Apologies if I missed someone asking this, but did anyone go down to investigate while the workbench sounds were in progress? Just wondering if the visual and audio experiences would have occurred contemporaneously.

Interacting with a residual. That's an interesting one too. Trying to get its attention. Certainly something for a braver person than me.

Hi Kindly Refrain, thanks for another thought provoking account. This time it's the living who're perplexing. I find denial in the face of ghosts so fascinating, and I've loved reading all the comments here about this. It's such a deeply personal topic for some and I can relate to your family's delicate handling of the topic around your mother. Well done to you guys!

This getting a residual's attention idea is also completely fascinating. Manafon, or anyone, any theories on how that happens?

Wish-Not, glad to hear from you again. Thanks for your kind words and for protecting my self esteem.

My sister does/did have some "stuff" going on there but I don't (yet) have permission to elaborate. It is not known if there are still occurrence's at my mother's former home. I can say that my sister has never mentioned seeing a shadow man anywhere.

I think that denial is a way of dealing with it but not a helpful way. If your own ears and eyes are telling you something it seems to me that it would be a heavy internal burden to continually deny that it is happening. Just as any other lie would be.

Punkysmama, sorry I blew your name in my other post. Wow the 50 character requirement is making me apologize longer. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I gave you some extra sorrys.

Hello PunksyMama, I really enjoy your accounts as well.

It was indeed common for my father to work on things at the work bench.

Part of me thinks that it may well have been my father, however, he would have known that this would frighten my mother and would have been to considerate of her to scare her by making noises or walking around.

A larger part of me thinks that this was something else or as Manafon1 suggests, a "semi-sentient-residual" (forgive my oversimplification Manafon1).

There are some suggestions that he (it) did not move along with my mother but hangs around nearby. (I do not yet have permission to elaborate on that.)

Hi RedBlackRosemama, I don't recall saying the figure was bad. If it came through that way I did not intend it.

If it was my father's spirit and he was there to take my mother home he was hanging around a long, long time waiting. He was a loving husband but also a practical man and I suspect his timing would have been more efficient. Then again what's time on the other side?

Manafon1, I appreciate you liking the account.

I suspect, as well, that the same entity was responsible for both the visuals and the audio.

Since my oldest daughter saw the figure quite often during the visits we made it would seem that it probably took place very frequently, counting days we were not there. It also did not seem to vary from its habits at these times. This does make it seem more of the residual haunting type of occurrence.

The basement sounds indicate that more was going on than mere repetition, however, as that did not seem to take place with a regular period or in concert with the appearances. So perhaps theories about residuals having some capabilities holds water here.

None of my children ever spoke to it and I am certain my mother would not have either. From a research perspective it would have been very interesting to see if there was a response.

Kindly- Thanks for another great story. I completely understand the need to have someone with you when investigating a possible "haunting". There is comfort in numbers.

So, are you implying that your sister now has the shadow man in her basement? Kind of seems that way. Stops there and starts at hers?

Oh, I also understand the concept of denial. There are those that just refuse to accept the possibility of something if it does not fit their believes. No matter how strong the evidence. For some, I think, is their way of dealing with it.

Can't wait until your next Kindly. Thanks for sharing this one. Have a great weekend.

Hello Kindly_refrain,

Thank you for sharing such an interesting story. I wonder, was it common for you father to work in the basement at the wood bench?

He seemed to have carried on "living" there with your mother. I wonder if this shadow being was a manifestation of your father, if he left once she passed on as well?

Very interesting that he was visible to his presumed grand-babies (presumed because we don't actually know who the being was).

Very curious! Thank you for sharing! 😁

Are you sure this figure is bad? I mean you say your father passed away in 1990 same my father too anyway maybe it's your father never know could be him taking your mother home when it was her time just saying...

Kindly refrain--This was another well told account. What makes it particularly compelling is that multiple people saw the shadowy male figure, including your mother. That this figure was seen coming up from the basement where the sounds of someone working at their work bench (including the specific sound of a vice being used) was heard by your mother makes it even more interesting. One could conclude without stretching credulity too much, that the figure and the sounds of activity in the basement, were caused by the same figure.

It does seem the activity at your mother's house falls in line with what is commonly referred to as a residual haunting. As I have brought up on this site several times, I am of the belief (as are many psychical researchers) that there is more to many cases of residual hauntings than a mere unthinking repetition of certain actions. It would have been fascinating to have noted if the figure might have acknowledged, even faintly, words directly addressed to it. That said, it is a great example of a haunting experienced by multiple people over a period of many years. Thanks for sharing!