Grins! No spirits here at this house, though I lived in a house with a restless and not very pleasant spirit as a child.

Perhaps Bernard can come collect his hitch hikers!

On Saturday night our family and friends gathered for our annual pumpkin carving and the conversation naturally turned towards ghosts and unexplained happenings. I remembered a night from when I lived in Spokane, WA and worked at the restaurant Patsy Clarks Mansion. Definitely hard to explain and random things happened in that beautiful old place. My most memorable experience was of one night when we had been joking all night long about the ghosts and the family who used to reside there after putting on a private party. When I went to open a door from one room to another as I was leaving it simply would NOT open. Not one tiny bit no matter what I did. I tried for about twenty minutes and the door had no lock on it. Finally I grabbed a friend from downstairs to come and try and she barely touched the knob and it popped right open. Paranormal? Who knows. It was strange though. It just felt like someone in the house didn't find my little jokes and comments from earlier all that amusing.

Kate

Kate, that would definitely spook me - thanks for sharing!

Bernard is still with us, and so I'll mention to him to take any loose spirits with him when he goes, which will be one week from today.

This afternoon my printer at work suddenly started printing copies of one of my drawings, and I had to turn it off to make it stop. With machines, a lot of things can go wrong to make something like that happen, but it is still disconcerting, especially since the warehouse here is known to be haunted.

Lars

We have a microwave in our vacation home that turns itself on and we have joked that we have a haunted house because of it. However, I think it is just a cheap microwave. We keep it unplugged. You never know though! We've always felt like we had happy spirits in the house. There are good vibrations there. Could be we are just so glad to be there that we confuse those feelings with happy spirits.

Glad you enjoyed that Lars. Also in the name of clarification, I had successfully opened that door dozens upon dozens of times before without ever having a problem. Nor did that ever happen again. Just that one time for no apparent reason.

Kate

Kate, I know Patsy Clark's. I've heard it's haunted. I'll have to tell the Kid that story...she went there on a field trip in jr. high so they could practice table manners (yeah that worked well, lol).

We built our kitchen...I'll be the one haunting it, hehe.

Well, we have a loo that flushes itself! But on a nicer side, the printer once just printed out a heart all by itself. aaaah!

Not in my kitchen, BUT my brother has a cowboy dressed in a long black duster and black cowboy hat in one of his upstairs bedrooms. I was staying with them after our house sold and DH was already work in Reno. No one told me he was there but when he startled me in the middle of the night I told them the next morning. They all laughed and said he hasd been there since they moved in.

Linda

Well, I solved my kitchen mystery. It turns out that many people have B&D blenders that turn on by themselves, including my office mate Dana. The printer is another story. Last night I checked my transits for Mercury and Uranus transits and found Uranus to be exactly squared to my natal Uranus, being only 0 degrees and 09 minutes off from exact. That is a long lasting transit, but the effects can be intense when it is exact. There was a Mars transit too, but I forgot to bring my transit with me this morning.

I've never seen ghosts, but I have seen them move things right in front of me, and I've photographed what looks like supernatural energy (or some odd sort of energy).

Lars

I find ghost stories to be fascinating. I've never really seen anything myself but I have heard stories from relatives that are very credible. In one really old home that my sister lived in, she saw a chair slide down the hall and her two girls where in their room and a ceramic bear flew off the shelf across the room.

Katie that's neat you know Patsy Clarks! It used to be a really incredibly place. I believe it is owned by a law firm now. Our former banquet manager had weird experiences all the time like having her hair lifted up but no one was there. She gave the best ghost tours of the property way back when.

Kate

I have a ghost that latched on to me when I was a kid, 40 years ago, when we moved to the new house. Now I live in the house next door and he has relocated to be with me. He still goes back to prank my mother now and then. He likes to play electrical pranks, lights on and off, doors open and close, and if I scold him, he's been known to undo what he just did. Most annoying is when he switches the frequencies on the garage door openers, and the wrong one opens the wrong door. He likes to play with the microwave, too. If things disappear or won't cooperate, we simply blame the "house ghost".

I did some research and actually know who he is. He killed himself in the new house, which is why the owners were selling. I guess there is something to be said for disclosure in real estate after all!!

I heard once it was the law in California to disclose if a property is haunted. I have no idea if there is any truth to that. Interesting concept though.

Kate

Disclosure of a haunting? I doubt it since most people say there is no such thing as a ghost...disclosure of a murder or a suicide, ABSOLUTELY!

I have a teeny tiny arsonist that's been following me since college that's dead set on lighting every damn toaster oven I own on fire.

The college toaster almost killed us all. My rocket scientist roommate (not! and that can kinda piss you off when you're an electrical engineer) put 4 plastic placemats on top of the toaster oven and then mistakenly turned it down but not off. The low heat melted the plastic and threw off carcinogenic fumes throughout the house for hours. We threw all the windows open and called the fire department before we figured it out.

One defective toaster oven and another with a couple crumbs decided to randomly flambe just for fun so I could give my fire extinguisher a test run and meet a few cute firemen (oh sure *after* I was married gee thanks GOD).

Oh and don't even think about looking up my rant-a-rama on my delightful new stove a few years back. Make your kids leave the room.

A few years back, DW and I were in the living room. We were the only people in the house. Heard a tremendous 'thunk' coming from kitchen. Went in there, and a big ornamental cast iron tea kettle was lying on the floor. It had been displaced from atop the microwave. Something had moved it.

Thinking poltergeist, we started looking around. Turned out to be a big-*ss possum had somehow gotten in to the kitchen. We chased it out of the house.

It's an old house, and the lazy carpenters who built it years ago didn't put any barrier between the space behind the built in cabinet drawers and the crawlspace below the house. Apparently the possum had managed to crawl up into the kitchen from below the house, in through a kitchen drawer and was exploring the kitchen when it knocked over the tea kettle.

A cleaning lady who once worked for us once opened up a kitchen drawer and found a possum nesting among the dish towels. She let out a shriek. Uh, she no longer cares to work for us...

We have remodeled the kitchen, and there are no more possum pathways. Plus, we now have a yard dog and possums don't care to intrude on dogs' territory.

My parents' house in out in the country with a large creek at one edge of the farm, and there were a lot of wild animals around when I was young. When I was about eleven, I opened the silverware drawer in the kitchen to find a huge cottonmouth snake that had crawled up through a hole next to the plumbing under the sink. I was so terrified that when I tried to scream, no sound came out! My father eventually got the snake outside and killed it. I was lucky that I did not get bitten, as these snakes are very venomous and very aggressive.

Lars

Yes, in California, you must disclose if a house is haunted. Whether you believe in hauntings and the like, or not, anything that can materially affect the resale value of a house must be disclosed; and if people think your house is haunted and it affects their perception of its desirability, then that needs to be disclosed. Many, many years ago, I had a broker's license in California, and while I was studying for it, this issue was mentioned by an instructor. Oh, and BTW, you should have heard the stories she told! She said that if you ever wanted to hear wild haunted house tales, the people to ask were house painters.

A couple of years ago, one of the teacher aides at my school kept complaining that her classroom was haunted. Odd noises and such. I burned sage there one day after class, hoping to cleanse it. Kind of a hippie thing, I guess. No more complaints since then.

I want to add that I have plenty of sage in my kitchen, so if spookiness occurs there, I'll burn some (and try not to set the toaster on fire in the process).

I am not claiming to be a physicist, and you don't need to be one to understand the meaning of this.

If you look into particle physics, you will come across something very interesting.

As humans, we can only perceive and interact with our normal realty, but this reality is only 10% of the total reality in the universe. The other 90% is known as "anti-matter" or "dark matter". We live within and next to this unknown, but real reality world. In some situations, there can be interaction between the two, but that you need to be a professor to understand.

It is very conceivable that some individuals may, at times, under altered state of consciousness, synchronize and tune into this alien anti-matter world and encounter ghostly paranormal experiences.

dcarch

I agree with dcarch that there is much more that we don't know than what we do know. In Michio Kaku's book Hyperspace, he says that according to Einstein's unified field theory, there should be at least ten dimensions in the universe - to make the theory work perfectly. He also says that we are essentially unable to perceive these other dimensions, much as a two dimensional world would not be able to perceive the third dimension. We can speculate about other dimensions, however, and I believe time is considered to be the fourth dimension. Other dimensions could contain wormholes that link us directly with other universes. Certainly the world of the subconscious or "spirit" world could exist in some of these other dimensions, and we may be able to tap into these as they overlap at times. It could be similar to having a sphere pass through the two dimensional world, which would appear first as a point, then an increasingly large circle followed by a diminishing circle, and finally a a point just before it leaves. That's an analogy that Michio Kaku makes.

When I was younger, I would sometimes go into trances and be able to see other worlds that existed in the same space and time (or so it appeared to me) as the mundane world. Of course if I would describe these visions to a psychiatrist, he would label me schizophrenic, but I do not see it that way. BTW, I do not score very well on psychological tests such as the MMPI because of the different way that I see the world. I blame that on the test, however.

Lars

Well, here is my Haunted kitchen expereince.

A while back I invited a few friends and a little Norwich Terrier for dinner.

I had many dishes to make. I bought one of those frozen large tube of Pillsbury flaky biscuits to save time. Those were too much trouble to make.

Before cooking, I put the frozen biscuits on the floor in front of the refrigerator's exhaust grill to thaw. I went down to the basement with my friends where I had a nice wet bar setup.

When it was time to make dinner, I came up to the kitchen. I found the tube was empty and the little doggie was licking the coiled paper tube. I, horrified, ran down to my friend and told her that her tiny dog had swallowed the entire tube of uncooked biscuits and may blow up inside him. We decided to wait and see if we needed to take the dog to the emergency.

Dinner time, the dog was begging for more food. He ate a normal portion of dog food, chewed on a few bones from the dinner table, and finish off with a wedge of cheese cake.

I felt very creepy about the whole thing. A bottomless devil dog?

Much later, I had to replace a light bulb in the kitchen fixture, and there behind the fixture, solidly and perminently glued to the plaster ceiling was the entire tube of biscuit dough. Hard as rock. It cost me a couple grand of dough to fix the plaster and refinish the entire ceiling.

dcarch

I love the story of the dog and the biscuits. I do believe in spirits. Our house was haunted by a prior owner, who died in the house. Hhe'd flush toilets and turn faucets on,slam doors, and we found things mysteriously moved around. And we often heard his footsteps during the night. He's gone now, apparently a house full of noisy kids and pets chased him away.

I, for one, do not believe in ghosts or spirits.

I got a good chuckle out of the dog & biscuit story.
DC, you, of all people should have known
what to expect from a sealed can of biscuits
placed (and left) in a very warm place! !

My 'haunting' experience was a bit alarming.
Sitting quietly and peacefully watching TV one night
(pretty late, in fact)
We heard a sudden very loud bang from the kitchen,
almost like a shot.
Followed by the sound of metal hitting the tile floor.
We checked the kitchen thoroughly, (we thought)
But could find nothing.

A couple of weeks later,
When cleaning the pantry,
I found what had been a VERY out-dated can of apricots.
Or rather, I found what was left of it.
It was wa-a-a-a-a-a-ay back in a corner.

That explained the loud bang.
Still don't know what hit the floor.
Probably something knocked from the shelf by the explosion
And not noticed at the time.

Rusty

(Yeah, I know, check canned goods regularly. . . )
:>)

i am very sensitive to spirits. i seem to pick on on one in most places. it gets worse at night. i was cooking some bacon ALONE in my kitchen about this time last year and my microwave door slammed shut and a female voice said "EW!". no one was around....just me. i didn't see a figure but i definitely heard it.

I have a haunted ice dispenser in my refrigerator. Every once in awhile it will randomly spit an ice cube onto the floor. Maybe someone is trying to kill me by making me slip on an ice cube. Maybe it's just broken.

Posted by dedtired " have a haunted ice dispenser in my refrigerator. Every once in awhile it will randomly spit an ice cube onto the floor. Maybe someone is trying to kill me by making me slip on an ice cube. Maybe it's just broken. "

May not be that strange.

Water expands when frozen. The shape of the container and the ice cube are tapered. However, the friction of the walls of the container can hold on to the ice cube. Stress is built up, until part of the ice melts or the force of the expansion is greater than the friction, then the ice cube is ejected with some force.

dcarch

No ghost in my kitchen. They have seen me cook. pretty scary

I don't know if this counts as being haunted or not, but shortly after my father died, weird stuff kept happening to me.

I went down in the basement to look for something and I walked into an arrow that was sticking out of the target. My father ALWAYS put the arrows away after target practice, so I never thought to look. I ended up bruising my eye and cutting my eyelid.

My mother was staying in a rehab place, because of a broken shoulder. I went into their closet to get her some clothing she wanted. My parents had a walk in closet with bins on the top shelves to store things. Some how, one of the plastic boxes (that was in a bin, mind you) managed to slide down and hit me on the head.

My husband and I went on vacation. Our car needed some work, so Mom said I could use Dad's car. While we were on the cape, somehow, my fingers got smashed in the car door. None of them were broken, thank goodness, but I did need several stitches.

The real kicker came later, when I was talking to two sweet nuns who volunteered at the rehab/nursing home my mother was at. I told them I missed my father a lot. They said, "Oh, don't worry, Cindy, he's looking down at you."

To which I replied, "Yeah, he's looking.. and saying, 'Leave my stuff alone!'"

My kitchen (in fact my entire house) is haunted and has been for years! I spend all day cleaning, then leave only to come home to find a trail of where my messy ghost has been. A cup here, a plate there, a dirty dish in the sink. Shoes there. Yes, SHOES! You didn't know ghosts wore shoes did you? Well, I've decided the ghost is my DH!

btw, I DO believe in ghosts!