Cynosure

I don't believe in ghosts. And I say this, having myself had several personal experiences that would support a belief in ghosts. That is, I've seen on several occasions what appeared to be a ghost. One time, it appeared as a human-sized wavering in the air. Another time, it appeared as a human-shaped form of utter blackness. Yet another time, it was a hovering ball of phosphorescent energy, about the size of a softball.

There were audible signs, too. Mostly, it was a young woman's voice, sweet yet mischievous. Sometimes, it was a man's voice, gentle yet somehow seductive. Once, it was a child's voice, seemingly innocent. Mostly what they said to me was "Hello" or "Hi" or "Hey, there". One time, as I lay half-sleeping, I felt someone approach and hover over me, and it was the woman's voice that said, "Boo!", then giggled. (By this time I was getting annoyed with all this, so I lifted my head from the pillow and said aloud, "Ha-ha. Very funny.")

Yes, what all of my experiences had in common was, they occurred as I was waking up (mostly in the darkness of night, but sometimes in the light of early morning). According to my research, these were probably "sleep paralysis" dreams that I was experiencing. However, I wasn't paralyzed during my experiences. Like, the time I saw a human-shaped wavering in the air, four to six feet from the foot of my bed, I sat up and thought, "Is this real? Am I awake?" And then I realized that, yes, I was awake! So I threw my pillow at the apparition to see if it was real. (All this did was cause it to dissipate. So much for my scientific approach! LoL.)

These experiences began for me shortly after one night, when my wife and I were sitting in the living room, watching TV and chatting with each other. In the middle of our light conversation, my wife got quiet. I glanced at her and saw a weird look in her eyes. Then she sat up and said, "I just saw a spirit, walking down the stairway and into the living room." Feeling a chill, I looked to the stairway, but I saw nothing. "No," she said, "it's already gone." I thoroughly questioned my wife and analyzed what she saw (or what she thought she saw), but I couldn't make heads or tails out of it.

Days if not weeks before this, we were experiencing numerous instances of weird dimming and brightening of the lights in our house. (We haven't experienced that in the years since all this stuff happened, even though we did nothing to fix the wiring in our house, nor have we had any significant changes in our electricity usage.) It was kind of eerie, when the thing with the lights was happening, but I figured there was a simple, scientific explanation for it. But then the other stuff started happening.

Well, a few days after that, my wife awoke in the night to hear a woman's voice talking in a hushed voice to our daughter, who was 6-years-old at the time. Our daughter was asleep, at the time, but she was mumbling in reply to the ghostly woman's voice.

Me, I continued to be skeptical of all this, even though I believe in God and the afterlife. And then I started having my own experiences, as I've already described.

There's a lot more details about our experiences (mine, in particular) that I haven't gotten into, here, including some stuff that was weirdly sexual in nature... but I digress for now. The bottom line is, I still don't believe in ghosts, per se, and I still question our experiences with the seeming supernatural.