How do you deal with "the unexplained"? (details within, obviously)

I’m a explorer type and a researcher from hell type too.
I am pretty grounded but, you never know what kind of weird shit can go down either. haha
Actually, I have yet to find out what one of the far neighbors was screaming about yesterday morning. The guy is about 10 acres over and we heard him screaming, all the way to his house from the far side of his property yesterday.

He screamed ” Aaaah, aaaaahhhhh, AAAAAHHHHHH” running away as his screams faded away. Maybe he got bit by a rattlesnake, maybe he discovered one of his animals dead from a cougar attack, maybe he saw a cougar, but running and screaming would not be the way to handle that. lol
Maybe his screams faded away because a Cougar took him down and for all I know he is buried under sticks and leaves out in the woods. LMAO.

I fugure oif anything big went down the other neighbors will let us know, the grapevine is pretty tight out here, not much goes down without knowing about it.

pretty obvious

When I was a young teen, I would be alone in the house some mornings, and I would hear what sounded like someone slowly quietly sneaking up the stairs, which reached my floor about five feet from my open bedroom door.

What I would do, is try to talk myself out of it, then be more quiet than the theoretical intruder, and creep to a big stick, then creep up to the corner of the doorway and wait and listen, plan, and be ready to attack. Then I’d either approach the stairs, or yell or throw something around the corner to spook the theoretical intruder, and finally approach the corner.

There was never a physical intruder, but it kept happening.

As for phone calls, hey, I grew up in the 70’s before any sort of caller ID or computer tracking/recording of every freaking call. Prank calls were a thing, and kids I knew did them a lot. So a voiceless prank call is not a high alert for me, and I know how to say fun things or make weird sounds or loud noises into the phone to discourage them. If it is actually someone messing with or stalking you via phone, the joke may be on them due to all the nasty phone records that are kept and available to the police.

Also as a kid, we went through people’s yards. I’d think someone was in my yard. Footprints are footprints, and there are burglars. Also kids and mailmen and who knows whom. I might check out where they led. I might ask my neighbors if they’d seen anyone in the yard.

The world has people in it, and I actually feel more comfortable in a world where people are allowed to walk around and make phone calls (even prank calls) without being tracked or explaining themselves, as opposed to one where everything’s suspicious and frightening and needs to be controlled.

However there are also burglars and worse, and I take practical measures about those, too. When people have actually broken into my homes, I’ve let the police and my neighbors know, and set up defensive systems to nail them in various ways if they come back. When someone’s tried to maliciously enter when I’m home, I’ve generally let out a battle cry and gone for that big stick or something… 911 is also a good call.

If something really uncanny is happening, then I do get curious and try to figure it out, and that’s been unsettling to me before.

And finally, though this confronts A), I’ve also now met many intelligent and sane people who have had experiences with ghosts, spirits, and so on, and also quite a few people who have ways of handling those. And I’ve had some experience of that, too. They’re there, but I’m not particularly frightened by them, though it is very eye-opening and strange to experience, and it’s changed my view of the world quite a bit. Physical crazy humans are far more dangerous, generally.

There is always an explanation to everything. Just believe that.

Someone burped twice in my house two nights ago when I was alone in the house. I set up my stuffed black Lab as a guard dog and went to bed.

My dad suddenly passed away and 3 days later on my voice mail at work was a message that came in at 3:42 am that was nothing short of angry noise….and I mean ANGRY! It was Poltergeist pissed that went on for 10+ minutes and I can only imagine it was my dad letting me know that what had happened to him was not supposed to have…There are many more “events” that happened after his death I have no other explanation other than he was messaging us.

@Cruiser how do you know it was your dad and not a wrong number? Were there any words?

@Dutchess_III I don’t really know it was my dad….but it was unlike anything I have ever heard before and not even close! It was static one second and then sounded like you stuck the phone out the window of a car at 90 MPH and then quite and then loud static and click click 90 MPH blast over and over. It just sounds so angry and not like anything I have ever heard before. Definitely not a butt dial or any other fluke phone whatever I have heard before. Give me your email and I can email a recording of this message.

I am somewhat a skeptic and wasn’t even scared, but I DID experience footsteps around an old farmhouse and knocking on a door several times one night. I was more fascinated than afraid. I realize some people’s encounters with ghosts are truly terrifying. Mine wasn’t. But it happened—and I know it is real.

Here is the story in full, if you have time to read it.

I really don’t know what to think of ghosts. I have heard of the phenomenon from reliable sources but never really knew until what I experienced for myself.

My friend Christi and I (we live in Memphis) were going to a Halloween ‘Zombie Hunt’ with Christi’s boyfriend, Brad, in Michigan City, Mississippi just an hour or so away. And in order to not make the trip back to Memphis after such an exciting, late night—we were going to stay with Brad (Christi’s boyfriend), who lived in a small house in Chalybeate, Mississippi—about 40 minutes further down the road.

It was a poor but somewhat pleasant house, a fairly small house built in the Craftsman/Prairie style probably about 1925 or 1930 – - basically a simple country /farmhouse with just a few rooms.

When Christi and I first arrived at Brad’s house, it was twilight in October, I remember the first time Christi pointed the house out to me from the highway.

Though small and unimpressive, right away I felt that the house was haunted, and admitted this out loud to Christi.

Christi wanted to know “how I knew”. The only sense I had, really, other than the gift of discernment, was something about the placement of the house itself—and that the squarish porches and the angle the house was set just looked kinda freaky to me. The angle to the road was wrong, or something.

Christi told me that Brad (her boyfriend) had tld her that there HAD been a ghost at the house but the ghost was gone now. That it was the ghost of a woman, Christi said that Brad had a picture of the ghost which had shown up in photographs when he (Brad) was actually trying to photograph the ghost—but I am usually a skeptic of such efforts. Which is not to say that a lot of strange things don’t happen.

I’ll admit a lot of weird stuff does occur I’m just not ready to accept that they are “spirits” (especially spirits of the dead). The house had two bedrooms—one a fairly nice guest room—with a hallway between the two (bedrooms) that went to what was once a front door—this
hall (between the bedrooms) opened to a “den” or family room that seemed maybe 14×22 feet—and a fairly decent kitchen.

Christi and Brad slept in Brad’s bedroom. But because the guest bedroom was so stifling hot, I opened a side door (the den door, which may have been the original main entrance) and fell asleep on one of the two leather sofas in the “den” and went to sleep rather fast—awakening at 1:26 in the morning – by that time the house had cooled off enough that maybe the guest bedroom was cool enough to sleep in.

At 1:26–1:30, after walking outside (it had turned somewhat cold) to look at the stars I got good and chilled and went on to bed in the guest room, after closing the outside door hard.

Almost immediately after going back into my room (the guestroom) I started to hear someone walking—in the room I had just been in (the den)—the footsteps circled around the den and wrapped around between the two bedrooms and back into the den. I assumed Brad had gotten up to “secure” the house if he had become aware that I was in for the night.

Minutes later, I heard someone ligthtly knocking on the door (the one I had secured—- there are bushes blocking the old concrete steps to that door but it was at one time possibly the main entrance.

About a minute later I heard the knocking on the door a second time, and considered the remote possibility that Brad had gotten locked out of the house (though I didn’t think he’d let us know that way—he’d most likely come to a window)—when I opened my bedroom door to go check, however, Brad’s dog (behind a closed door in the bedroom with Christi and Brad) started barking—and Brad tried to quieten the dog—he and Christi were asleep or close to it.

No one was in the “den” or at the door, of course. So I went back to my bedroom, whence the footsteps started again in the den .

At 3:00 and 3:17 the knocking happened on the same door again and footsteps continued. I did indeed get the impression that it was a young woman—
probably about 20 from times when being a 20 year old carried a lot more responsibility than it does now. The walking continued from 3:17 until about 4:00 in the morning then I drifted off to sleep.

I heard the walking in my sleep/dreams and was seeing the old floorboards and ceiling boards in my dreams as I guess I continued to hear the footsteps.

I want to re-emphasize that I was well awake enough to investigate this phenomenon and notice the time. I did not ever experience the “threat” of anything demonic nor was I afraid. I don’t know what a ‘ghost’ is, but I felt like this one must have wanted to see if anyone she knew still lived at the house,or was aware of the great passage of time.

Anyhow, GHOSTS fascinate me but Christi is very uneasy about them. What I heard that night was similar to what Brad had experienced. I guess the dog just was used to hearing it and didn’t consider it/her a threat. Dogs seem to accept things as just so, and seem to be able to discern / run from true evil—

so I feel my own insight was pretty consistent with the dog’s—it didn’t scare me. I’m kinda glad to know that there ARE mysteries we can’t explore fully with science.