Experiences of the supernatural?
Context: my French conversation group has as its next topic later this week “what is your experience, if any, of the supernatural?” (Or words to that effect.)
I cannot think what I can say.
I have had no ghostly or weird experiences of that nature.
I suppose I might think of something where events have been more than coincidental, and I might see the hand of God in them, but nobody else in my group has any Christian faith or any other religious leanings, so I am struggling to think what sort of situations I might talk about.
I am looking for inspiration from shipmates, especially of a light-hearted nature.
What might be attributed to “the supernatural”?
I cannot think what I can say.
I have had no ghostly or weird experiences of that nature.
I suppose I might think of something where events have been more than coincidental, and I might see the hand of God in them, but nobody else in my group has any Christian faith or any other religious leanings, so I am struggling to think what sort of situations I might talk about.
I am looking for inspiration from shipmates, especially of a light-hearted nature.
What might be attributed to “the supernatural”?
Comments
We are encouraged to tell other people’s stories, so, with your permission, I will do so. I just need the ideas, as I am not imaginative enough.
It was mid September many years ago. At 4.30 I suddenly remembered that I had to post a birthday card for a birthday the following day. I dashed around, writing the card, and envelope, and finding my purse to put money in it, then jogged to the post office. I was relieved to catch the last post (5pm) by the skin of my teeth.
I started to walk home. I was trying to remember if there was anything I should buy, while I was passing the shops. Milk? Bread? Eggs? Our church is surrounded by a graveyard and as I was passing I noticed a stout middle aged woman kneeling on one of the graves, arranging a bunch of large white flowers. She was wearing a short-sleeved cornflower blue dress. I passed her and had walked on maybe 60 feet (still on the pavement running alongside the churchyard) when it struck me that it was a chilly September afternoon and she was in a summer dress. Thinking that she must be a visitor, I turned round to offer to let her into the church to look round. She wasn't there as I walked back, but there's a wall round the churchyard and only one way in, so I thought she'd be somewhere in the churchyard, as I didn't think she'd had time to leave. I went in and wandered round looking for her but she wasn't there. I was puzzled but thought I'd somehow missed her. So I went to see which grave had the white flowers.
There were no white flowers.
KarlLB suggested a simple explanation - she was not laying flowers on the grave, but stealing them, hence legging it sharply as soon as she had scooped them up.
Apart from that excellent explanation, I still don't understand it. Everything was humdrum and everyday, not remotely spooky, until the point at which I realised that there were no white flowers.
An elderly lady - JT - of Our Place's congregation (she died 12 years ago this week) lived in a house - a former shop - whose front door opened directly onto the wide pavement of a busy street.
One day (she told me) she had gone out onto the pavement for some reason, and accidentally closed and locked the door behind her. Of course, she tried the door - it was indeed shut fast - and she didn't have the key with her.
She was just starting to panic (her husband was ill in bed, and unable to get up, let alone come to the door) when a Young Lady asked if she could help. JT had not seen where the Young Lady had come from, but explained what had happened. The Young Lady tried the door, which immediately opened.
JT entered the house, turned round to give profuse thanks, but there was no-one to be seen, and no nearby alleyway or other shop into which the Young Lady could have gone. There was no Young Lady, or anybody remotely resembling one, to be seen on the wide pavement, although JT looked up, down, and across the street...
What do you think of that? she asked me. O, said I (in all seriousness), I think you were visited by An Angel Of The Lord. JT agreed that this was no doubt the case.
Ah, French orals! The game where you learn a handful of stock phrases, and try to work them into whatever scenario you get given.
Her vast number of siblings and cousins all worked in service. She had been a tweenie in great houses. She married up. To the butler and chauffeur of one.
Whilst working with a kinswoman in a great house, there was 'a fall of ice'. Inside. A hundred years ago. But not winter. Her relative just said, 'He's dead'. And he was. In the Arctic. A close relative. That day. It transpired.
I tried to rationalize it to Nan. She shook her head rapidly, slightly, mouth turned down, 'Oh no Martin' with absolute dismissal.
The chill always returns.
Was that me? I don’t remember it!
Thank goodness nobody is awarding marks at our u3a French group.
@Leorning Cniht, there are marks awarded for Content in GCSE, and if you don’t score on Content ie relevance, your score for language is slashed.
Fortunately, "Je ne comprends pas" and "pouvez-vous parler plus lentement?" are always relevant.
I was a sensitive child, with an unsettling talent for being able to read people and situations which I still have, and my mother was convinced I had ‘the gift’ (what would have been termed a witch in previous centuries) and she would turn to me for advice. She was right in that I am unusually empathic and naturally intuitive - I feel things instinctively and deeply - but what she didn’t know is that I have manic depression, which is an affective disorder which impacts on emotional behaviour. Still, I reckon my mania would have been enough to get me burnt as a witch in the seventeenth century!
(Probably not helpful for your class though, I would go for something like NEQ’s story.)
I am inclined to think that one could definitely have “the gift” (or various gifts) and also have emotional disorders along with that. But I don’t want to presume about what you may believe about such matters.
It was only when I came fully around, a few moments later, that I recalled that my dog had died a couple of months earlier.
That's thought-provoking and lovely to read @Heavenlyannie .
This thread reminds me of a chapter in Elizabeth Goudge's autobiography The Joy of the Snow where she discusses the supernatural. I must go and reread it.
On the other hand, I've got Irish gypsy blood and my mum had the sight, so although I remain quite sceptical I've had enough first hand experience to know that weird stuff does happen, and the best approach is to leave it alone.
I have never seen my mother so pale and angry as the day she found us - we were all staying with family friends - with a ouija board.
Our house now definitely has occupants other than us, but they're nice/seem to like us. There's something very malevolent in my dad's house. We moved in in 1987 and after I'd taken my now wife there about 10 years ago on the drive back she unprompted told me exactly which two places weren't nice. The two places that have never been nice.
We actually ended up having our university house, back in 2001, blessed. This isn't the story in my first para! But *that* was a weird house. I know we were all students, and probably egging each other on, but I've seen bottles crashing from mantlepieces, people going up and down the stairs out of the corner of my eye - and the worst one, the scream of the 15 stone rugby player who slept on the top floor and woke one night in bed, opened his eyes and saw a figure standing at the foot of his bed. He closed his eyes. He opened them again and the face was two inches from his, staring straight back.
At that point, we got the professionals involved. Bit of Holy Water, prayer, and the whole thing settled down. Wasn't full on deliverance ministry mind.
I scuttled off sharpish. The Devil at my heels. He attacked me with a thunderstorm after my adult baptism.
The tricks the mind plays eh?
It was pareidolia. My mind made it up in the cacophony of sounds.
He became ever more remote, even while God got closer.
But for one more close encounter to come.
But there was one time, while preaching, I went into a rendition of the pharisee who had invited Jesus to a meal, and an unnamed women can in and washed his feet with oil, drying them with her hair. I was so in character that it disturbed one of the women in the congregation. Later, I spoke to her. She said as I went into the character, a spirit entered the sanctuary. She saw it fill me. After I came out of the character, she said she saw the spirit leave me and exit outside the sanctuary. We talked about this spirit. She told me it seemed friendly, She eventually concluded it was a manifestation of the Holy Spirit.
Had another neighbor who believed her house was haunted. I did a blessing of the home. No more spirits.
Other experiences as well.
I don't really have anything I would call supernatural. But here is an oddity. I give my cars names. Well, basically the same name ("Sarah Jane") and then number them as time goes on. And I always treat them as sentient because it amuses me.
So let me tell you about Sarah Jane IV, a/k/a "Baby Sarah" (all of them have had nicknames). I was driving with a friend down a dark street, going about 45 mph. Suddenly Baby Sarah slowed down. Understand: I was driving. I did not slow down. She did. My friend even heard me ask myself "Why are we slowing down?" And then I saw it. Up ahead of us was unmarked road construction/demolition. A big unmarked hole in the road that would have caused damage or an accident if we had hit it at full speed. Because we were moving slowly, I could avoid it. I hadn't seen it. My friend hadn't seen it. Baby Sarah slowed down (on her own regardless of what I was doing as driver) because SHE saw it.
My friend might not believe it of any of my other Sarahs, but she does join me in believing that Baby Sarah was sentient, and dedicated to keeping me safe.
I could also tell you the story of how Baby Sarah got me home safely over 10 miles despite having blown out TWO tires in potholes--but even I find that one hard to believe. Or how, when she finally died last year, she got me home---despite the engine failure she sustained several blocks away from home being so massive that the next morning she was just a paperweight.
Supernatural? It doesn't fit the traditional categories. But I grieved when Baby Sarah died. My sweet daughter the car.
Perhaps old Will was right about there being more things in heaven and on earth than dreamed of...
Incidentally, a book very worth reading on this sort of thing is Deliverance by Jason Bray. He's an Anglican diocesan exorcist; having been jumped on by the press he tells his story, in a very understated and very British way. There's more about diocesan insurance than actual exorcism!
Absolutely. And some of us would not balk at the notion of inanimate objects having their own spiritual natures…
We have driven that stretch of highway several times since, but we have never located that motel. It's as if it never existed.
Some other people we have known over the years tell us they have had similar experiences.
I wonder if these ghost motels take credit cards? And what appears on the statement?
A previous vicar was called in to do house blessings on a local house. He admitted later that he had actually done an exorcism.
I might have kept quiet about that given the rules if I were him... mind you, IIRC deliverance ministry became a diocesan reserved thing quite late so I suppose it might pre-date that.
I'll try and avoid it with my final encounter with the forces of darkness masquerading as an angel of light.
Back in the day when I was being plagued with thunderstorms by Satan, whispering my name in the roar of a waterfall, I used to test myself by going for walks late at night in to the empty countryside south of Leamington. I've done it in the Schwarzwald since. Frit me rigid.
So anyway, there I was, coming back from south east, now turned north, and an unearthly glow was in the treeline. It didn't move. It's a lovely, intense copse in the grounds of The long gone Beeches, a former home for wayward boys. The closer I got, not much, uphill, the more ethereal it got, the more the hair went up on the back of my neck. I froze like my blood and stared and stared. No change. I decided to face my fear all the way. So I did. In to the wood. The moon had risen behind the hill. And in a single shaft of space through the phyllosphere, it shone only on a tree stump. Unearthly indeed. Moonly. So I always stare down such atavistic fears since.
ISIRTA c1965
Occam's Razor again - a Boar or a Man would have manifested themselves fairly quickly, so a smaller animal probably snapped the twig, and then itself froze in fear of Martin...
Dear me. What a boring old rationalist I am.
It was a loud snap about 10m away. It may have been the snapping off of a dead lower larch branch being brushed against. It wasn't a dried twiglet under a bunny's paw.
Are there Badgers to be found in that forest? Or Deer? Creatures rightly wary of Humming Beans...
The priest concerned was not (AFAIK) the official Diocesan Minister of Deliverance, but I have no doubt that he took advice. He told me later that prayer had sufficed to rid the young couple concerned of the nuisance. He mentioned it to me, as I (then holding a minor Office in the parish) was the first person to be approached regarding the problem, which I immediately referred upstairs to the priest!
Again AFAIK the matter was never mentioned to, or referred to by, any other person. Discretion in such situations is vital.
It began to move. It was rather like watching a dog with a torch in its mouth, although the light never turned away from us. It began to move quite quickly, and suddenly it was right down the far end of the field - but got there faster than even a greyhound could run.
We watched this for several minutes, quite bemused. Then the light simply vanished.
I have never had a satisfactory explanation. But for the avoidance of doubt, I was neither drunk nor on drugs, and my dog watched it with as much fascination as I did myself.
When my mother asked her about it she said it was nothing and they went out as planned. Only later did she say that she was sure she had seen her dead sister standing on the landing looking up at her.
Some appear to be, yes. Those are generally called “residual hauntings” as opposed to the ones in which there is still someone’s soul stuck there.
Deer aren't nocturnal. Badgers don't live in conifer forest. So, Occam's razor says boar or man. And men are more nocturnal. So are wolves of course... Trained humans don't move for 20 minutes. I agree a pig would move away.
Being stuck somewhere (for how long?) seems a pretty terrible thing to happen to a soul. Having reread the relevant chapter in Elizabeth Goudge's The Joy of the Snow I prefer the shell explanation:
"The suggestion is that it is not an earthbound spirit but a cast-off shell. As we go through life we leave old selves behind us as a snake leaves old skins... There may be a great grief, or some other rending or terrible experience, and the person who emerges from it is not the same.
"According to the shell theory, someone who has passed through great suffering, or perhaps great joy, in a particular place has lived so intensely that something of himself, some fragment of his eternal living, remains in the place and can be seen even though the person who suffered or enjoyed has passed to a new life and severed all connection with his cast-off shells."
Yes. Though that often seems to be because of something they can't or won't let go of. I hope I don't do that when the time comes. Though of course the saints, and apparently some of our own beloved dead at times (whom I assume are in the arms of God, formally canonized or not), seem to be able to connect with us without being "trapped" on Earth in that way. The ghosts who seem stuck here don't generally seem happy. God bless them.
It has been so long ago, I do not remember if there was a charge or if she paid cash.
Fair enough. I wasn't trying to diminish what must have been a scary experience for you - merely suggesting that there might be several explanations for it.
I forgot about it and got on with my work. Later that afternoon I was working in my room and there was a knock on my door. Without thinking I said "Come in M..." and stopped mid name because I had no reason to think it was Madeleine the Chaplain. As it turned out, it was her and she needed someone relatively slim to slide into her hatchback car via the boot because she'd locked her keys in.
It could have been a coincidence, but in the three years I'd lived there, she'd never come to my room before. I don't think I'd seen her anywhere else in the Chaplaincy except the ground floor as that's where her office and the chapel were. I don't think it is unrelated that the feeling of certainty came as I was waking up, or that we'd become good friends during my time there.