Things that go bump in the night
There have been quite a few times when I have been talking with a group of people and somehow the conversation will turn towards "ghost stories." Every time, there was always someone who had an experience for which they could not find a mundane explanation. I myself have had a few unusual experiences. Inevitably, there are skeptics in the group who, even given the absence of any other reasonable causes, will claim that the person telling the story must have been mistaken. However, the skeptics were not there, and they themselves have never experienced something similar, or they would know that it happened. It's a matter of faith, when your brain is desperately trying to find a logical explanation for something that cannot be rationally explained. Perception can be distorted, but the few times an unusual experience has happened to me, there was no room for doubt in my mind while it was happening. The first two happened when I was in college, and the third happened today.
The first time, I was in my bedroom. It was late at night, my lights were on, and I was reading in bed. I started to feel a prickling sensation over my face, like when you get near something with a lot of static electricity, but it felt more like a touch. And then, I saw the foot of my bed go down, like someone had just sat there.
The second time, I was in my car. It was morning, and I was driving to my morning class, so it would have been around 8-9 in the morning. I was stopped at a red light waiting to turn left when I felt as if someone was caressing my neck. i was so surprised that I jammed on my brakes, so it was a good thing that I was already stopped.
Usually when stories like the above happen, someone has just died in the person's family, but no one was ill or died around either of those times. However, I have always believed in guardian angels, so perhaps I can attribute these stories to them.
As for this third time, it has been almost a week since my grandfather died. I've been spending a lot of time over at my grandma's house since it happened. When I arrived tonight, at about 6:30 pm, I opened the front door. There was no one in the living room, but the rocking chair was rocking like someone had just jumped up from it. So I called out, but the house was quiet as if no one was there. So I walked through the house and out the back door, and my grandmother and my great aunt (who has been staying with my grandmother this week) were sitting out in the backyard with my parents. So I asked them if they had just come outside, but they had been there for half an hour. There had been no one in the house for half an hour, and the chair was rocking as I opened the door, so I couldn't have knocked it with anything. We tried to make it happen again just by opening the door, but there was no real physical way that just opening the door could have caused it. So we think that my grandfather was paying a visit. I hope that he pays my cousin John a visit, because John does not believe in souls or in the afterlife, and I'm sure that it would be comforting to know that Grandpa wasn't just gone.
Life is a lot more interesting when you believe that there is more than you can rationally explain.