Paranormal Occurrences- Ever had Any?

[PariahPoet]

Came across that story a few days ago. My vote is on dead raccoon. Mostly because of the shape of that front paw. I think the "beak" is just an era of exposed skull where the muzzle is decomposed because you can see there is no lower half to this beak, you can, however, see lower canine teeth.

I love how completely clueless people keep yelling "It's a turtle without its shell!". A turtle's spine is a part of its shell and the fleshy body is attached to the shell. It can't just climb out. Plus turtles don't have teeth.

[lycan94]

Agreed. Looks like a dead racoon to me. Or some taxidermist did it for fun with some spare parts.

[Dreamer]

I tend to have them fairly often, though I don't often talk about them. Not so much any personal insecurities or emotional uneasiness so much as not having any specific need to convince others. To me, the paranormal is a fact of life; it's a collection of phenomena that have yet to be explained, but are still real, coupled with a larger set of possible but unlikely phenomena lumped in. (I'm annoyed when the word "occult" is used, usually by Fundamentalist religious leaders, trying to manufacture a notion of fear and unholiness.) As a Wiccan, my normal religious practices sometimes border on paranormal. I have also experienced both passively and through intention events that seem improbable but plausible by themselves but add up to an awful lot of "coincidences."

Probably the best example of such was when I went to a Six Flags theme park in 1995, having just moved into the Dallas/Fort Worth area to go to medical school. Several of us new students decided to go as a chance to get to know each other better. Our first ride and my first roller coaster ever was one known as the "Texas Giant." After riding it and three or four other rides, I noticed that my car keys were missing, having fallen out of my pockets on one of the rides. I did not know which one. I told the others I was not going to let the lost keys spoil my night, and furthermore that I would get them back; I decided that they fell out while riding the Texas Giant, and that they would be found by the staff. We would ride it a second time, and afterwards I would get off and ask at the control station if the keys were found for a Hyundai Elantra, my car at the time, and that they would hand them over to me. I also told the others that I was visualizing this happening. I mentioned the full moon and how it enhanced the ability to do "spellwork," though I did not specifically mention my newly discovered Wiccan faith. We did ride the Texas Giant shortly afterwards, and I went through the motions I had envisioned, and the keys did turn up, in spite of the darkness and the size of the grassy ground underneath the roller coaster. I got wrong the face of the person at the control station, but I got right the important part about getting the keys back, all the while spooking my company.

Back in high school, I felt that I was stuck in a very mundane realm, one in which I heard about paranormal phenomena but never got to experience it personally. But, now it's fairly commonplace for me to experience events some might consider strange. I have had some luck attempting astral projection a few years back a few times, for instance, and some ghost sightings.

Only one was scary--a hospital bed that rattled in a room in which other night staff workers had previously reported hearing sad wailings. I tried communicating, offering yes-no questions, but the rattling, presumed spirit, was not willing or able to cooperate. None-the-less, the bed responded to movement and more loudly when I talked directly to it, shaking and creaking as though someone had grabbed onto a rail and vigorously shook it. I had heard second-hand that maintainance staff were unable to find a mundane source of the rattling, and no basic electromagnetic phenomena or simple air conditioning problem in the room could account for the force of the shaking or its tendency to respond specifically to people in the room. In another ER where I work, monitors are frequently prone to giving pulse rates and pulse oximetry readings even when they're not connected to anyone. The nurses have nick-named this ghost phenomenon "Charlie." In neither case do I know of a specific traumatic death to account for the ghosts, but untimely deaths are frequent, even routine, in the medical setting.

When buying real estate, whether or not traumatic deaths occurred on the property are part of my standard list of questions, just like property inspections, homeowner's association membership, or the threat of eminent domain. One house I lived in for three years had a previous owner die of natural causes, but no phenomena seemed to have stemmed from her. The house before had a resident ghost cat, a little black kitty cat that would appear in the corner of one's eyesight briefly; my wife and I both saw the cat fairly often, as did occasionally guests, though the presence was a purely benign one.

I've never been to my knowledge abducted by aliens, but I know two people who claim to have been. Neither recommend it.

Probably the eeriest paranormal experience was when I worked in the ER a few years back as a resident. The attending doctor, the nurses, and I were sitting around, talking about dreams, and I told them about one I had, in which I was an American operative, working in Afghanistan against the Taliban. I was out to find, possibly assassinate their leader, who was a bearded man who "looked somewhat like Fiedel Castro." I was cornered by an enemy fighter, until I realized that she was a woman in disguise as a man and a fellow American operative. That was the end of the dream. I had previously learned of the Taliban and their suppression of women's rights. But, what I did not know was what they in real life were planning the following day. The dream was on the morning of September 10th, 2001. We were astonished when we learned the afternoon of the eleventh that fighting broke out in Afghanistan, and that the Taliban were tentatively being implicated in the unfolding attacks. One of the nurses working that day had dreamed the morning before work of running through city streets from a series of explosions, which the dream described as a "national emergency." I postulated that the September 11th attacks were sending out psychic shockwaves forwards and backwards through time, stronger as we neared the event and weakening afterwards. Unfortunately, none of us got enough information out of these vague premonitions to come anywhere close to stopping it--just enough to make us wary of any disaster dream. But, I've had worse catastrophe dreams that did not seem to predict anything other than resolving personal issues or needing not to work so many hours.

Believe it... or not...

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Well, actually, these events seem easily explained through mere coincidence, the dream about the watch being based on your subconcious memories of the theme park and where you thought your watch probably was, and the 9-11 dream could be simply chalked up to something you read. Beleive it or not, I actually give what the others say more credence than your story mainly because you seem like the sort of person that reads supernatural explainations into things that more likely have much more mundane explainations (Especially being a wican and all), the type that Penn and Teller mock weekly on their show Bulls**t. And no, I am not a fundimentalist wicca-basher, just a rational sceptic.

Some of the others stories actually seem much more likely influenced by the supernatural. But then that's just my two cents.