About a year and a half ago during midterms, I was in my school dorm and had just awakened from about an 8 hour sleep at 9 pm (I was keeping wacky hours during that time).

I took a shower and afterwards was standing in the bathroom looking in the mirror when I got this terrible nauseous feeling. It's almost indescribable, but I got these pains in my stomach, started sweating and felt like I was going to faint.

Then the scariest thing happened, my vision started to become obscured, but not really darken, it was like when a person rubs their eyes while they're closed and sees "stars." But the creepy thing is that it was happening out of nowhere.

It got to the point where I could not see at all and I felt so ill I thought I was going to collapse. So I hobbled to my bed and laid down. After about 30 seconds my vision cleared up and I felt better, and the whole episode lasted probably no more than a minute. But after that I was so tired.

So I went to sleep again, slept the whole night and didn't awake until next morning. So discounting my shower break, I slept almost 20 hours straight, which I've never done. When I got up I felt fine but I had this weird sensation on my right shoulder blade.

It was like something was touching it. Say you're just wearing a shirt and then stuff a napkin or something down the back of it. It was like that, a slight impression that something's there, almost imperceptible. Except that feeling was continuous, even when I had nothing on my back.

I'd even unconsciously keep touching my back trying to "dislodge" whatever I thought was there. This feeling lasted for two weeks and drove me crazy, but it finally went away on its own.

Afterwards, from talking about it with others I learned (and it depends on what you believe) that the phenomenon meant a spirit had tried to enter my body.

For whatever reason that it happens, it usually occurs in liminal states (going from unconscious to conscious, unclean to clean, etc.) because that's when your spirit is most susceptible. It also can make you feel sick because your body already has its own spirit and is not meant to support another.

Additionally, it also makes you tired, because it essentially amounts to an attack on your spirit which is very draining. While the odd sensation on my back is where the spirit tried to enter.

After hearing all of that I was very O_o but I'm open-minded and consider myself spiritual (not really religious). Probably a really long, unnecessary overshare, but still :/

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1. I lived in a really old, sturdy brownstone during my first year in NYC, the kind where you can't hear your neighbors because the walls are like, solid brick (this was good for when we had parties). There were two apartments on each floor, and the other one on our floor was unoccupied. A little while after I moved in, I started waking up to a smell of cigarette smoke directly over my bed - the kind where it's a thick smoke, except without the smoke. Just a really thick smell, so bad that it'd flare up my asthma. However. It was only in the space from my pillow to about three feet up, and only right around the top of my bed. Nowhere else in the apartment or my room. Just there. And neither my roommate nor I smoked, nor did her previous roommates. There were no windows or vents in my room.

Also, there were more than a few nights where I'd be almost asleep, or I'd wake up from sleep, to the sound of a party in our living room. Like, not the TV being left on, but full-on party. I'd get up and look in the living room, which was empty and pitch-black. It mostly happened when my roommate was gone (she'd experienced it when I was gone too), but there were a couple of nights where we'd both open our doors and look in the living room, freaked out.

2. When I was in college, our Welcome Week leaders would scare us with ghost stories, including the story of a ghost in one of the dorms. The fifth floor of the dorm (a male dorm, most of my guy friends lived there) was abandoned and totally boarded up - when you were inside on the fourth floor, you could see that the staircases to the top floor were completely boarded up and had been for years. As in, there's absolutely no way anyone could get up there. One night, my friends and I were crossing campus to drop off the guys at their dorm and cross the field to our dorm, when one of the guys pointed out one of the fifth floor windows. We would've laughed if he didn't sound terrified. When we looked up, the window was completely illuminated by what looked like candlelight and there was a figure in a top hat standing at the window. Needless to say, we ran like hell back to our dorm, where the guys fell asleep on the couches in our sitting area.

That dorm's been torn down, but I wonder if the ghost is still there!

It's here:

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Over the summer, my family bought a new house. My dad surprised me by calling and telling me to come home for a surprise (I'm in college). So I did, and they bring me to this really old house. The first part of it was build in the late 1880s, and it became its current size in 1904. As a sidenote, I am TERRIFIED of ghosts, and have one of the most overactive imaginations.

So skip ahead a few days. My fam runs out for some errands and I'm left with two of my brothers and my little sister. My sister is napping and my brothers are on the third floor playing videogames, and I'm on the second floor watching TV. All of a sudden I hear music BLASTING from the master bedroom. So here I am shitting bricks, too terrified to know what to do. It stops after a few minutes. Then starts up again. At this point I'm like "holy shit wtf run for your lives." Music finally stops. I don't move, my sister doesn't wake up and the boys can't hear because they're upstairs.

Flash forward 30 minutes. My dad calls, and tells me to see if Chris wants something to eat. And I'm like "who in the bloody hell is Chris?"

"Oh, he's in the basement. He's working on fixing the intercom/stereo system in the house."

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And, um, that's it for me and Ouija boards!

I have to add that I am basically a skeptic. I believe that a lot of ghosty phenomena is perfectly scientifically explicable - but with the caveat that there is a whole lot we don't understand yet. There's a rational reason why these things happen which is yet to be discovered. That said...I really wanna know what happened that afternoon, because I am frankly still a little freaked out (and it happened eighteen years ago).

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I'm fascinated by the paranormal, and I do believe in ghosts. I think there is a thin veil between our world and the spirit world, and some people are much more sensitive to it than others. My grandma is a medium/reiki healer, and whether you believe in the paranormal or not, she really does help people with what she does for them.

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Me, I'm not a spiritual person, but I believe that time is not linear and I believe in the law of conservation of energy. Combine the two and you could get some pretty interesting results, I think.

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He's a ghost! And he writes to us!
Ghostwriter

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Learn about confirmation bias and Occam's razor, and accept James Randi as your lord and savior, amen.

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