Collection of personal accounts

Hello Macabre Monkeys,

I've been at it again, hounding strangers for stories to share. What's amazing is that the more people I talk to, the more I believe most people have had an experience of some kind! Here are a selection of a few stories for your enjoyment.

What did she say?!?
So we all know kids are weird but sometimes the stuff they say might have more meaning than adults realize. Take the case of 4 year old Samantha who while sitting on the edge of her bed kicking her legs as her mom tries to tie her shoelaces looks down and says to her mother "I used to do this for you when I was your Mommy."
Well 'mommy' thinks this is strange but lets it pass not really thinking of it until a few years later when she is reading the results of a past life reading and reaches a paragraph that says Samantha had been in Mommy's life for many past lives but always as parent or guardian or mentor but most often as Mommy's mother.

Another case of independent corroboration?
So we all know that University/College age boys are not the most sensitive or considerate beings on the planet so it's not surprising that when visiting friends at a university town, Jill was given a place to sleep in the excessively creepy basement. You know the kind that hasn't been redecorated since the 70's when wood paneling and deep pile carpet were all the rage. Well to add to the creepy atmosphere Jill spends most of the night hearing noises coming from the stairs to the first floor like someone is skipping up and down them or bouncing a ball and even seeing occasional shadows move even though everyone else slept two floors above. When she could sleep Jill also had some strange dreams that she didn't clearly remember but that felt connected to the noises, as though she wasn't fully asleep. In the morning Jill is talking with the boys who live in the house and begins asking if they have heard these noises before or if they knew what caused them. They tell her that they think its a ghost and they've even had a medium come in...Jill interrupts and without feeling fully conscious of where it came from says "Yeah, his name's Toby, he died when he was 9". This statement is met with open jawwed shock from all 5 boys, one of whom finally manages to say "That's what the medium told us too"

Grandma again?

This story comes from a friend who heard it in high school as it made the rounds through the gossip mill. It is perhaps a localized urban legend but still a fun story. The story goes that it was an average night and a few boys were hanging out at a friend's place in the basement following an evening of typical teenage boy antics which always somehow result in leaving a mega-mess behind them. After a little while the boys here the host's parents go out and then a short time later they hear noise coming from upstairs that sound like things being moved around. So one of the boys says "Are your parents back?" and the host replies "No, that's my grandma." The group looks puzzled and one finally says "uh... I thought your grandmother passed away last year." The host shrugs and says "She did." At this point the group thinks he's just screwing with them so they go upstairs to check out the noises expecting to find their friend's parents cleaning up. What they find is their path of destruction returned to order and no sign of the parents. I guess grandma still hates a mess!

Want to check out more personal stories take a look at past posts:
Renovations cause ghosts?
Time Slip at Waterloo Station
Spooky Dorset
First independent corroboration story, featuring a hooded figure
The haunted stove or grandma stops by to say hi

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He said, She said...We said! Independent Ghost Corroboration

My constant verbal promotion of Death Clicks has once again struck gold. We, here at Death Clicks tend to combine a deep-seated belief in the paranormal and unknowable with a healthy skepticism and even healthier (if extremely twisted) sense of humour. As such, we are often interested in exploring personal accounts and finding or experiencing evidence of ghosts and mikkary (no idea what that is? read the blog post).

One type of evidence often dismissed or over-looked (in my opinion) is independent corroboration of stories from multiple sources. A friend recently shared this story:

When he was around 10 or 11, our friend (we'll call him Jack) was spending some time visiting with his Aunt, Uncle, and two similarly aged cousins. Jack was sharing a room with one of his cousins and was awoken in the middle of the night. In that shaky, 'it's the middle of the night, why am I awake?' way Jack looked around to try and determine what had woken him up. In the course of scanning the room, Jack sees a hooded figure leaning over his cousin's bed. At first, thinking in his sleep-muddled brain that it's his aunt, Jack sits up and begins to call out to her at which point the figure disappears. Jack is by this time terrified, so terrified in fact, that he waits YEARS to ever speak of what happened. Flash forward (hurray for time machines) to a decade or two later and Jack is hanging out with his other cousin (not the sleeper who was hovered over) and asks her about the figure he saw. She tells Jack that she saw this figure around her home constantly when she was a child but that eventually her mother told her to stop talking about it.

The hooded figure is a common figure in paranormal accounts and some believe it's the grim reaper or a demon but what interests me more is if an account of a personal experience can be as easily written off when someone else has had the same or similar experience independently? I think it's understandable to question thousands of claims of seeing Anne Boleyn at the Tower of London, but what about individuals like Jack?

I have my own story similar to this of a figure of a man in jeans and a plaid shirt and foam-mesh (or trucker) hat who would stand in the kitchen doorway. He was always seen only out of the corner of my eye and any time of day but most often during daylight. It wasn't until my family and I were moving out of the house after more than 15 years living there, that anyone said anything about him and we all discovered that we had each seen him on many occasions.

We'd love to hear your stories and what you think about independent corroboration as evidence of the paranormal.