Encounters with the Supernatural

I'm trying to collect some good stories on peoples' brushes with unexplained phenomena for some D20 Modern I intend to run soon. How prevalent are these experiences? Does everyone have one? Just for fun of the topic, let's declare this a skepticism-free zone. I'm a big skeptic myself, but we all know about Ockham's Razor and kids in wheatfields with boards and rope. Let's just have some fun.

I'll get the ball rolling. I've seen a UFO, near Area 51 in fact! About five years ago, my friends and I took a weeklong road trip to Vegas. Being big X-Files fans at the time, we just had to take a day trip out to Area 51. Night had fallen by the time we made it to the valley on the other side of the ridge from the Area. We stopped at the Little Al'e-Inn in Rachel and spent about an hour there browsing the store and talking to the owner (neat guy, BTW). We bought our souvenirs and headed out, wanting to stop at the Black Mailbox on our way.

We pulled our van up to the Black Mailbox (which was white at the time, incidentally) and I hopped out. Immediately, I noticed a bright white light above me, and a whir of helicopter blades hovering above our van. We were being buzzed! The whir became noticeably quieter after only about a 100 feet when it left us. That in itself seemed noteworthy, as you can usually hear a helicopter a mile away.

We had apparently picked a very interesting night to be out in the valley. It looked like there were some kind of maneuvers going on. We could see the lights of a couple dozen helicopters moving along the ridge all around us. They didn't appear to be doing much more than that though, so we started stargazing (an absolutely AMAZING place to do that, as there are no city lights around for like 100 miles).

Something caught my eye along the hill line across from us. It was a dim orange light suspended above a hilltop, which looked somewhat like a flare. I pointed it out to my friends, and no sooner had they turned to look when suddenly it started doing the most bizarre gyrations I've ever seen. It would bob up and down in the air like a cork in water, and side to side, making 90 degree and 180 degree turns with no curves! I noticed that two helicopters were flanking the hill around it. This orange light danced about for 2 minutes or so, and the comments all around were "That can't possibly be a plane or helicopter. NOTHING moves like that." After it had stopped for awhile, we packed it in and drove back to our hotel.

When we got home the next week, I told my boss about it, who was an aviation buff. He told me that he'd read in Popular Mechanics (or something similar) about spy drones the size of toasters which are light enough to move like the object we saw. Still, you gotta wonder...

Before anyone asks, this is not BS. We really saw this.

So anyone else have a UFO/Ghost/Poltergeist/Flukeman story? Does anyone see werewolves anymore? Those seem to have fallen off the map.

When I was a kid, we had an appartment near a train station. The place was old and it had very, very thick glass. The lights of the station were bright and you couldn't block them out without making the entire room completely dark (not an option for a 7-year-old-Biggus!) Anyway, between the movement of the trains and the thick glass, I always had a slowly shifting pattern on my far wall and I would constantly see faces in the patterns ... as if they were people trying to escape something or come and get me somehow.

Spooky.

I used to do some amature ghost hunting and have all kinds of stories. I'l type them up and post them later.. at work right now.

Ok, Supernatural occurences that I have witnessed.

Let me just list one or two to start.

I used to live in an very old house, and if you want to hear more about the house just ask, this house used to be a farmhouse, so there was a fairly large barn (2.5 story) and an old Silo, these structures sat on about 2.5 acres of land that is now forested. Which in turn butted up against a state park, Clear line of site to the barn from the house, the silo obscured by many trees.

Events that have happened to more than myself.
- Screaming Lady - A Woman Screaming outside of bedroom doors, localized to one hallway. Extremely loud, sometimes repeats up to three times an evening.

- Swaying bushes - Large and small bushes lining the driveway sway, specifically occuring in no wind.

And the best so far, (in fact this has made it into my game)
- The White Owl - Repeated sitings by multiple independant people, all without knowledge of what other people have seen. This owl is either normal sized or up to 4 feet tall, and in all cases without any discernable face, no eyes or beak, just a smooth 'face'. Soft white light emanates from it, so that it is easily seen in the dark. Will be standing on the ground, or on a bench, or tree branch, when seen, will 'stare' at person a couple seconds, then always fly into the Barn's second floor wall. This side wall has no holes or windows.

That's all for now, I've got tons, if you want more, just ask.


RX

I think I saw a ghost/apparition.

One night my friend and I needed to swing by his house. He lived with his grandmother at the time.

We parked across the street and I looked into the house and saw her walk into the kitchen. The kitchen blinds were open, so I had a pretty clear view, and I was only 50 feet away.

We went into house and as I walked through the front door, I called out to Granny, saying hi. My friend looked at me and said that she wasn't home, that she was out of town. I told him he had to be wrong, because I just saw her in the kitchen. We went into the kitchen, but sire enough, it was empty.

I though that maybe there was an intruder in the house, but my friend seemed indifferent. He just kind of grinned and went about his business. Later, he told me that the house was haunted and that over the years quite a few strange things had happened, so he really wasn't surprised that I saw something.

Until that day, I though ghost stories were a bunch of crap. But I KNOW I saw a woman in that kitchen! The fact that my friend wasn't surprised, and actually believed me, lent credence to my experience. I wonder who that lady was/is?

Hm... I haven't observed anything spectral beyond certain places in the bush having a really creepy feeling about them.

On the other hand, things people do are sometimes supernaturally tinged... like someone saying my name in my ear when I know for a fact they're on the other side of a few rather large buildings, or my tendency to see 42 seconds on my watch more than half the times I checked it (normally at least 10 minutes apart), or my siblings sitting on opposite ends of the couch occasionally spontaneously pointing at each other and giving each other shocks (I've done something similar once - it screwed up TV reception so I haven't tried again).

I've also done a statistical analysis of psychokinesis (with a really small population though) which came out noticably (20%) in favour of my being able to roll dice to a target number.

This is more 'abilities' than 'phenomena', though, unless Freaky Psychic People are going to be showing up in the game.

Only overtly (and even this isn't) supernatural thing that ever happened to me was once, about 7 years back now, when I woke up suddenly around 3:00 AM (for some reason, I often wake up about 3:00 AM, but that's another tale) experiencing the whole sleep paralysis deal. I saw a human figure, completely pitch black with no features (rather like a DnD shadow) standing in one corner of my room, near my closet. It just stood motionless, looking out my window, and then vanished after a few moments.

Although I do have mysterious dreams - the haunted admissions office at Gettysburg College (Pennsylvania Hall, a former Civil War field hospital, and we all know about the wonders of Civil War-era medicine...) shows up with unnerving regularity in my dreams. Every few nights, I'd say, it appears, whether it makes sense in my dream or not.

I have 3 stories.

1. This was a couple years ago. I was taking a walk with my little brother in Syracuse, NY. We were talking and out of the corner of my eye I saw what I though was a shooting star. I told my brother to look, and it appeard at first to be a shooting star but did not fade, just looked like a star. Then it stopped dead. It was moving fast and stopped. Then it zipped to the right about 5 miles, stopped and imediately went left about the same distance to its starting point. It stopped on a dime and reversed direction very quickly. It seemed to move very fast. Then it got smaller like it was moving directly away from us very quickly. Whole thing lasted about 15 seconds, and My brother saw the whole thing too. It looked like a white light like a normal star but a bit brighter.

2. I was in my apartment over looking the city. It was a very cloudy night, very low to the ground. The amber lights reflecting over the city was very pretty. There was a BRIGHT blue flash in my window. I got up to look adn it was gone. about 10 seconds later it happened again, but was a little distant. It looked like a giant bar of blue light coming through the clouds about 300 yards wide and about a mile long. It flashed and then about 10 seconds later it flashed again. A little further way. I watched it do this for about 10 minutes. Every 10 seconds or so it would flash and be about further way like it was moving at a slow steady pace from south to north. Very wierd. My wife saw this too.

3. In this same appartment we kept feeling like we were being watched and it kept getting worse. We had people over adn they would say the same thing. Sometimes we would see reflections in the glass of people moving quickly. It was there then gone before you could blink. Sometimes we would see a shadow where there wasn't anything, and always that feeling of being watched. Small things seemed to be disturbed. Nothing big, no noises just moved 6 inches from where you left it the night before. This was in the winter so no windows were open. We started feeling very uneasy.

We started using insense and did some buhdist space clearing excersizes. Chanting mantras of protection. We started this abot 6 months after we moved in every day was a little worse. At first when we started doing the insense and mantras things got worse. More unease, more glimpses. We kept 3 sticks of incese burning in each room most of the day. After about 3 weeks we saw no more glimpses and we did not feel like we were being watched. Nothing has happed since.

4. Ok a little more. My wife has "spider sense" Pretty often she will put her hand out and catch something before it falls, before it starts to fall. Or avoid a car accident. She says she can see it a split second before it happens. It is totaly hit or miss, sometimes it doesn't happen for months.

One time when she was 16 a car past her car while her dad was driving. She yelled stop and said they were going to die. 10 seconds later the car that passed them was going through a green light at an intersection and another driver went through a red light very fast and hit them. The people in the car that was hit died. She saw the whole thing before it happened.

I also had a similar experience. My mother was driving and we were going behind a mall. There was a sharp right were the corner of the building was. Before we got there I yelled at her to stop. I said a red car is coming fast around the corner. Sure enough a little red car zips around the corner not stoping and would have hit us if we did not stop. There was no way I could see anything around the corner due to the building.

I have two.

First on the list is my UFO sighting.

My friend Mike and I were about 11 years old, and were hanging out in my Grandparent's backyard in British Columbia, Canada shooting our BB guns at tin cans when way off in the distance there was an object that looked like 2 multifaceted spheres connected by a bar. It tumbelled end over end from one horizon to another in about 10 seconds.

During it's "flight" it went in front of one mountain, and behind another, so we knew it was about 100 miles away.

It didn't seem like a big deal to us at the time (we thought it was some kind of balloon), but given the speed it was going, we were just amazed a couple of days later after giving it some thought.

Still don't have any clue what it was...I mean it doesn't even fit the "normal" UFO sighting template.

I'll post my Ghost one later.

TarrasqueWrangler,

You might want to check out the website for Coast-to-Coast A.M., a radio program that often talks about UFOs, ghosts, and other unusual topics. Do a Google search for it, or can someone post the link in this thread?