When I was a good deal younger, my younger siblings decided to tease me about our house being haunted. They said that the house was haunted by shadow ghosts (just like they sound--ghosts that are silhouettes, like shadows), which would peak out from behind doors and stuff. They swore that they were being truthful, and for a while I took their story at face value. Eventually they added in a plot twist: the shadow ghosts--hundreds of them--could on occasion be seen gathering together out in the street around dusk. At this point I became skeptical, and it was only within a few days when it finally came out that the whole thing was a big fib.
While the shadow ghosts proved to be a bust, I now had a renewed urge to find proof that ghosts were real--and that they were occupying my house.
Several occurrences happened, which seemed hard to explain. In one room of the house, things would off of their shelves. It seemed to me like a ghost would be running through the room. Another time, I thought I saw Mozart when I was waking up. I developed the telepathic ability to communicate with pictures of my grandfathers, neither of whom I ever got a chance to meet. I would ask them questions (mentally), and they would smile back at me. It was subtle, but it seemed like they were able to answer me. One day while I was doing this, it felt like somebody poked me in my left arm.
I would use google to research knowledge about ghosts. I stumbled across a site that said that you could bring ghosts home to your house if you went to the cemetery and invited them into your home. This is exactly what I did. I went to the edge of the cemetery, and invited ghosts to come to my home.
Let's just say that it certainly seemed to work. I started a log to keep track of all of the ghosts I saw--it reached around 30 entries. When I tried to create a digital log in Microsoft Access (as opposed to a paper log) the ghosts really started acting up. I assumed that they were angry, so I deleted the digital log. They seemed to please them.
The ghosts would only appear for a split second, and then they would vanish. One of the ghosts, who I saw three or four times, was a young friend of mine who had at the time recently passed away. I saw him sitting on my couch, at my table, at the end of a hall.
One time I was at a friend's house for a sleepover. I saw an alien spaceship fly over outside, an instrument come down their chimney, and a ghost sitting in a chair across the room from me. Since I couldn't sleep, I got up and had an hour long telepathic communication with a coat rack.
Twice while I was in my own bed trying to get to sleep, a faint glowing orb floated in through my bedroom door, and vanished when it got close to my bed.
Once in my downstairs bedroom, and for a split second I saw a man in a suit and fedora appear and then disappear. I went upstairs into the room directly above where I had been, and a dark, faint mist wizzed through the room.
Another time, I saw an old man hunched over a cane in the downstairs hallway. He had his back to me. As soon as he disappeared, I got a bit creeped out, and decided to go upstairs. Standing on the landing of the top of the stairs was our old family dog who had passed away when I was little. Of course, when I went to explain this to my parents I was mildly hysterical, and they didn't believe me.
The forest behind my house was slated to be logged. Protests were held, and it seemed that whenever anything related to the logging was happening, these faint ghosts would appear in my living room which were flying skulls with white capes.
In an effort to get ghosts on film, I set up my go pro in our living room. It ran for ten minutes. I sat on the couch with a notebook, and whenever I saw orbs I would jot down the video timecode in the notebook. When I downloaded the video, I could've sworn that the orbs were present in the footage.
Three or four decades ago, a woman was killed in the house next door to mine. I had it on good authority from my neighbor that the house was haunted, and that she would come home and chairs would be moved around. She would never go in the basement. One day I went into our basement and saw an orange, crippled figure, followed by two orange orbs. My neighbor sold the house. The new neighbors fixed the place up, and gave us a sneak peak of the place. When I looked down my neighbor's basement stairwell, I saw the orange orb at the bottom.
That pretty much covers all of my most interesting ghost stories. For the most part, I stopped seeing ghosts around turning 14. Even with the benefit of hindsight, I honestly do not know what to make of all of it. While I would like to believe that I could communicate with my grandfathers, I seriously doubt that I have ESP or telepathic abilities--and communicating with a coat rack is just looney, plain and simple. While I have memories, corroborating logs, and even a videotape, I lack a sound conviction that ghosts are, in fact, real.
To answer the thread topic, which I already did once before (the 2020 thread is locked, so I figured I'd write this up), I do believe in ghosts--albeit tentatively. I recognize that there could be multiple explanations--an overactive imagination, for instance.
An article in the Guardian asserts that childhood hallucinations are common (and when they do not have negative feelings attached, are often benign). While some of the ghosts were quite vivid, they never lasted more than a split second, making it harder to assert their actual existence. Heck, as I'm writing this I'm noticing tiny vapor trails in my peripheral vision--is my imagination acting up, or have the ghosts actually come back to pay me a visit? I cannot say. I honestly do not know. All I can say is, whether the things I've seen are real or not, they certainly make for an interesting yarn. Thanks for taking the time to read all of that.