Spooky experiences.

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Well, not necessarily 'spooky', but unusual, unexplainable (in scientific terms), etc.

I recently recounted on another thread about experiences I've had that are unusual. Figured I'd add some more. And ask if you've had any.

The first experience I mentioned, I had in 1986. I was a church going Christian (no longer) who was renting a small unit for $70 per week, payable on Mondays. I was short for rent only once in that year, and the following experience only happened once that year. Came a Sunday and I was short for $30, payable in 24 hours. Being a Sunday, at church, and with no other options, I prayed for $30.

After church, a lady came up to me and passed me an envelop claiming God wanted her to give it to me. You know what comes next. $30 in the envelop.

I had an experience about five years later in which I was house-sitting for some family members. There was nobody else there. Just me. Laying in bed, I listened to the zipper on my overnight bag running its tracks. Ziiiippppp... ziiiipppp.

In the late 90s, I was share housing, and they had busy social lives. Once, one of their friends was missing for a week and her mother went around to her various friends to see if we knew where she was. We didn't. When her mother left, various members of the household tried divinations to find out where the friend was. The divination message I got was, 'safe', 'on water'. When she reappeared a week after that, she revealed she'd spent the two weeks with her new boyfriend on his houseboat.

About ten years ago I had a dream in which I was washing windows in my house, but since it was raining I decided to not do the outside of the windows.

Next morning at breakfast, one of my kids told me to not forget to wash the outside of the windows.

Life is full of such things. Have you had experiences?

What an awesome topic.
I loved reading your post.

Years ago, I was waiting at the end of the street, ready to turn left, across traffic. Police car coming, WITH BLINKER ON to turn into my street, so off I went. He would have T boned me but good if my car had not inexplicably stalled. Because he went sailing on past me and down the road with his blinker still on.

I rented a room in what was described as a haunted house (built in the 1700s as a stage coach stop) because that is all I could afford as a single mom. 2 year old and I shared the bedroom and had use of kitchen etc. We got locked into our room one night. Latch completely put into the 'eye' even though I refused to do that for fire safety reasons. Latch was a good foot above what my daughter could reach.

After moving out of there, we returned for an overnight visit because my kid was still friends with the little girl whose parents owned the place. I awoke to feeling that something was sitting on me, I could not move. After a few seconds, it lifted and the door swung open of its own volition.

I started smoking 25 years ago and quit 5 years ago when I was sitting on the steps (of another sketchy cheap boarding house, all I could afford) and wishing like heck that I could quit smoking. Out of nowhere, a hummingbird (first time I'd seen one anywhere near this place) hovered IN THE SMOKE at the end of my cigarette, then flew up and touched my forehead with her beak and flew off. I stubbed out my cigarette, cried for half an hour because if felt like 'someone' had cared, and never had a craving after that. I was 53 and when i was 8, I had decided that the hummingbird must be my 'totem' since one tried to stick her beak in my ear! I've loved them ever since.

not scary but when I was at high school someone asked if anyone had a spare pen and I threw it in his general direction from about 7 metres away. He had his hand in a fist on the desk and the pen got lodged in his fist

I'm 60 years old and I haven't had any spooky or unexplainable experiences. My belief is that when they seem to happen they are nothing more than tricks of the mind or coincidences.

Did some "ghost-hunting" back in college.  Entered a lot of drafty rooms that had strange smells and sounds, and was always able to determine a logical cause.  No disembodied spirits, no demons, no monsters, and no space-aliens.

Most of the time, the "hauntings" were hoaxes; and when they were not, small animals and/or faulty construction were involved.

Nothing more to see ... move along ... move along ...

Yeah, I've had somewhere between half a dozen to a dozen that were pretty interesting and varying levels of anomaly.

My outlook - it doesn't seem like there's much reason for consciousness not to go all the way down. Any signs of teleology in the universe would suggest that it's baked in at deeper levels (to which if we have no good direct analogies to consciousness, so much so that we're still not able to sort out the 'hard problem' and have concerns about when we might be tormenting or enslaving sentient AI).

The universe pretty much works like Dawkins, Dennett (RIP), or Carroll would assume it would work 99.999% of the time - until it doesn't, and when you get into those moments it's like you're dealing with a shallow associative set of functions in what seems like a subconscious sort of mind that doesn't seem to know you all that well but throws out things that rhyme with something you were deeply rapt / focused on - or you have some deep existential crisis, it kicks off in something close to internal factioning, you end up having mystical experiences and then get decked with rafts of synchronicity (sometimes for days) where you don't see anything that's strictly speaking not mundane but really bizarre things happen that you can triangulate against reality and know that you're not hallucinating.

One additional thought on this - I've been really interested in the dialog that Donald Hoffman and Steven Wolfram hae been having. Donald Hoffman works with mathematician Chetan Prakash on their theory 'Conscious Realism' which is technically analytic idealist (universe based in mind) but it ends up being in a granular way where you get Darwinian evolution and all that it entails. What Don and Chetan are trying to do is derive all of current physics from their theory and he was sharing his results on that recently with Wolfram on Curt Jaimungal's Theories of Everything. What I really like about Hoffman and Prakash's theories - it describes consciousness in a granular way having what's referred to as 'functionalism with multiple realizability' which means it compiles into multiple layers as separate experiences (individual cells, organs, human or animal, potentially egregores out past that). I'd say the bulk of the mystical and anomalous experiences I've had, when they do anything odd, seems very reminiscent of upward / downward communication in a multiply realizable functionalist stack and it's part of why you can have this without being able to 'manifest a Lexus' or any of that crap realistically speaking.

This did not happen to me but it does fit in with this topic; this is a true story. There was this young girl who all of a sudden went crazy and her parents being well-off spared no expense in getting their daughter cured. It was finally determined by learned professionals that there was nothing that could be done to cure her; things such as this just happens. Her parents did not give up and consulted Edgar Cayce who was known as the sleeping prophet as a last resort. He was 500+ miles away and agreed to do a reading on her. He went into a sleeping trance and his mind connected to hers and diagnosed her problem as a wisdom tooth that grew and was pressing on a nerve; pull her wisdom teeth and she will be fine. Her parents followed his instructions and had her wisdom teeth pulled. The young girl recovered and returned to normal. I don't understand this but my guess is that all our minds are inter-connected with each other and certain people can tap in to this.

Not exactly spooky but my main inexplicable event was standing in the backyard with my brother I thought I saw a satellite moving. As we watched it changed direction and performed a slow circular figure 8 around two stars. We had a discussion over a few days about the impossibility of its distance/acceleration and it's possible perspective.
A few weeks later he denied it ever happened.

My other unusual memories are atmospheric.

In the city once I went outside and saw overhead that there were dozens of a small roiling clouds in a grid. Each cloud was stationary over a house and I guessed it represented steady state thermals rising from hot roads, but the containment and isolation of each cloud seemed quite surreal.

The last was while driving home to Gippsland through the rolling hills. I had to pull over and get out of the car because I noticed the cloudbase formed a perfect copy of the terrain. There was a 3D copy of the map in the sky. Again, explicable, but surreally unlikely.

No, nothing like that has ever happened to me. I really wanted it to when I was a teenager, and I looked around for some kind of good evidence of the supernatural, but I failed to find any. Later on I discovered Derren Brown, James Randi, and Richard Dawkins, who present some strong arguments that it's all tricks of the mind or clever con artists, and that belief in such things holds us back.

I do think there can be eerie things about those psychological tricks of the mind though. We get very accustomed to things making sense, and then one day the brain doesn't know what to make of something. That can be spooky.

This isn't spooky, nor does it involve ghosts.

One day at work I was asked by my supervisor to take some paperwork to despatch, the other side of the workplace, which was a mushroom farm. I hardly ever went to despatch and I was happy to say hello to the people who worked there.

I gave the paperwork over to Liz, boss of despatch. As I did, the phone on her desk rang. She answered it, looked at me and said, "It's for you." She handed over the handset to me and I said, "Hello?" "Why is someone else answering your phone?" My twin sister asked. "But I'm not at home, I'm at work." I replied. My sister was confused and told me she rang me at home and accidentally rang the wrong number. A number she hadn't written down nor called before. And I happened to be right there at that time. Had I been five minutes earlier or later, my sister would have been told she had the wrong number.

It was a big coincidence.

I had a spooky experience at under 10 me and my brother were joking and I was spraying a spray a lot in a room. Then on a chair it revealed an old lady. Me and my brother was shocked and ran out of the room in disbelief. He has said he is likely on the spectrum. I was a very sensory child.

There was the time my boss told me I'd been working too hard. Nobody had ever heard her give such an opinion before, but they'd heard her give the opposite opinion many times. Nobody could explain it.