Pretty sure I saw a ghost this morning.

I really don't know what to make of this deal. I've had weird thing happen in the past that I can't explain, but nothing that would make me believe ghosts are real.

My parents are on vacation, so I'm watching their dogs. a 110 pound German Shepard and a 30 pound Blue Healer. When we have the dogs, I sleep on the couch, so my wife can get decent sleep. If I don't, the dogs are in and out of the room and on and off the bed all damn night. The Healer is a yapping bastard that takes his herding job seriously, I probably step on him 50 times a day because he's under my feet. The Shepard and Healer are VERY protective of our entire family and miss NOTHING..... Okay, on to the ghost part.

I got woken up this morning by the sound of my wife shutting and locking our windows. We have newer windows with the safety lock that allows them to be open about three inches. We have had cool nights here and we both like the fresh air, so I assumed it was raining and the wind was blowing the rain into the sills. As she passes me from the dining room to the living room, I see the time on the cable box says it's 4:16AM. I watched her shut and lock the four windows and head back to the bedroom. As she passed the couch, she stopped and scratched her hand and that's when I noticed she was fully dressed in her work clothes. I could see her slacks, belt and shirt perfectly. The Healer was next to me on the couch, sitting up and staring at her. Kinda thought that was odd, because that little bastard herds us anytime we move, yet he's just staring at her. Whatever...

So, she rounds the corner and heads down the hallway. I figured since she was up, I'd go pee. The second she rounded the corner, I got up. When I rounded the corner, she wasn't there. I thought odd, but again, whatever. I can only be .07 seconds behind her, seriously, it's not that big of a house. So I peer into the bedroom to see her under the covers asleep. I crawled in bed and gave her a kiss on the forehead and she was straight up asleep. No bones about it and I was all WTF???

So I take a leek thinking WTF just happened? I know what I saw. Again, whatever... So I'm back in the living room and sit down for a cigarette. Looking at the clock, it's now 4:20. I said to my self, there's no way she could have gotten undressed and in bed in the amount of time that transpired and was scratching my head. I grabbed a small pen light and went back to our room to see if her clothes were on the floor. Nope, floors are clean. Now I'm really confused and head towards the basement. I stopped at the top to let the dogs go first like they always do, but they just stared at my like go ahead f#er, I saw that ## too! Again, whatever. Flick on the light and head down to find her work clothes in the laundry basket and am now questioning my sanity.

Back upstairs I look at the windows and they are in fact locked. I went to the spare bedroom where the Shepard sleeps and the window is open like it should be. Check our bedroom and it's the same thing, windows open to the safety lock. Bathroom is the same too. Now I'm thinking why in the hell did she lock the windows in the room I'm sleeping in, if it's not raining, knowing it will get stuffy. I'm actually pissed at this point and head back to the bedroom to ask WTF. I woke her up and asked what was going on, only to be told to STFU, I'm sleeping, have been sleeping and didn't shut a damn thing! I looked under the blanket and she's naked a a Jaybird.

I know what I saw but am now at a loss. What do y'all think?

a reply to: KawRider9

Very strange, did you actually get a good look at her face when she was down there shutting the windows, or did you just see the figure and assume it was your wife? I mean, it was dark, right?

a reply to: wtbengineer

Yes it was dark, but we have a couple night lights in the hallway. I coundn't make out the colors, but I could vividly see her outline. She sleeps in the buff and that was why I focused on her clothes. It sure looked like her but I didn't look at her face.

The whole, being fully dressed threw me for a loop. When she stopped and scratched her hand is when I could vividly see she was dressed. The dogs not making a peep had me cofused too.

The whole damn thing was strange and has me questioning my sanity. I was wide awake and know what I saw.

Maybe you caught her having an out of body experience. I have also seen my mom checking on me when I was a kid, but sometimes it wasn't actually her physically there but something like you saw. Sometimes it really would be her and when she would say something to me I'd nearly jump out of bed I was so startled. However the specter version of my mom never seemed able to touch or manipulate anything. She didn't even move, and she was not fully opaque. It was like looking at a slightly transparent cardboard cutout, though sometimes if I closed my eyes and opened them again the specter would be closer. One time it got close enough to touch, so I shut my eyes one last time and refused to open them a good long while. Honestly, my childhood sucked with this stuff occurring regularly at night.

The one time I was certain I had an out of body experience, which was seen and confirmed, I was floundering around and certainly couldn't pick anything up. The sensation was like swimming through glue or pushing against a big cloak over me. I have no idea how your wife managed to close windows, but if she was really focused I guess anything is possible. I don't think it was a ghost or demon unless you have other signs of other paranormal presences or activity around. But I'm no expert.

a reply to: KawRider9

Okay, so you didn't actually see a face to know if it was your wife. I can't help being reminded of something that happened to me a few years ago that has a similar aspect. I was working in the basement of our house on the main stack tying in a new toilet drain and I distinctly heard my wife come in the door and yell "Hi honey" so I went upstairs to greet her only to find the house empty. She didn't arrive until a half hour later in fact. I have no idea how to explain what I heard, I only know that it was loud and clear and it sounded like my wife. Ghost? My wife is alive and well so I would say no, but what? Tricksters I tell ya.

It sounds like a doppelgänger experience. There's a few very interesting cases.

paranormal.about.com...

And here's an episode of monsters and mysteries about them.
The segment starts at 14 minutes in.
m.youtube.com...

Whether thought forms unknowingly projected by someone, or ghosts, or some strange time slip... Who knows.
a reply to: KawRider9

Were you able to recognize the clothes that the person was wearing as belonging to your wife?

My crazy, out-there, this-person-is-a-lunatic hypothesis is that a small slice from a very nearby parallel reality got "stuck" to our reality and bled over, allowing parallel-reality-wife to close the windows in both her reality and yours. Then, at the point in time when she went up the stairs, the realities came unstuck.

I have experienced similar things, such as watching myself walk the opposite direction out of a Target, and yes I was 100% certain that it was me, as myself and I looked deeply into each other's eyes and wondered what in the actual frig was going on there, probably thinking the exact same thoughts, etc. I have also been spotted by and spoken to by people who know me very well in two separate locations at around the same time while I was sitting at a library reading about snakes for no reason. You will probably accumulate more stories such as those, because these things legitimately happen and you're not loco. Unless you get obsessed with it, then you're loco.


ETA It's probably kind of like a time slip.

a reply to: Phototropic

This sounds like a very good theory. It happened to my oldest son not too long ago in the movies. I went to the women's restroom while he waited outside and said, " Mom, I just saw your twin. She had the exact same clothes as you and even your little backpack. She was looking at me." I told him to point her out. It was Jurassic World opening weekend and it was packed so he wasn't able to find her again.

You probably did have a time slip.

a reply to: KawRider9

We all know what happens at 4:20 bro......




You could set up a camera my friend, see if it happens again....

Very freaky though.

SheepDipped and Phototropic make good points...you could have seen your wife's doppelgänger. My friend's father is a really reliable guy; he doesn't say things for drama, etc. One evening, he was in the kitchen doing dishes when he saw himself casually walk through the kitchen. He says his doppelgänger didn't look at him once, as if he were invisible. He never saw it again.

a reply to: wtbengineer

I don't mean to drag us off topic but I just had to ask, has this sort of thing happened any other time at your house? I was an ATS regular over a year ago but left to basically flee my old house. It wasn't haunted, per se, but it was annoying to live in.

It was a common occurrence to have audible but not visible doppelgänger phenomena. I and other family members and visiting guests would hear all the sounds my husband makes when he arrives home from work. But when we would check, he wasn't home after all and I would text or call and find out he was still at work.

We then had off and on a doppelgänger of one of our cats. At first my daughter and I wondered if it was a ghost of a cat we had that passed away. We could not quite see it looking straight at it. It was visible only slightly off from the center of our vision. But it did not look like or move or act like any of our cats who had passed. It looked like one of our newly adopted kittens. Though we couldn't see it directly what we could see of it gave the impression of the same size and shape and coat color. It acted like that particular kitten. It was as if the kitten had been copied, but in a form we could not see directly.

My daughter was the first to see it. She didn't want to tell me about it once she figured out it was not her kitten. But one day I was checking on her in her room and the "ghost" kitten was sitting there watching my daughter play like our real kitten normally does. But I had just seen the real kitten hanging out with another of our cats.

I walked into the room and the ghost cat darted out and ran into the room where the real kitten was. I told my daughter what I had seen and she told me this kitten had been there about a week, and she didn't know what to say about it. We saw it running around the house and past the real cats. They reacted as if they could see it but didn't know what to make of it themselves. They didn't seem upset by it. I'd even seen it go into the litter box once. It did come out again and run past me. We never tried to pet it. We were too creeped out. We could never shake the feeling it was our living kitten split off somehow.

It disappeared for awhile and came back again and stayed a few more days. I lost track of how many times total it visited with us. Not very many.

We also dealt with annoying but not alarming encounters with shadow beings and moving cold spots there. And the wooded area behind our houses was prone to getting struck by lightning. Once there wasn't even a storm around and lightning traveled miles on a sunny day to scorch our back lawn. My daughter's teacher told me the geology in that area was very unique and prone to lightning strikes.

I was also plagued with hearing low frequency vibrations while living there. And I made my posts about hearing the sky sounds while living there.

All in all, that was a unique property. Only my childhood home could match it for strangeness. My husband and I had moved around quite a bit prior to starting a family and never had I experienced anything so odd as I did there. He seemed oblivious to all but the cold spots and loved the place. I never lost the feeling of being surrounded by something odd and unseen there. Animals varied in their reactions. Our dogs and most of our cats were fine. A visitor's dog acted like it could see something we could not in a spot where over time, many people including myself reported uneasy feelings.

In other strangeness, a van-sized sinkhole developed behind our property and was filled in by the hoa.

The history of that house is known and it was completely normal and typically suburban. Before that, the land was part of a farm with a mundane history.

Before we sold it, I conducted a house blessing. We are friendly with the new owners and they seem very happy there. I think most people would be fine with that house but for a subset of us sensitive to whatever odd energies flowed there, it was an unsettling place to be. My husband absolutely loved that house and could not understand why I wanted to move. But we found a home more conveniently located to work and our sports activities so he agreed to move.

a reply to: blackmetalmist

Yes I could. Slacks, belt and a collared short sleeve short, were plain as day.

a reply to: EA006

I chuckled at the time for sure. Seriously thought I was on something!

a reply to: KawRider9

You dreamed it or imagined it. Going to sleep and waking up are the two times you are likeliest to hallucinate.

That's probably not the answer you were looking for but, without anything else to go on, that's the sensible explanation.

a reply to: wtbengineer

That's happened to me twice as well.

First time, I went in the basement to work out and I heard her ask me to help move something behind the bar. Walked behind the bar and no one was there. Walked around the bar and into the game room to find I was alone. Didn't freak me out, but I know I heard her.

Second times I was in the basement working out and she was in the laundry room. She said, Robbie, come in here for a second. I said give me a minute and I'll be right there. Kept lifting and then I heard, Just come here. I quit, walked in the laundry room and asked what she wanted, only to be told she hadn't said ANYTHING. We argued about it for awhile until I gave up(that's what us real men do, QUIT)! I KNOW I heard her twice but she swears she didn't say anything.

Both those events were a few years ago.

Thanks for the replies so far and not calling BS right off the bat. I know I probably would, cause this just doesn't add up! Hell, I'm questioning the story and it's mine!

a reply to: SheeplFlavoredAgain

That's a lot of strangeness there. I haven't had anything but the one instance I mentioned, although my wife has said that she has seen the lower body of a man walking by in the hallway and thought it was me only to find me in a bedroom that I couldn't have been in if it was me walking by. She hasn't mentioned it for a few years, but for a while there she was reporting this rather frequently. Overall, the house we live in is peaceful and I am fine there, even though it's almost 100 years old and in an area widely assumed to be haunted.

a reply to: KawRider9

I have no reason not to take what you say at face value. I've had enough weirdness in my life starting as a child in the house where I grew up. The things that have happened recently have not had the fearful nature of the early experiences for me, just odd occurrences and interesting anecdotes.

Doppelganger... wife's pre-arrival announcement or she was astrally traveling and somehow you could see it due to.. .what? conjunction of the spheres or something?

Or a garden variety ghost.

Anything continual and odd happen in that residence... or was this a first time weirdness?

I am convinced (due to recurring personal evidence) that the phenomena known as ghosts and haunting exist... what I don't know is why, exactly... but boy, it does really, really exist.

I'm with WTbengineer here... Trickster be busy... whatever THAT is.

eta: Phtotropic has a good theory too, one tenuously based on real physics, as well.

You might have been having an out of body experience or a lucid dream without realizing it. You'll never get a real answer as to what happened that night. I'd say dont sweat it and be happy you got to experience it, whatever it was.