Terrifying "paranormal" experiences that turned out to be something silly

Vibe-Feeler

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Given that we've all had our fair share of some significant paranormal experiences, I'm sure you must have at least one experience that initially came across as terrifying at first but after closer inspection it turned out to be something so trivial that you probably couldn't help but chuckle at the situation. I don't know if it's just me that's had moments like this but if anyone else here has I think it could be something fun to share. I have three I can think of:

Computer turning on by itself
We had a computer in the living room in 2006 and whenever we all went out and the house was empty, we would come back to find the computer was on, and we would never leave it on if no one was at home. The first time we just thought one of us forgot to switch it off, but then it happened several times after that. It was quite unsettling until we found the cause. Next to the computer was a wireless landline phone (one of those you had to press a button to answer or make a call after picking it up). Each time the phone rang, the signal somehow turned the computer on. We tested this by also pressing the answer button on the phone near the computer and it would switch on every time.

Packet moving across the table
The one night we were watching TV in the living room and there was an empty chips packet on the coffee table in front of the couch. Suddenly this packet starts to slowly move across the table by an unseen force. Myself ad my mom witnessed this and this packet had now moved halfway across the table. We had paranormal activity in the house before but nothing to this extent so we were really unnerved by this. Eventually we picked the packet up and it turns out a small beetle had crawled under the packet unnoticed by us. While it was trying to crawl its way out, it ultimately ended up pulling the packet with it making it seem that the packet was moving by itself.

Bedroom door violently rattling
This was the most terrifying experience but the cause was still less terrifying than my paranormal assumption. I was reading in bed late one night and I heard my bedroom door start rattling. I have two dogs that sleep with me and one of them, for some reason, insists on sitting against the door when she scratches her ear with her back leg. The door hinges run really smoothly so when the dog scratches herself against the door, it easily rattles and bangs against the door frame quite hard. So the door's rattling and I sit up to tell her to stop (because it's distracting) but I see both dogs are on my bed and this door is rattling rapidly and very hard. I honestly felt the blood drain from my face but then the cause revealed itself. It wasn't so much a paranormal entity rattling the door, but rather a sudden earthquake that then rattled the rest of the house for about 3 seconds, after which I heard my mom yell from her room, "Did you feel that?!". Quite frankly I would rather have the earthquake than an entity that likes to bang my door like an angry landlord after outstanding rent.

Anyone else have experiences like this that they would like to share? :)
 
Hi Vibe, I was thinking about a similar kind of thread earlier this week but I couldn’t recall an appropriate example of my own to open the thread with so I bailed on the idea. Yet upon reading your own examples, I’m still coming up stumped. So I’ll post about a kinda similar occurrence where my blood ran cold for a few seconds because of the horror I thought I was about to encounter.

To understand how the following imagery might have ever entered into my mind, you first have to know the following environmental factors.
  1. My GF is the oldest of three sisters and the other two are twins. I’m completely convinced - knowing the character their mother was - that there was constant drama in their house accompanied with high pitched, loud talking escalating often into screeching. Mostly they were just three girls competing to be the official house drama queen. As 60 year olds, they still do this when any two are together. Their sounds go from zero to 60 (decibels) within just a few seconds. All three sisters are also capable of these same shrieking skills even when separated.

  2. From the front doorway of our home you can look down the hallway, straight out into our backyard, clear through our 5 foot metal fence, to the neighbor’s yard, and to the back of their home behind us. At the time of this event, a nice, very old couple lived in that house. Now onto the story.
So this one summer evening arriving home from work, we entered our front door; my GF goes first and I lingered behind just long enough to close and lock the door behind us. Within seconds, I hear a literally blood curdling scream from my GF. I turn around quickly expecting (cause, why not) to see the nice old lady who lived behind us hanging dead from our fence, with a fence post piercing through her bloody abdomen! (Of course, our fence is as tall as that old lady was and the fence posts were topped with totally blunt caps so she would have had to work very hard to get up on our fence and then even harder to embed a fence post in her torso. But again, with the death cry coming from my GF, why not imagine that exact though unlikely scene...)

Pale and now sweating, I ran to my GF’s side only to find her jumping for joy that our landscapers had - as planned and as scheduled - planted a new tree in our backyard.

And, as I came down from my adrenaline fueled high, my GF couldn’t seem to understand my physiological reactions to her fearful bellowing. (Really...?)

So though not quite paranormal Vibe, it was an event which dripped of horror for a few seconds.
 
OK, I have one.

Years ago, in the middle of the night, the drapes in my room began to move about 2 AM. No fan that night as it was really cold out, hubs sound asleep, dog on bed, kid in his bed. All accounted for. Yet, that curtain moved. Not a lot, but it moved. Then it would stop, and again move. I got up, went over, saw nothing. No air current from window, no obvious reason it should move. Stood there a bit and nothing. Went back to bed and bam...it moved again.

OK, so being about 25 yrs. old, I did have a solid background in the paranormal as I'd been raised in it, so went to protection prayers and began quietly to tell it to leave. You have no place here, all the basics. Wasn't my first rodeo with apparitions/activity kind of thing, but heck...it was 2 AM! And it kept moving....every so often. I was in high gear telling it to get! When....

"Mom, Fred is loose!" came whispered from the doorway. Fred was his hamster.

Sure enough. I went to the curtains, turned on the light, and Fred is scaling the heights and almost to ceiling level. Found....one hamster.
 
It has probably happened to me at times but as it turned out to be trivial I don't recall them.I remember the big paranormal events that have happened like it was yesterday and the smaller ones I recall when a similar one from someone on here is spoken about.
 
One night a friend came out to my house for a visit. I lived out in the middle of nowhere and out there it was DARK. Anyway, when Bob showed up he was shaken up. He had seen a just huge UFO and it had followed him for a while on the freeway. He described it as a huge silver cigar-shaped craft that was only about 300 feet up and had followed him down the freeway. He felt fortunate that he was in a car with a big engine and had left it behind. I jumped in his car and told him to head back to the highway. He was hesitant but we went. When we got to the interstate it wasn't long before we spotted it. I started acting like I was freaked out and he was ready to make a run again when I cracked up. I had been about 90% sure that I knew what he had seen. We lived about 5 or 10 miles from a Goodyear Chemical plant. I had noticed that day on my way home that the Goodyear Blimp was visiting and roughly circling the plant. they did this every so often. The hanger for their southern blimp fleet was in Houston so it wasn't very far. Evidently they were heading home and following the interstate and that is why it was following him. I had seen it many times so wasn't ever suprised but it actually was a cause of a lot of UFO reports when it was visiting. Normally when it is circling the plant it has lights on the sides that spell out Goodyear. I guess when they headed for home they turned off those lights.
 
Okay, remember something now. I was noticing some weird lights high in the sky, every night shortly after dusk. They moved rather aimlessly, and had a sort of glitter to them. I became convinced that they were UFO related, and started planning to take a picture with a disposable camera. So on the big night, I took aim with the camera, only to realize that they were birds. Somehow the lighting in that area was distorted, giving them an odd glitter. I felt pretty foolish!
 
Okay, remember something now. I was noticing some weird lights high in the sky, every night shortly after dusk. They moved rather aimlessly, and had a sort of glitter to them. I became convinced that they were UFO related, and started planning to take a picture with a disposable camera. So on the big night, I took aim with the camera, only to realize that they were birds. Somehow the lighting in that area was distorted, giving them an odd glitter. I felt pretty foolish!

Good Morning Garnet, I’ve seen similar confusing situation.

I was staying at a hotel and glanced out my room window looking into the parking lot after dark. There was a kind of glittering effect immediately below one of the lamp post lights. I watched it continue consistently for maybe three minutes before I left my room to review it live.

Once I reached that specific lamp post, I could see that it was actually a small number of white birds flying in and out of the lamp’s downward facing light. They were apparently drawn there by the tiny bugs (food) flying around the same lamp. The birds were so white, and they moved so fast, that the lamp light literally bounced off their feathers for just a fraction of a second at a time. Then, with multiple birds sweeping through the light at the same time, it looked like a twinkle of glitter.

I returned to my room and looked out the window again to see how the now understood event still looked like glitter from that distance.
 
Wands, thanks for that! The description of the light against their feathers sounds exactly like what I saw. I was disappointed, though - I had hoped for an interesting, out of this world experience!
 
Wands, thanks for that! The description of the light against their feathers sounds exactly like what I saw. I was disappointed, though - I had hoped for an interesting, out of this world experience!
Yeah...I was really hoping for some fairy activity or maybe a portal. My paranormal intrigue turned into a let down of a para-boring discovery. :( Darn mundane world. :mad: