A couple of days ago I was MeMe'd by Mike Mueller (a lender from Walnut Creek in CA, which is also part of the San Francisco Bay area). Mike's MeMe post was incredible! I had no idea he was a closet DeadHead!

It seems like forever ago, but I was MeMe'd by another Active Rainer back in June, Eveline Tritsch . Here's a link to that MeMe:  http://activerain.com/blogsview/113215/I-ve-Been-MeMe.  In that MeMe, I shared that

• I have a BA and MA in religious studies/theology (first career was secondary religious ed and youth ministry and I've done volunteer hospital chaplaincy & other such things.
  
• Travel is my passion; I've been all over the British Isles and Europe, to Israel, Greece, Tahiti, Mexico, and Japan plus most of the of the US
  
• I collect ghost stories
  

Since we're coming up on Halloween, I figure that for this MeMe I'll talk about that last point a bit more!

Why does Mary Pope-Handy collect ghost stories?    Is this a case of "I see dead people"???

Sorry to disappoint, but it's not!

This odd hobby of mine started after a few uncanny experiences happened to me. 

So the first MeMe point is that I've always been somewhat intuitive. I describe myself as mildly to moderately intuitive. Sometimes I get a very strong sense that something is going to happen, or has happened and I just haven't been told yet, and I find out later that my impression was spot on.  Like what?  Usually it's been pregnancy and death (yeah, the big tickets in life). I don't know why, but many times I've just known when someone near to me was expecting a baby - not necessarily physically near, but someone I care about. And often enough I've just had the sense that the baby was going to be a girl or boy - and was right there too. Once this happened even before my friend knew that she was expecting.

That's kind of fun.

Sometimes my dreams are intuitive, and that is the way that bad news more often comes to me.  And unhappily, those have often been correct.

Anyway, with this intuition, sometimes I walk into houses and get the impression that it's a happy home, sad home, uptight home etc. And once in awhile I get the impression that bad things have happened there....or that it is haunted. I cannot always tell if a place is haunted - I am just not that sensitive that it's an on-command kind of thing. But often I can.

If I think a place has a ghost or some other weird activity, normally I'm subtle enough to ask an open-ended question like, "this is a fascinating old building - are there any stories around it?" rather than blurt out, "is this place haunted?" Once in awhile, though, I'm so strongly impressed with a presence or two that the words come spilling out of me without a filter. Since approximate half the population believes in ghosts and the other half doesn't, it's best to ask the open ended question for a whole lot of reasons!

The second MeMe point for this ghosty self-revealing is that yes, I have had some experiences of ghosts. But I have not seen apparitions per se.  Most of the time when people have an experience of a ghost, it's not visual - that is actually fairly rare.

What other experiences could someone have of a spook?

Many books have been written on this topic, but off the top of my head, I would say that these are the most common ways that people experience a haunting:

(1) Electrical disturbances (lights, TVs, radios going on/off by themselves)
(2) Doors, windows or other things moving on their own with no natural physical explanation possible
(3) Strange sounds with no explanation (footsteps on a staircase with no one there, barking dogs with no dog present, other sounds that don't make sense but are very distinctive). This can include disembodied voices.
(4) Out of place odors - sometimes that only one person in a crowd can smell
(5) Cold spots in a room or place with no drafts or other issues. Frequently these cold spots move.
(6) That "feeling" that someone is watching you or looking over your shoulder when no one is there
(7) Less common, but well known nonetheless are disturbances that appear on photos, videos, or audio recorders.

Any of these alone may not "prove" that a house or home or other place is haunted. But when things are experienced in a particular place over and over and by multiple people (of sound mind), it's a pretty good indicator that everything's not quite normal.  (From the above list of seven, I've experienced four of these, by the way. I don't like talking about them because - yes - some people will be tempted to think I'm crazy!) I have had some really interesting photos over the years and those can be fun to share. The best ones involve family reunions and children in my extended clan so I am not posting them or sharing them, sorry!

Finally for this uber-spooky Halloween MeMe, you may or may not know that not only do I collect ghost stories, but I have both a web page dedicated to Haunted Real Estate and now (drumroll please) I also have a blog on haunted houses and places! The blog s fairly young but just recently is looking the way I want it to thanks to my 18 year old son, Brian, who is a whiz with wordpress: www.HauntedRealEstateBlog.com.  I sometimes tour friends and family through my town of Los Gatos and talk with them about the bodies that were never moved out of the old cemetery (which is now covered with restaurants, shops, and a bank) and the other known to be haunted places in Los Gatos.

The Haunted Real Estate Blog, though, is not only for stories local to Silicon Valley, but really anywhere in the US. I do try to share events and experiences people have shared in Saratoga, San Jose, or anywhere in Santa Clara County especially, but we cover things all over - so please feel free to visit, and to share your own spooky tales of ghostly encounters!


No MeMe Post would be complete without sticking it to someone else, so for the next MeMes here, I nominate:

Carole Provenzale and
Mary Warren and
Kevin Tomlinson (because he loves my ghost stories!)