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I'm not sure quite what to make of the psychic and paranormal Alex. It seems very real to those who have experianced it but, the nearist I have come to any experiance like that is premonitions. By, that I mean a sixth sense telling me that this is either going to end badly or that'll be the last time I see that person alive.
'It has one of those very unsettling feelings of being watched...'
Alex, I understand that. There is a disused branch railway line that ran from PLymouth to Yealmpton. The spooky bit is between Puslinch Bridge and Warren Point. To say its unsettling is an understatement....
I lived in Yealmpton and used to walk the dogs around that area and others felt the same as me... cannot quite put my finger on 'why', and I cannot find any stories that would make this stretch of track 'haunted'.
Very odd.
I haven't been back there for 20 plus years and one day I took my lad and our two Labradors there. The dogs were nervous and my lad didn't like it... so, its not just me.
Plymouth to Yealmpton Branch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Ramblers : Local Groups
The other experience was at the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, in Italy. Unlike Pompeii, Herculaneum lost quite a few of it's citizens during Vesuvius' eruption, dying in a horrible way. During my visit there, I experiences different sensations ranging from a feeling of being watched, to the sensation of something or someone close by. In several cases, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye when photographing in in the homes and shops. When I'd turn to look, nobody was there and the majority of those instances of seeing movement or a fleeting glimpse of someone/something were in areas that were off limits to visitors (barred or roped off). In a few places, there was even a sense of dread or sorrow. Hard to describe, really.
Perhaps the most extraordinary and credible research into the ghost phenomenon ever documented is the so-called "Ghosts of Flight 401." On December of 1972, an Eastern Airlines Tri-Star jetliner, Flight 401, crashed into a Florida swamp. The pilot, Bob Loft (on the left), and flight engineer Don Repo (on the right), were two of the 101 people who perished in the air crash. Not long after the crash, the ghosts of Loft and Repo were seen on more than twenty occasions by crew members on other Eastern Tri-Stars, especially those planes which had been fitted with parts salvaged from the Flight 401 wreckage. The apparitions of Loft and Repo were invariably described as being extremely lifelike. They were not only reported by people who had known Loft and Repo, but their ghosts were also subsequently identified from photographs by people who had not known Loft and Repo.
The strange tales of the ghostly airmen of Flight of 401 circulated in the airline community. An account of the paranormal happenings even appeared in a 1974 US Flight Safety Foundation's newsletter. John G. Fuller, the best-selling author of The Ghost of Flight 401, carried out an exhaustive investigation into the hauntings with the aid of several cautious airline personnel. A mass of compelling testimony was produced as a result. The website Flight 401 – The Black Box Story provides an account of the crash as told using material from the Black Box. It highlights how poor cockpit resource management caused a tiny light bulb to distract the pilots and bring down a Tristar jetliner.
The cause of the crash was found to be a couple of minor design faults in the controls, and Lockheed rapidly corrected them. However, it was after some of the undamaged parts of the aircraft were subsequently recycled onto other planes that the mysterious incidents began to be reported.
Although Eastern Airlines refuses to discuss the matter, researchers have interviewed numerous individuals claiming to have encountered the ill-fated pair on L-1011s. As the reports would have it, Loft and Repo have devoted their after-lives to watching over the passengers and crew of these Lockheed passenger planes.
Many of the testimonies are extremely persuasive. Many come from people in highly responsible positions: pilots, flight officers, even a vice president of Eastern Airlines, who allegedly spoke with a captain he assumed was in charge of the flight, before recognizing him as the late Loft.
Other sightings are convincing because they have multiple witnesses. A flight's captain and two flight attendants claim to have seen and spoken to Loft before take-off and watched him vanish - an experience that left them so shaken they cancelled the flight.
One female passenger made a concerned enquiry to a flight attendant regarding the quiet, unresponsive man in Eastern Airlines uniform sitting in the seat next to her, who subsequently disappeared in full view of both of them and several other passengers, leaving the woman hysterical. When later shown a sheet of photos depicting Eastern flight engineers, she identified Repo as the officer she had seen.
Another incident occurred when one of the L-1011 passenger planes that had been fitted with salvaged parts was due for take-off. The flight engineer was mid-way through carrying out the routine pre-flight inspection when Repo appeared to him and said, "You don't need to worry about the pre-flight, I've already done it."
Repo and Loft are apparently not content merely to be present on these airplanes. Often their style is far more hands on, particularly in Repo's case. Aside from his appearance to a pre-flight engineer who he appeared to have been assisting, there is testimony from a flight attendant who observed a man in a flight engineer's uniform, whom she later recognized as Repo, fixing a galley oven. The insistence of the plane's own flight engineer that he had not fixed the oven, and that there had not been another engineer on board, would seem to lend weight to her claim. Repo was also seen in the compartment below the cockpit by a flight engineer who had accessed it in order to investigate a knocking he heard coming from there.
On another occasion, Faye Merryweather, a flight attendant, saw Repo's face looking out at her from an oven in the galley of Tri-Star 318. Understandably alarmed, she fetched two colleagues, one of whom was the flight engineer who had been a friend of Repo's and recognized him instantly. All three heard Repo warn them to, "Watch out for fire on this airplane." The plane later encountered serious engine trouble and the last leg of its flight was cancelled. It is interesting to note that the galley of Tri-Star 328 had been salvaged from the wreckage of flight 401.
The sightings were all reported to the Flight Safety Foundation (an independent authority) which commented: "The reports were given by experienced and trustworthy pilots and crew. We consider them significant. The appearance of the dead flight engineer (Repo) ... was confirmed by the flight engineer." Later, records of the Federal Aviation Agency recorded the fire which broke out on that same aircraft.
One of the vice-presidents of Eastern Airlines boarded a Miami-bound TriStar at JFK airport and spoke to a uniformed captain sitting in First Class. Suddenly, he recognized the captain was Loft, at which point the apparition vanished.
Another incident occurred when Repo appeared to a captain and told him, "There will never be another crash. We will not let it happen."
A female passenger found herself sitting next to an Eastern Airlines flight officer who looked pale and ill, but would not speak; she called a stewardess but before the eyes of several people, the man disappeared. The woman was later shown photographs of Eastern Airlines engineers and she identified the man as Repo.
Unfortunately, further research into the well-witnessed paranormal incidents was severely hampered by the airline company which steadfastly refused to co-operate with the ghost investigators.
It should be noted that ghost sightings have been reported many times throughout recorded history. During the 1990's, research into "after-death communications" (ADCs) by near-death researchers, Bill and Judy Guggenheim, helped to make the phenomenon of ghost sightings more mainstream.
"The boundaries between life and death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where one ends and where the other begins?" - Edgar Allen Poe
People once believed that the world was flat, too...
In otherwords, there's things out there in the world that we don't understand and as such, tend to disregard as "impossible" or "no such thing".
While there is a huge percentage of occurances are easily explained or even downright BS, there is that small percentage that goes beyond our ability to comprehend...
As an atheist, I can dig the "Your personal experience/ feelings" as not reasonable proof. Absolutely. That is why I had several other people experience the phenomenon.I guess once again I be the wet blanket in the group. Spent years in places where hundreds of men died or had died horribly. Never once had any reason to think/feel/believe "spirits" were present. Never saw/heard/felt/smelled/tasted anything even vaguely "para"normal. As to "proving" the none existance of ghost/spirits well you can prove an elephant isn't in your closet, but that's because it's that particular place. Can you PROVE that striped elephants don't exist? In order to do so you'd have to be able to check every place in the world, and every possible elephant. Even then, it wouldn't be proof, because you may have missed it.
Proving that elephants DO exist simply requires finding ONE so one CAN prove that things exist; but you can't PROVE that they don't.
Now a reasonably educated person certainly has reasons to doubt the existance of a purple elephant -- since that's just not a color critters like that come in; but it's not proof.
Proving existance is possible so you can prove you have a pen, but can you prove the pen doesn't think or feel? But then there's no reason to think it does, and much reason to think it doesn't; thus, the reasonable person would reject the belief even without evidence.
Any study of the human brain and its workings reveals our tenous grasp of ALL of the things going on around us and how narrowly we focus. And when full sensory data is lack the brain fill in the missing data without a bit of hesitation