Rag & Bone Paranormal Community

Thought I'd get a near death experience thread going. Doesn't have to be crazy to share.

I had mine when I was about seven. I was living with my mom at a big house that the owner was letting rooms out in, and they had a pool without a fence around it. You probably already guessed by now, but I couldn't swim yet. I was in the back yard playing with the boy who lived down the hall when the frisbee we were playing with landed in the pool. I thought I could reach it, and the other kid encouraged me, so I knelt down and reached out as far as I could for the frisbee. It didn't happen immediately, I was reaching for a bit before the landlord's big dog came by and bumped into me. I fell in, struggled a bit, and ultimately went under. I remember looking up at the surface, seeing my dog, a black lab, swimming circles over me, and then just going to sleep. My life didn't flash, I didn't have a realization that I was going to die, no lights in tunnels, no voices, no being dragged through deep water or any of that. It was really just like "I'm tired now" and I went to sleep.

Somewhere in all this, someone told my mom I was in the pool. She ran out, jumped in, and dragged me out. My next conscious memory is her pumping on my chest and me throwing up and coughing up water (kinda felt like both anyway). We never went to the hospital, in hindsight I was damn lucky not to have died of dry drowning later. In fact, I've been a paramedic for 14 years, and I've seen my share of drownings in home pools, and it only reinforces for me how lucky I got. It's such a narrow window of survivability, and my mom threaded it. Pools are no joke, don't leave your kids unsupervised around pools, and never ever trust an unfenced pool.

This is a smaller note, but it happened to one of my patients, not me. I was treating a man having a massive STEMI, and when we were just thirty seconds from parking the ambulance, he coded on us. We'd seen it coming, though, and already had the defibrillator pads on him, so I had the firefighter start compressions while I charged up the monitor. Once it was charged, I cleared him and fired the shock, and we actually got Hollywood resuscitation, like his eyes popped open, he gasped, started looking around, the whole nine yards. Only time in my whole 14 years I ever saw that. But the guy looked terrified, way more than he had been before. I'm talking a real, fundamental lizard-brain terror in his eyes; it's possible you've never seen that look, but if you know, you know. I've always wondered if his experience was like mine, had he just gone to sleep and then been jolted awake when the monitor hit him like a freight train? Or did he experience something else?

Going to lead with: no, this isn't a skinwalker story.

Back in the early 2010s, my friends and I would hold regular airsoft practice in the woods behind my house. A lot of it was the sort of dense, old growth that covers to southeast US. Our last practice back there, we were wrapping up when we heard a very distinct whistle. We figured it was probably one of my neighbors who might have gone back to see what we were up to, so we called out to them, and, after getting no response, whistled back at them. We got another whistle back within ten seconds, and while we could figure out a general direction the whistling was coming from, we couldn't find anyone there. Getting a little concerned, we called out again, and decided to just pack up and leave when we got no response again.

Everything seemed mostly normal while we were packing up, though two of the people in our group insisted that they'd seen a figure peeking out from behind a tree at us. It wasn't until we were leaving that things got a little more exciting. On the way up the trail, my friend's dog kept indicating to the same area of to our right. We also heard that whistle every few minutes, getting closer each time we heard it. My friend with the dog later insisted that he saw a dark figure ducking out of sight from just behind us and off to the right of the trail. Thankfully, that's about the point where we started coming to the edge of the woods, and the events mostly stopped. The whole time that we were packing everything in the trucks, though, my friend's dog was laser focused on the woods.

I had some other kinda weird stuff happen at that house, like something hitting the back wall so hard that I thought the refrigerator had fallen over. To this day, my friend who claims to have seen it is sure we encountered something paranormal, though I'm not convinced that the whole situation wasn't just a bunch of college guys getting freaked out by someone in camouflage having a laugh.

My personal favorite genre of ghost story is the healthcare ghost story. Nurses have told me some stories that have made my eyes water, though that's not the tale I came to tell, because for all of my later attempts, I've never been able to do it justice. Let's share our medical spooks

I have 13 years of experience working on an ambulance as a paramedic. I've seen a lot of things, some horrible, some funny, some downright bizarre, but nothing I'd really classify as paranormal. This story was told to me by a co-worker on another ambulance shortly after it happened to her, while she was wrapping up documentation at the hospital.

They'd been dispatched to a sick person, which is sort of the catch-all complaint when dispatch doesn't have a more applicable complaint. When they arrive at the house, they find that the patient is a man in his late fifties who's gone unresponsive. Thankfully, the man's parents are able to let them inside the home and provide them with the information they need. Suspecting Sepsis, they try to hustle and get the guy out and down to the hospital. He dies shortly before arriving at the ER. Despite the efforts of both the crew and the emergency room, they can't get him back and the man is declared dead. Law enforcement comes by to start writing up their report and starts asking for information that the crew didn't obtain. It's no problem, though, the crew tells law enforcement to just do a 911 callback to the house and ask the guy's parents. So, the officer tries it, but gets no response. Having exhausted the easy stuff, the officer goes out and decides to visit the guy's parents. When he arrives, however, the doors are locked up tight, and there's no sign of anyone else. As the officer's poking around, a neighbor notices and goes to ask if he can help. The officer tells the neighbor what's happened and asks if he can help him contact the man's parents. The neighbor looks very surprised and says that the guy's parents have both been dead for years. And that's the story of how a co-worker got medical history from a dying patient's dead parents.

As a child, maybe about 7 or 8 years old, I woke up one morning to the sound of two people talking in the next room, with some laughter. Then all of a sudden two ghostly beings burst through the wall and rushed at me. The thing was, they were wearing underpants on their heads, and socks on their hands. It was clear that they were just being silly and scaring me for fun, which at the time felt like it made it all the more scary, cos it was just a joke to them. I was totally terrified, paralysed with fear.

Then I woke up again.

So, what's your experience with weird people? I don't mean socially awkward people, mind, I mean people that might actually be wizards or three aliens in a trench coat kind of weird.

When I lived in the poor part of Tulsa, there were people like this in spades. One old goat had the monicker of "crazy man Stan". Stan had a way of just appearing, almost out of thin air. You never saw him coming, you'd just look over one way, and look back to find Stan there. There was a laundry list of other weird shit Stan was known for that I've since forgotten. One day, he fucked my mom's truck up. She was sitting there, gabbing with a friend, when Stan does his presto-hobo apparition trick, leans in through the driver side window, and forces the turn signal switch back and forth as hard as he can for the few seconds it takes my mom to get over the shock and hit his crazy ass. Every time she hit the turn signal after that, the horn would beep in time with the light coming on. We had our last straw with Stan when a friend and I saw what looked a hell of a lot like Stan actually appearing in the middle of the street out of thin air one night. My mom declared that he must have been in league with the devil. My step dad had been putting up with Stan's antics because it's Oklahoma in the late 90's, what else do you have going on? I don't think he believed that devil stuff, but he was always pretty keen at figuring people out, and I think he reckoned that Stan was the kind of person that had trouble hanging around him like a cloud of flies. and decided he didn't want any.

There was another guy we knew who would scry for random treasures on a map and did aura readings. Besides the claim to psychic abilities (he never referred to them as such, he was the type of Christian that believed he was given gifts due to the manifestation of the holy spirit in his heart), he usually had smart things to say, so he was sort of the shaman of the ghetto. I can't speak for the aura readings, but everyone who ever went out with him on one of his adventures vouched for him finding something interesting. He never did it for money, so it wasn't like it was some kind of scam he was running, at least as far as I could tell.

Around 2010, we lived in some apartments in Newnan, Georgia that used to be an old factory. Most of the other resident we ran into agreed that weird stuff would happen there, like seeing apparitions of people. Very little happened to me, personally, but my wife experienced much more than I did. Some of these experiences include, but aren't limited to:

-She had the front door unlock, open, shut, and lock again all on its own. It happened with so little fanfare that she, at first, assumed that I had walked out until she realized I was in the shower.

-She got a coat hanger thrown at her. We were in bed and she was woken up by the clatter of a coat hanger coming to rest on her side of the bed (concrete floor and metal coat hangers make a fair bit of noise). The hell of it is, the only place we kept coat hangers was in the closet, and the only two ways that it could have made it there from the closet was 1. to go left into the bathroom, make a 90 degree turn, and then forward out of the bathroom OR 2. launch up and over the closet wall and then go forward about ten feet.

-She would feel somebody poking her feet at night time. Of course, nobody was ever there.

A couple of times, we'd hear these loud footsteps go racing across the metal roof. I've had metal roofs before, and I know what it's like when trees drop stuff on them; you can hear the debris rolling and banging down the slope of the roof until it falls off or settles into a depression. This wasn't that. There would be loud, fast thuds that would run across the length of our apartment, across the slope of the roof in a matter of a second or two.

We also had a friend stay there to dog-sit while we were away. He has excellent vision, and told us that he saw an extra dark shadow in the corner of our vaulted ceiling that the dog also honed in on shortly afterwards. When I say dark shadow, I mean that the lighting there was inconsistent with how it was every other day; that corner was never that dark before or after, but for whatever reason had a deep shadow in it for that one of several days my friend was there.

What really sells it for me is that my wife never had any kind of paranormal experience before or since. She's not generally the kind of person who's into this whole scene; she loves a good ghost story as much as anyone, but she's not the type of person who commits much thought to it or sees spirits around every corner.

Anyway, it didn't really seem to build towards anything, it was just kind of a thing that was there and sometimes you happened to notice it (or vice verse, I suppose). A couple of the residents tried to invite one of those ghost shows out, but the property management team caught wind of it and shut that down immediately. Used to be that you could see tenants talking about the haunting on their google reviews, but I just looked and they must have cleaned those up.