I am not ashamed to admit that I am one who experiences ghosts regularly and at times quite vividly, engaging both visual, emotion, sound and felt sensations. It does not pose a problem for me as I am quite capable of distinguishing between this and what is normal perception, not only by common knowledge of what is and is not contained in our mutual perception of reality, but also in that these ghostly perceptions are not lifelike or real-seeming as what we perceive by normal means. So there is no entanglement into ordinary perception of reality and no consequences into my reactions nor leading to changes in the choices that I make or how I live my life. Rather, it is an entertaining and interesting anomaly to experience, somewhat as innocent and amusing like watching television.
So, after that little disclaimer, I can say that I frequently experience people and places that depict the past of the place that I am visiting. Most places do not trigger these experiences, but certain places will always trigger the same scene to take place around me like a holographic movie.
Typically, most of such depict something disturbing taking place. Someone drowning, dying from an illness such as the plague, or starvation, or being stabbed. Others depict distress, if there is a fire, a bomb falling from the sky, or sadness and grief, someone crying over a coffin of a deceased loved one. Only few are pleasant scenes from everyday life, such as emigrants leaving Sweden for America, a man from the 1600s carrying a book down the stairs, or little girl ballerinas in the 1800s performing for their families in what is otherwise an empty closed down hall today.
The experience is visual, it is also felt, I can often feel the person or the surroundings in that image, there are sounds but sounds that are felt not heard, and sometimes scent. Sometimes the ghosts try to touch me and make contact, then it never feels like real touch but like a blunt electrical sensation. Once a ghost was screaming at me and pushing me off a chair, and it resulted in an actual physical push. I was holding on to the edge of the chair and I fail to understand how my body could have acchieved a motor response of that kind.
The ghosts see their surrounding in their own time in history and not the way I see it today. When the image of a ghost reaches me, often the ghosts in the image that they are in can become aware of me, but then they see me as if I were there with them, in their time. Often then the image of myself appears hazily with them, and with me dressed in a way according to their time.
Ghosts can talk to me, and I can talk back to them and engage in conversations with them. They are always surprised, and often in disbelief, when I tell them that they are deceased and that they are in the past, and that I am in the future and the year is 2010. They move about in an image that looks like their time, they have no sense of our time.
Often, speaking with the ghosts it becomes clear that they are stuck. They are reliving some traumatizing experience that they had. Often when I talk to them about it, it can offer them some relief, and often then a ghost will suddenly turn into a bright flash of light and is gone, and the same haunting will never occur in the same place again.
I do not take it too seriously and I make no assumptions. It is just something that I see, and it is no more real or important to me than the television I watch: while I am seeing it it is interesting, encaptivating, but I never lose myself into it from reality around me, and once I switch it off I am back here, nothing gained, nothing lost.
