i had a similar instance. when i was younger ~10 i remember waking up scared by a nightmare around midnight. i decided i’d go to my sisters room because she was likely still up and i didn’t want to wake my parents.

her room was on the second floor so i had to quietly run in the dark and up the stairs as to not disturb my parents.

when i got to the steps i began hearing a crowd of people and with each step up the stairs it got louder and louder. i recall it being one of the loudest things i’ve ever heard. at the landing of the stairs it was so loud i collapsed onto the door handle and swing it open. then just like that the noise stopped and it was silent.

my sister was up watching a movie and looked over curious to why i made such a dramatic entrance. i don’t recall ever saying anything i just curled up on her floor watching a movie until i fell asleep.

i’m in my 30s and i still think about that event at least once a year and it still gets my heart pumping! thankfully it has never happened since.

So this will make me sound like a crazy person but whatever. I have a resident ghost in my house. I own the house I grew up in now and have lived here most of my life. When I was little myself and my siblings experienced all sorts of innocuous things like feeling like being watched or hearing unexplainable sounds. We would joke about it being a ghost but no one really believed it because that would have made it scary. But once I bought the place and moved back in the activity began to include lights turning themselves off/on and finding items having been moved especially as we began renovating things. I couldn't really brush the experiences off and finally all the little pieces of my memories started falling into place. Like how my repeated childhood dreams of digging in the backyard only to find a grave linked up many years later with the news of my neighbors two doors down finding a civil war grave when digging posts for a new fence. They actually had to have county people come out to do an archeology digg before they could put their fence in. Or the time my edgy teenage self and friends played with an oujia board and ended up asking our "ghost" questions from our history book as a joke, except the answers were all correct. (I never played with the damn thing again.) I never really talked about any of this with my family until the activity picked up during renovations after I bought the place. I remember I was joking with my mom one day saying I didn't think the "ghost" was happy with the changes I was making and she just casually mentions that oh yeah she had actually seen our friend in the kitchen (where we were doing the most renovations) from time to time. She told me that he looked like a young man in civil war uniform with curly blond hair. She really doesn't like to talk about supernatural things so it was quite a shock to me. After hearing that I went home and had a "talk" with the ghost. I told him that I'm still the same person he's always watched over, that he was welcome to stay as long as he behaved, and that we needed to update house to keep it from falling apart. And wouldn't you know it the talking worked as the majority of the activity stopped. We still find the occasional items moved around but it seems to be more like he's cleaning up after us. He's cleared trash off the floor and picked up items that the dog might have accidentally gotten ahold of. And our dog still growls at seemingly nothing in the kitchen from time to time. Other than that we all just go about our lives and I don't really tell people about it because it sounds crazy. I still don't know how I will approach the situation when it's finally time to sell the place but that's a long ways off for now.

When I'm awake at late-night, I sometimes hear children laughing in the corridors of my apartment.

It sounds similar to how it does in the day, which means that it's neither quiet enough for me to not hear, nor loud enough to disturb me.

Usually, it's only for a minute or two, and I can ignore it if I want to, since it doesn't scare me that much.

When I was very young, my family lived in Cameroon for a while (Dad was an expat). Storms always scared me because we lived on the top floor of an apartment building and when the wind would pick up you could feel the building sway.

But there were 2 storms at night that got REALLY bad. The kind where there's barely 5 seconds between strikes. During both storms, the thunder would get louder and more frequent until it felt like it was right on top of us. Suddenly there would be a MASSIVE thunderclap, so big it made everything shake, and then... drums.

Deep and heavy, pounding to a consistent tempo, I could hear them so clearly. At the same time, the shadows around my room would begin to swirl and form into vaguely person-like shapes which began to move around my room to the rhythm of the drums. I would run screaming from my room to my parents who heard nothing of the sort, not even the massive thunderclap that started it. I'm not sure what they thought after the second time it happened, but we moved away shortly afterwards and I never experienced anything like it again.

I smoked a bowl with jesus.

When I was in college I rented a room in a house with three other people, one of whom made a habit of coming home plastered in the middle of the night. Several times I would wake up to hear the mistakeable sounds of drunk cooking. I would roll out of bed to go stop my roomate from burning the damn house down, only to arrive to a dark kitchen. Nothing out of place. Roomate still gone.

My other roomies had similar experiences when they were home, coming to make sure drunk cooking was supervised, only to find no one there. The guy who owned the house also reported hearing someone in big heavy work boots coming up and down the stairs, but nothing was ever there.

It wasn't a town house, and there was yard between the houses so I couldn't chalk it up to hearing the neighbors. Plus both nieghbors had young kids and worked alot, so I couldn't picture them drunk cooking so loud at 2am we heard it in our house. So I dunno. Super weird.

I have a lot of dream related phenomena that I experience regularly (sleep paralysis, out of body experiences, etc.) but I generally chalk that up to the fact that I probably have some kind of sleep disorder.

But there was one dream I had that I cannot easily dismiss. A few years ago, my grandfather was living alone and declining in health. He and I were extremely close when I was growing up. We (my mom particularly) would go check up on him during the week, and he had home health aids that checked in as well.

One night, I had an unusually vivid dream where I saw him - in blue robes, in a heaven-like setting, happy and healthy and strong. When I woke up, I made sure to journal the dream, as I keep track of significant dreams. Just a few minutes after I finished writing, my mom calls me and tells me that my grandfather's health aid had showed up and found him lying on the floor; they had thought he had a fall during the night. They sent him to the hospital, but he wasn't really coherent and was pretty obviously reaching the end.

I visited him as soon as I could and said my goodbyes, and he died the next day. I felt like the dream gave me some sort of closure, like his spirit reached out to me and let me know that he was ready to move on?

I actually had a few dreams after that where he visited me, but we both knew he had died and couldn't stay. I at least got to share the news with him that I was expecting a child (I found out I was pregnant about 4 months after he died). I have not seen him in a dream since.

Do experiences on substances count? Or what about something seen in the sky observed by others with me?