Growing up, I was Mormon (though I no longer am), and I served my mission in Russia. I was serving in a little town outside Moscow called Lobyna (meaning “the place of the skull”), and it was mid-winter and my companion (that’s what the other missionary in a pair is called) and I were sign-boarding, handing out free Books of Mormon. I noticed that there was a man who had walked by our station a couple of times, dressed kinda bedraggled – I noticed him because he wasn’t wearing any shoes – who seemed interested in talking but shy about starting a conversation. I offered him a copy of the book, and struck up a reasonably pleasant conversation that resulted in my inviting him to take the discussions by meeting with us in the church building.

Our companionship lived on the second floor of the church building, which was a converted dacha (a Russian summer home), and then the first floor and half of the second floor was reserved for church activities. We scheduled our meeting with this investigator (I don’t remember his name, it’s been a few years) to be right after morning study, so we didn’t have to leave the house and come back.

Come the day of, and I go downstairs to the kitchen to make breakfast, and lo and behold, our new investigator is sitting in the middle of the biggest room (the chapel/former living room) on a folding chair just waiting. I called down my companion, and we did our discussion earlier than expected, which was fine, and then did morning study afterwards. I don’t remember a lot of that first meeting, other than he seemed like a reasonable Russian Orthodox member who was chatting with American missionaries. What I do remember is that when I went to let the investigator out, I had to unbolt both front doors to do it.

After he’d left, I asked my companion if next time he’d please tell me when he lets people into our house, to which he replied that he didn’t let the investigator in, he just assumed I’d done it. This was when I started to get concerned. You see, Russian doors aren’t like American doors. Generally speaking, there are two doors – a wooden door with a lock like I’m used to, and then a “fire door”, which is like an inch and a half thick steel with five deadbolts into the frame (three into the wall, and one into each of the floor and ceiling). This isn’t a “tee-hee” kinda situation to open up the door to get in, you would have to do major structural damage to enter through a door. And it was mid-winter (like -30 - -40 degrees mid-winter), so it wasn’t like we forgot and left a window open or something. We resolved to be extra certain to lock up the house next time.

Which is why it was so surprising when, a few days later, he was sitting in the middle of the chapel-living-room waiting for our appointment an hour early again. We had checked all the bolts and windows and everything, yet there he was. And this time, the discussion went thoroughly off the rails. He was telling us about how the spirits of the dead congregate behind a comet that circles the solar system, and that they’re awaiting the confluence of some celestial bodies and would get free and so on. We wrapped up the conversation and did not invite him back, and never saw him again.

And sure as shootin’, when we checked the doors and windows when he left, they were all still locked and barred. It’s been 15 years and I still don’t know how he got into our house.

My parents live in a house built by my great grandmother, when I was a kid, about 7, just before I went to take a bath I saw the spirit of an old woman walk out of my parents room and into mine.

She walked out, paused and looked at me, and then walked into my room. I. was. PETRIFIED. Although I knew if I told my dad something he wouldn’t believe me, so I put tried to not think about it as I had to walk towards the side of the house she had just walked from to take a bath lol. Nothing else happened that night. I didn’t recognize the woman but I remembered her face.

A few weeks later I was going to sit down in our front room. On the table next to the chair I was going to sit in was one of my mom’s lamps, it was ornate and had a small glass pane slotted into a piece of wood. We always had an obituary card wedged in there so that it would show through the glass, but I never really read it or looked at it, it was one of those things that kind of just faded into the background for me. Especially since I’m ADHD, my brain kind of just filters out stuff sometimes. Even though I never really looked at it, my mom had told me it was my great grandmother’s obituary card. Well, as I was sitting down I happened to glance at it, and I had to do a double take, that was the woman I saw!

I asked my dad when about my great grandmother lived here, where everyone’s bedroom’s were. He said “Well, Mimi had my bedroom, and yours was your grandmother’s and her sister’s.” That about confirmed it for me: I had seen the spirit of my great grandmother performing her nightly check up on her daughters. After that day sometimes if felt like she was watching over me in my room, although that could have just been in my head since I had seen her walk in.

Not a big one. In my 20s, asleep in bedroom, girlfriend asleep next to me. I wake up and see dancing, glowing blue filaments, about 20cm long, moving through the bedroom. No sound, bedroom is otherwise completely dark. It was a similar glow to Cherenkov Radiation, but at a much smaller scale, and clearly defined, glowing threads.

Wake girlfriend who grumpily agrees they exist before falling asleep again.

5 minutes later they just stop and I never see them again.

We were the only people in the house, in a room with blackout curtains and with all electrical items turned off at the wall (UK plugs rule).

Still no explanation to this day.

Prophetic dreams. Never about anything important, nothing I could have predicted, and way, way, too detailed to be chance. I used to record my dreams, in my early and mid 20s and some of them did happen. It pissed me off so much because I want to believe the future has not yet happened.

I had deja vu about something before it was finished.

I’ll explain. My buddies and I were all sitting around the table working on our next batch of D&D characters when my one friend says a totally normal phrase. Instantly I get that deja vu feeling, like I remember him saying exactly that while sitting exactly there, and I remember that after he said that, my other friend stupid up for a drink of water, so I look up at him and sure as shit I watch him stand up and head over to the sink.

Blew my mind. Never happened like that again.

I have this recurring dream where I’m in my great grandmother’s house. Sometimes she’s there, but obviously deceased, but still holding conversation like nothing is wrong. Other times the house is empty. Every dream I’m there I’m trying to get out and it seems like something is pulling me back in.

When I lived there over a summer in my childhood, when granny was alive, my brother and sister and I all agreed it was haunted and had stories to tell about the voices and figures we saw. We discovered several years later that the 80 year old house was built on top of an old civil war graveyard.

The supernatural part is, as a 29 year old adult, I was explaining those dreams to my brother and sister and they each said they have them too. Same details, same deceased great grandmother, trying to get out.

She passed when I was 18 and none of us have been there since. The house might not even be there. I heard it was demolished and rebuilt. But the dreams still come fairly regularly

I was floating on a donut floaty in a massive public pool with a bunch of other kids. Middle school, maybe?

Someone flipped my donut over to be a dick. I hit the bottom, and was totally submerged. I couldn’t swim. I struggled to get back out but couldn’t.

Then suddenly I was on my donut again.

Watched the first six seasons over a week while recovering from mono. I have no explanation for what I did or what I saw.

Nothing super crazy, but when I was in high school, my family lived in a big, newly built two story house that, to me, had some very weird and off vibes to it. There must have been something attached to the land, because 1) it was a brand new house, 2) the house we lived in before was also ‘haunted’, but in a different way, and 3) all the houses my parents moved into afterwards were fine.
Often when I was home alone, I would hear doors open and close in other parts of the house, and stuff would move around a lot on their own. More than once I would set something down, leave the room for a few minutes, and then come back to the item being in a different spot.
Once I woke up to breathing in my room. Very steady, heavy breathing, like someone trying to calm themselves or meditating or something. Even after I turned on my light and checked the other bedrooms, the closet, etc, I could still hear it, but only in my room (and no, it wasn’t me lol). I weirdly wasn’t scared or anything, I just couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. After I laid back down to go back to sleep, I had what felt like a hand press up against my back between my shoulder blades. Not pushing or aggressive, but like someone just put their hand there.
The weirdest thing that happened was one morning I got up to feed my cat, and while she was eating, the bowl slid across the floor and hit the wall with so much force that it knocked out a bunch of food. Scared the shit out of the cat, who ran across the room (while still eating what was in her mouth lol).
Almost everyone I tell the story to says “Oh, obviously your cat was just messing with the bowl.” Nah. She was a kitten at the time, and there is no way she would have enough power or strength to move a bowl a third her size and full of food with the force or speed that it moved at. When I say it hit the wall, it hit the wall. There were little kibble bits everywhere. Plus, she doesn’t play with her food like that.
idk what was going on with that house, but like I said, it had some weird vibes.

I was 10, sat on the 6/7 foot wall in my garden, I go to push off and go back into the house but instead I hit the ground knocked out, an old man I felt at the time I knew comes through the back doors says for me to get up. Years later I spoke about it with my mother asking he he is, she said there wasn’t an old man. Still confused by it.

I stepped out the back door of my house when I was 12 or so. The house was on a 1 acre lot and I saw my brother at the back of the property. He threw a rock into the woods that bordered the property. He turned and looked at me and then he disappeared.

Straight up ghost dog chasing me and 2 friends out of the woods.

I hadn’t discovered drugs by that point in my life. I don’t tend to think about this too much.

Also, drugs. Some supernatural shit hangs out on the psychedelic crowds.

WinCo sells these orange sticks. Chocolate outside, orange jelly in the middle. One time, I opened the freezer, and the whole bag of orange sticks was perfectly split in two. Not bitten. The chocolate wasn’t cracked, the jelly looked like it had been perfectly, smoothly sliced. They were all like that. I have no explanation for it. It’s never happened again. It sincerely baffles me.

Fell asleep on the TTC (Toronto subway) one time while we were travelling along a particularly old part of the tunnels.

I was dozing and staying kind of peripherally aware of my surroundings. Late at night, old model of subway car. One or two people at the other end of the car, in one of the cars far down the line away from the driver, second or third from the rear car.

Going through a section of tunnel, in the dark between one light and the next, I suddenly felt… surrounded. My eyes were closed, and for a second or two I distinctly felt the sensation of hands. All over my body, like I was passing through a crowd of people all grabbing at my arms, my legs, my hair. Cold, like holding your hands in your armpits on a winter day when you forget your gloves. Reaching, grasping like pickpockets. Desperate somehow, like the eyes of a scared animal.

The sensation fled as swiftly as it arrived, either a result of passing beyond an area of influence, or a symptom of leaving a particular state of mind. I opened my eyes, and it was gone.

I don’t know how many lost souls search for answers along those tracks, hoping for relief, warmth, company, safety. I’ve seen many homeless folk that catch a few minutes of sleep on those cars late at night; I wonder how many others travel unseen.

I never fell asleep on the subway again.

I can’t think of anything that I personally have run into, but I think that the most-interesting unexplained phenomena that other people have run into is ball lightning. Supernatural…well, I wouldn’t use that term, but we do believe that it likely exists, but haven’t really tamped down on the mechanism that produces it (if it is a single mechanism).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning

Ball lightning is a rare and unexplained phenomenon described as luminescent, spherical objects that vary from pea-sized to several meters in diameter. Though usually associated with thunderstorms,[1] the observed phenomenon is reported to last considerably longer than the split-second flash of a lightning bolt, and is a phenomenon distinct from St. Elmo’s fire.

Some 19th-century reports[2][3] describe balls that eventually explode and leave behind an odor of sulfur. Descriptions of ball lightning appear in a variety of accounts over the centuries and have received attention from scientists.[4] An optical spectrum of what appears to have been a ball lightning event was published in January 2014 and included a video at high frame rate.[5][6] Laboratory experiments have produced effects that are visually similar to reports of ball lightning, but how these relate to the supposed phenomenon remains unclear.[7][8]

Scientists have proposed a number of hypotheses to explain reports of ball lightning over the centuries, but scientific data on ball lightning remain scarce. The presumption of its existence has depended on reported public sightings, which have produced inconsistent findings. Owing to the lack of reproducible data, the existence of ball lightning as a distinct physical phenomenon remains unproven.[9]

On the above video:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24886-natural-ball-lightning-probed-for-the-first-time/

In 2012, Jianyong Cen and his colleagues at Northwestern Normal University in Lanzhou, China, were observing a thunderstorm in Qinghai, China with video cameras and spectrographs. Purely by chance, they recorded a ball lightning event. When a bolt struck the ground, a glowing ball about 5 metres wide rose up and travelled about 15 metres, disappearing after 1.6 seconds.

The spectrograph revealed that the main elements in the ball were the same as those found in the soil: silicon, iron and calcium. The observations support a theory for making ball lightning put forth in 2000 by John Abrahamson at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Gold dust

Abrahamson surmised that when lightning hits the ground, the sudden, intense heat can vaporise silicon oxide in the dirt, and a shockwave blows the gas up into the air. If there’s also carbon in the soil, perhaps from dead leaves or tree roots, it will steal oxygen from the silicon oxide, leaving a bundle of pure silicon vapour. But the planet’s oxygen-rich atmosphere rapidly re-oxidises the hot ball of gas, and this reaction makes the orb glow briefly.

The theory garnered support in 2006, when scientists at Tel Aviv University in Israel were able to create ball lightning in the lab by firing mock lightning at sheets of silicon oxide. The event in China marks the first time such an orb has been captured in nature with scientific instruments.

The study authors say that other mechanisms could also explain their observations. But Abrahamson thinks the findings are a perfect fit for the soil hypothesis. “Here’s an observation which has all the hallmarks of our theory. This is gold dust as far as confirmation goes,” he says.

Even if the above theory is accurate, it’s possible that there are multiple unexplained phenomena here that were all dumped under “ball lightning”; the historical descriptions are not entirely consistent. Some examples have been described as popping or exploding and causing damage. Some examples have been described as rolling over surfaces.