Thanks for responding, finger,
I actually am not able to shake off people's experiences automatically. I only mentioned jumping to quick conclusions because of very odd occurrances that have had strange but natural explanations.
In 1974 I slept in an Irish cemetery near an isolated little town because my freewheeling bicycle trip didn't include advance rooming arrangements.It was early spring and evening falling, I rode up to the first B&B i saw and noticed an inordinant number of cars about (cars were not so common then as I hear they are now)Too bad for me, there had been a football match between villages or something and NO accommodations. I pedaled off.
Nothing on the horizon and dark moving in fast I became aware of an ivy covered stone wall by the road. It encircled an abandoned church yard. Everything was shrouded in a dark green ivy. Even the only relic left of the church, --A chimney? a spire? was an ivy monument. I stopped and saw the churchground were like a hammock of the same stuff. Maybe this could provide a safe night's rest---
Almost dark,I looked around and pitched my bike over the wall thinking that no drunken footballers would find me there and I might sleep and get a move on in the morning.
It was a dew-soaked and miserable night. I woke up long before dawn utterly miserable and rummaged blindly through my canvas rutsack for matches and a cigarette.(i smoked then) I lit one and could see my watch--long time til sunrise. I decided to scrounge around for branches to kindle a fire, warmup and killtime--and cook up a few rashers of bacon when it got light.
I stacked damp twigs on a hard flat surface where I had cleared away the everywhere-ivy to lay the fire--and just as I struck a match--I imagined I heard a sound where I crouched.
I stopped moving and listened more closely. It began again--scriiitchh, scritchh, scratch. Clawing sounds near my feet! I stood up and looked about and there was nothing but blackness with no horizon.
It seemed (aLa Edgar Allen Poe ) to be coming from underground! O GOD. was I scared. And even worse, when I scraped hard at the ground where I thought the sound came from--I found I had built my fire on someone's slab grave stone!
My heart was bursting with a terror, my ears were aching with fear hearing the clawing sound again!
Trying to be rational I decided it was more to the side of the stone, near my canvas bag. With light coming enough see my hand move to it Ishifted the bag and found the soure of he terror--An Irish hedgehog.
He had been working at the side of my rough canvas bag for reasons of his own and left off after I found him out. I was a laughing nervous wreck--
Knowing that if I had pedaled away without seeing the hedgehog I would be telling you"Tales from the Crypt" is what makes me careful of hasty judgements.
But.....
That said, my older sister who was working on a graduate degree in Ireland in 1972 had repeated and frightening experiences with a "presence" in her flat; t"it" became so agressive that she lost money in order to move out.
She was alone in her locked up flat after the lights went out. She thought she heard a large dog pacing through the room. This went one for a few nights until she lay in bed one night and felt "it" on her chest weighing her down and its breath in her face. She screamed and was up and that was the last night she spent there.
I cannot say anything about it. She discounted any pranks of the landlady--why lose a paying renter? I am sure there might be an explanation--but I don't know what it is to this day and neither does she.