He said, She said...We said! Independent Ghost Corroboration

My constant verbal promotion of Death Clicks has once again struck gold. We, here at Death Clicks tend to combine a deep-seated belief in the paranormal and unknowable with a healthy skepticism and even healthier (if extremely twisted) sense of humour. As such, we are often interested in exploring personal accounts and finding or experiencing evidence of ghosts and mikkary (no idea what that is? read the blog post).

One type of evidence often dismissed or over-looked (in my opinion) is independent corroboration of stories from multiple sources. A friend recently shared this story:

When he was around 10 or 11, our friend (we'll call him Jack) was spending some time visiting with his Aunt, Uncle, and two similarly aged cousins. Jack was sharing a room with one of his cousins and was awoken in the middle of the night. In that shaky, 'it's the middle of the night, why am I awake?' way Jack looked around to try and determine what had woken him up. In the course of scanning the room, Jack sees a hooded figure leaning over his cousin's bed. At first, thinking in his sleep-muddled brain that it's his aunt, Jack sits up and begins to call out to her at which point the figure disappears. Jack is by this time terrified, so terrified in fact, that he waits YEARS to ever speak of what happened. Flash forward (hurray for time machines) to a decade or two later and Jack is hanging out with his other cousin (not the sleeper who was hovered over) and asks her about the figure he saw. She tells Jack that she saw this figure around her home constantly when she was a child but that eventually her mother told her to stop talking about it.

The hooded figure is a common figure in paranormal accounts and some believe it's the grim reaper or a demon but what interests me more is if an account of a personal experience can be as easily written off when someone else has had the same or similar experience independently? I think it's understandable to question thousands of claims of seeing Anne Boleyn at the Tower of London, but what about individuals like Jack?

I have my own story similar to this of a figure of a man in jeans and a plaid shirt and foam-mesh (or trucker) hat who would stand in the kitchen doorway. He was always seen only out of the corner of my eye and any time of day but most often during daylight. It wasn't until my family and I were moving out of the house after more than 15 years living there, that anyone said anything about him and we all discovered that we had each seen him on many occasions.

We'd love to hear your stories and what you think about independent corroboration as evidence of the paranormal.