I've lived in haunted houses all my life. I've always been fascinated by the spirit world and usually the paranormal doesn't bother me. About 20 years ago I split up with my husband and rented a house in another town. I had viewed several houses, none of which were really suitable and I only took this one because I'd reached the point of desperation. I didn't like the place from day 1. The whole house was always intensely cold, even on the hottest summer days. I always felt uncomfortable like I was being watched. I would often come home from work to find the furniture out of place, not wildly out of place but just enough for me to notice and at first doubt my sanity. My pet dog would flatly refuse to enter certain rooms of the house. One time i was cooking a meal and he ran into the kitchen with his ears back and his tail between his legs and cowered at my feet. Something had terrified him but we were the only ones in the house. One evening I was watching tv when I heard the sound of dripping water right next to me. I switched off the tv but i could still hear it. I searched high and low but couldn't find any water source in the room, I didn't have a drink in the room or any other kind of liquid and there were no pipes in the room that could have been leaking. It wasn't raining outside. I even checked the room upstairs but nothing. I went back downstairs and sat down. Something prompted me to look to my right and there on an empty crisp packet on the table next to the sofa was a little puddle of water. To this day I don't know how it got there. I wasn't sorry to leave that house.

OK so I have another one. In the house I currently live in I experience paranormal activity quite often. It's nothing malicious, mostly lights and things switching themselves on and off, doors opening by themselves, things disappearing and turning up weeks later in bizarre places, sometimes I hear footsteps when I am in the house alone, and sometimes I hear something go crash in another room and when I investigate there's not a thing out of place. On the upstairs landing the light switch is outside my bedroom. My daughters' room is at the other end of the landing so I put a safety light outside their bedroom so if they get up in the night to use the bathroom which is downstairs they're not fumbling around in the pitch dark. A few weeks ago I had to get up to use the bathroom at around 1.30am. I never switch the landing light on as the safety light is always on. I was about halfway downstairs when I thought I saw someone standing at the bottom of the stairs. It was gone in a split second and I thought that maybe I was still half asleep or dreaming so I thought nothing more of it. A few nights later I had to get up to use the bathroom, again at about 1.30am. I saw the figure again and this time I saw that it was a tall thin man wearing a mac and a trilby hat. At the same time I saw him the safety light which was behind me started to flicker. It freaked me out and for the first time in my life I encountered a spirit that I didn't like. I mentioned it to my eldest daughter and she said that she's also seen the very same apparition recently. Since then, one day last week, I distinctly heard somebody knock on my downstairs window (three loud raps) but there was nobody there. And a few nights ago I was woken up by a loud crash in my bedroom. A trinket box, which has been standing quite securely in the middle of my dressing table for several years, somehow fell off, spilling all the contents onto the floor.

It may not be weird to anyone else but I survived addiction and I've made it to my 40s. In my addiction, I was subjected to guns being pulled on me, very volatile relationships where I could have been "unalived" at any point because they were out of their minds. I've been in a house that exploded and I only survived by jumping out a small window. Today, I have a very large family, grandkids and I am living my best life...

My whole life. Its impossible to pick just one thing. So I'll throw a few out there for starters. I was once almost killed by the world's largest American flag. President Bill Clinton asked for a picture with me. I've been in every form of media except radio, including being asked to pose for a painting and two different sculptures. I learned about my secret ingredient for cooking while I was in Geneva Switzerland, at a party for billionaires and high level corporate executives. The second girl I dated deliberately pushed me to commit su icide. She succeeded. No one to this day knows why I didn't stay that way. I'm considered the family dissapointment, the underachiever. I was essentially forced to publish my senior project in one of the top scientific journals for historical archaeology, despite being neither an archaeologist nor being interested in getting published. I can go on.

I suppose any one of these could happen to a person, but it is the combination that is unusual. I completed eight college degrees. I have been trapped in two malfunctioning elevators. I have been on five volcanoes while they were erupting. I have been bitten by two rattlesnakes, stuck in quicksand, struck by lightning, run over by a van, and had an anaphylactic allergic reaction to a bee sting. I have been in five car crashes, two motorcycle crashes, and one helicopter crash. I got shot once and stabbed twice. I have broken nine bones, one at a time. I have had 32 jobs.

I was attending a special art school that was downtown. In order to get there I had to take two buses. I had a dream one night that I had just gotten off bus #1 and saw bus #2 approaching the intersection where I changed buses. I dashed across the street and nearly got hit by a car. The next morning - that actually happened!