[tangent: The sensations of "non-headaches" and of pixie-sticks emptying in the brain remind me of when I physically feel mood swings (I'm bipolar) in my head - I call them "moodaches," although I also use that term when I'm at the point of tears for no reason. But I can feel a very odd sensation in my head, accompanied often by really heightened senses (euphoria) which sometimes looks like someone cranked up the saturations in the colors in the world. I have a friend who reported the same experience of seeing things in extra-brilliant color before a mood swing.]
One of the reasons I came to these boards in the first place is precisely such a conversion of sorts. I'd always thought reports of hauntings were very easily written off. (I should add that the fundamentalist Christianity I was raised in viewed all paranormal experiences as demonic, but as an adult I'd moved to the Episcopal Church and also stopped believing in angels, demons, and the devil.)
I was auditing classes at the Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit, and one night (as luck would have it, during spookily strong winds) our class let out early. I had loaned my car to a friend, so had to call her and ask her to pick me up much earlier than expected. As I was standing around waiting for her to get the message, the librarian (who was also auditing the same class with me) commented that I was in the area where he sees the ghost. :shock: He explained to me that he'd often hear footsteps upstairs (on the main level; the library is down in the basement) when he was alone in the building (and the security guard also claimed the same thing), and one night he even saw her! He showed me the spot where he saw the lower half of a woman in an old nurse's uniform walk several yards. Apparently, there was nothing obstructing the top half of her - it simply wasn't there. He said he didn't know why, but he called her Katherine (my spelling; I don't know how he'd spell it) and figured she was a member of the congregation (the seminary's in an old Presbyterian church) back in WWI. I asked him, "So where does that fit in with Christian theology?" He shrugged his shoulders and said, "It doesn't." (He was UCC, FWIW.)
I'd never met anyone who'd had such an experience outside of my childhood Pentecostal circles (there'd been various reports of "demonic" activity, miracles, and such), and here was an educated, sensible person who I basically trusted. I think it helped that his theological views were similar to mine.
Then a (Baptist, as it turned out) coworker told me about how her dead grandfather would pull on her hair from time to time, just as he used to when he was alive.
Other coworkers were wanting to believe our building (an old turn-of-the-century mansion) was haunted, and my one coworker, a very calm, level-headed guy (who's now in law school) said something like, "No, it's not. Haunted buildings feel different." Turned out he'd worked in one. I asked him what it "felt" like, and he said, "Like someone's following you around poking you in the back of the neck."
Anyway, I can't reasonably write off so many people's experiences (who I actually know and respect!), so I was converted from non-believer/skeptic to agnostic. I certainly believe there's phenomena, and something behind them, but have no idea what it is.
Similarly, I think - I never believed in gender until I finally heard enough of the experience of transgendered and transexual people. I'm still agnostic about that, too, though. But if so many people believe their gender is different from their sex, then there must be something to their experience! Just what, I don't know. Maybe there is no gender, and it's some intuition that a person's sex is wrong, without reference to gender. All I can do is honor the experiences of others, since their experiences provide data I can't otherwise access. And I'm not willing to write off all data that doesn't come easily to me!
