Am I ? Gee. That description made me laugh. If you could see me, you'd laugh too. I'm probably as close as you'd get to the love child that would result from a mating of Glenda Jackson and Edina Monsoon.
Anyway, seeing as I seem to have killed this thread stone dead, I may as well add to the damage while I wait for an Ebay auction.
I worry a bit about all the wide-eyed involvement and interest in 'dark' subjects these days, when the reality is, no-one really has much of a clue about who/what or where we are .. or about the experiences many of us have. Scientists speak of hyperspace, string theory, holograms. Mediums and clairvoyants often tend to speak of the after-physical-death state as if it's similar to a big garden party. There's talk of spirit guides and ghosts and good and evil spirits. Then there are the hobgoblins and aliens, tulpas and golems. Christianity weighs in with angels and demons.
Spontaneous experience of any or all of these does change you. The change may be subtle or profound. Nothing is ever the same afterwards, just as it isn't for the man who learns his son is not his biological child, or the person who learns as an adult that he/she was adopted. Life goes on, but it's a bit like living in a house in which one of the walls was suddenly ripped away one day while you were sitting in the kitchen eating your cornflakes.
There are army cadets who spit and polish and drill and dream of and glorify battle. And there are soldiers who've wiped the remains of someone's face from their boots. Some women are delivered of a child via ceasarian section in a five-star private clinic and there are women who crouch in bombed out ruins and give birth to armless, eyeless things while bullets fly over their heads. Some priests spend their entire working lives in picture postcard villages with duck ponds and nil crime rates and other priests spend their days carting two day old bread to wretched creatures living in cardboard boxes under railway bridges. Some people experience the appearance of their much loved dead grandmother, complete with scent of violets and some people are confronted by cloaked entities who shoot from the hip. Luck of the toss.
I never believed in sheet-draped 'woo-woo' ghosts, which may be why I've never encountered any. I was a full-on, outdoor action type kid; never bored, always trying to do ten things at once; always found just about everyone and everything to be interesting. I enjoyed drawing and reading as much as I enjoyed adventure and exploring. Ghosts held no interest for me and the idea of a dead 'thing' (spirit, ghost, whatever) jumping from around a corner dressed in a sheet was too ridiculous to be entertained. I still have no idea why anyone would look for a ghost in a graveyard; it makes as much sense as claiming people would hang around a used-car yard, just because they left their old car there before driving away in a new one.
Don't know if I'm 'dark' any more than I know if I'm offended to be described as such. I've had my lighter paranormal (for want of a better term) moments. But, once the wall has fallen away, you're left with no alternative but to accept that wall's gone. At the moment, there are millions of people who believe the after-death state consists of wearing super-white fluffy wings whilst sitting on a cloud, playing a harp. Millions of others believe that after they die, they'll spend eternity copulating with 77 virgins. Others believe they'll be reincarnated and will do it all over again. Some believe death just means you sink into a dreamless sleep forever. Those who've experienced non-living entities are compelled to view things differently, just like the soldier who wiped the blood and guts from his boots. Because what people are experiencing does not conform with any of the popular 'when you die' scenarios.
People are experiencing stick-men and shadow-men and three dimensional dead people who suddenly appear in the middle of the road or in toilets and corridors. Where are their wings and harps? Why are they still hanging around, instead of being reincarnated or instead of seeing how many virgins they can fit into a paradisical day? Who are these stick creatures? Why do ghosts hitch lifts or haunt their old bedrooms?
I can understand the interest in the paranormal; I'm interested in it too. But I think caution is to be advised. People are plunging into occult and ghost hunting activities with the same happy go lucky attitudes as those who go on a pub crawl. For most, the only ghostly activity they'll experience will be wishful thinking or created by the ghost-hunt organisers. But for a few, the wall will come down and they should be aware that it can never really be rebuilt. Afterwards, they'll have to learn to live without a safety-net. Or, more correctly, they'll have to learn to accept that the afterlife appears to have no safety-net. Once you've seen a ghost, you're confronted with the reality; 'there but for the grace of god, go I '.
In the meantime, until we die and learn what on earth's going on, it's we the living who appear to be disadvantaged in all this. We haven't a clue what's going on around us. And our 'experts' are so clueless, they don't even acknowledge that it's going on !
So here we are, like blind, deaf and dumb things groping around in a massive metropolis peopled by stick and shadow things, by disembodied and dismembered things, by creatures of all shapes and sizes and origins, all of them able to see us, have sport with us, deceive and mislead us. Some of them seem to guide and help us. Some of them seem determined to scare the life out of us. And ALL of them are too wily and elusive for us to be able to prove, or even say with certainty, actually exist.
At the moment, the same person, within the same day, may be called upon by the police to provide a witness statement, after which the police may say: ' Thanks very much. You're very observant. You've provided us a great deal of valuable information' ... and, two hours later, someone may snap at that same observant person: ' Oh look, ghosts don't exist. It's all in your mind. You're highly suggestible, imagined it all, were probably sexually molested as a child, your amaglydia's broken, you're emotionally unstable and cannot be relied upon, p*ss off, you're full of shite'. So, we're each of us on our own with our experiences if they're of a certain type.
I'll be the first to post in here if the day comes when a non-threatening, non-scary ghost/entity appears before me and assures me that my after-life is going to be a pale pinky-lilac, classical music, angels and cream-cakes heaven of safety, love and goldilocks palaces. That's what I used to think it would be. I'm a reasonably nice person. Why wouldn't I have a nice eternity? But in the meantime, I'm faced with what I believe I experienced, which was a scary cloaked thing that was angry with me. I'd like to get it sorted but have no idea how to do that and so have to face the fact I might be in for less than a bed of roses, somewhere along the line, and yes, that is pretty dark, although I still hum happy tunes most of the time.
At our old house, just the feeling that something is there that you can't see was enough to unnerve me sometimes. I think though I'd rather see a full apparition than just shadows. Shadows can be scarey. 
