Lots of great stories here, thanks everybody for sharing. The stories of verifiable mediumship, of the sensing of danger and/or passed on loved ones, of objects being hidden for protective purposes, of answered prayers especially involving miraculous physical transformation, of synchronicities and of animal connections are very powerful. Elessar, I'd love to read more about your experiences if you'd be willing to add me to your private conversation.
I've been having (almost entirely negative) spiritual experiences on and off over the past fifteen years, but the problem with sharing them, other than that many of them are very personal, is that none of them involve any objective or third-party corroborating evidence, so it would be too easy for the reader to dismiss them with "Nah, dude, it's all in your mind". In any case, you can get a sense of the nature of some of them through
the post I made recently in another thread.
So much for the bulk of any personal paranormal experiences I can share. Too bad.
I can think of only two other experiences that might make the grade, although they're not all that impressive. The first is my one and only ouija board experience, which occurred in 1997 in rural Victoria, Australia, where I was visiting a family of fruit-picking friends, and the children of the family (around my age) suggested we try a ouija board at their friend's house - they said they had used one before with intriguing results, and I was curious. So we did, while their friend's parents were out one evening, drawing up an ad-hoc board and using an upturned glass. The objectively-verifiable inexplicable (on a materialist account) thing that happened is that as soon as we called for a spirit to communicate with us, a strong wind blew through the room, totally spooking us all out. Why was this inexplicable and spooky? Because the house was entirely shut up: all of its doors and windows were closed, and there was no way for a wind (especially one of that strength) to get in.
I would never use a ouija board again, I have heard too many stories of negative things happening to people who played around with one of these devices. Perhaps it is possible to use them safely, I really don't know, but for those who don't know what they're doing, as I and my friends did not, my strong advice is: do not use ouija boards; you are potentially opening yourself up to dangerous and malevolent forces and entities of which you know very little.
The second experience is somewhat less objectively-verifiable, but a lot more positive. Hooray.
Sometimes, I struggle with excessive consumption of alcohol. Some years back, I had reached a point where I really, really wanted to quit and clean up my life, but no matter what I tried (mostly "willpower"), the cravings kept me chained. I was at that time in communication with a wise online friend who was spiritually developed and had a personal spiritual toolbox, and, when he saw that I was serious about wanting to quit and clean up, he suggested that I pray out loud to God, His angels and any helper beings, saying exactly what I'd told him - that I wanted to quit, and to clean up my life, and that I requested their help in doing so. He had other advice but it's not so relevant to this story, so I'll omit it. In any event, after our conversation, I did exactly that. It was a sincere prayer, and it had an immediate effect: from the moment I finished it, the cravings for alcohol (which, recall, had been so strong until then as to prevent me daily from quitting even though I really wanted to) vanished, and I never experienced anything beyond the mildest of temptations for another two years (at which point, I'm sorry to say, I took up drinking again, but, whilst that's sad, it's also beside the point of this story).
Of course, it might be easy for the reader to decide that this was a placebo effect: I believed that the prayer would work, and so it did, and, of course, I have no hard refutation of that other than that it doesn't match with my experience; in fact, I didn't pray with the expectation that it would work, I simply took my friend's advice and prayed sincerely. It might then be objected that regardless of whether I had a conscious expectation, the ritual primed my subconscious with a personal intent which had the effect of eliminating the cravings. Again, I have no hard refutation of this, but it doesn't match with my understanding of this experience; I would say that at best it's only part of the story. It is not very convincing to me (on a materialist account) that conscious, willpower-based attempts to quit utterly failed whereas a brief ritual in which I wasn't particularly consciously invested - beyond sincerity - would result in such stark success.
Anyhow, as I said, these experiences aren't all that impressive, but they're the best I've got with any degree of objective evidence: a paranormal wind felt by others and two years of sobriety.