[Robert]

I had a falling out with a friend once. Several years later I was taking my family out for dinner. As we approached the restaurant, his name popped into my head and I thought I could feel his presence. I tried to push this feeling out of my mind, but later that evening, I looked over my shoulder, and ... you guessed it ... he was sitting at another table! He was engrossed in conversation with a lady and did not notice me. I'm not absolutely sure it was him since I did not speak to him. But the feeling I had and the resemblance was eerie!

And then .... Around ten years following that incident, I was entering the health club where I workout and again, his name came to mind and I thought I could feel his presence. This was the first time since the previous incident that I had this feeling. I completed my workout and as I was leaving I noticed him at the counter, talking to one of the employees. Again, not positive it was him, but the feeling, the familiarity of the voice, and the resemblance all seemed to match up. Eerie...

I'm certainly not claiming the feeling I had was para-normal in any way; in fact, I'm reasonably sure it wasn't. I think there was something that triggered my awareness at a subconscious level. Still, this was strange.

Regards,
--Robert

[TinyTree]

I believe that ghosts are real, and also your paranormal experience was real. And I believe they are all real and must resort to "super natural" powers to explain.

However, the super part of the natural is merely a skill we all have, and are not able to utilize on a conscious level very effectively. Namely, we have the power to smell very trace amounts of pheromones and hormones emitted by others, and then use this olfactory knowledge to generate knowledge about the environment and about the past.

Most ghosts take place in places where there have been horrible things that have happened. Why is this? It is because the people who were undergoing the trauma were communicating like crazy through their pheromone chemistry to warn others. Then, these molecules drift through the air, stick to the walls, the carpet fibers, the metal- everything becomes a communication vector. Then decades, or even hundreds of years later, these molecules can be lifted into the atmosphere and picked up in your nose.

Our subconscious brain picks up on this emotional communication, and then generates accompanying input (such as the visual ghost). Similarly, a lot of very happy people generate phermones that are then picked up and stored in the environment.

As for your friend, he emitted phermones in the places that you visited, either shortly before you were there, or else a long time before. These phermones drifted into your nose, and your subconscious generated an image of him which made you ready to run into him again.

Since you have a heightened emotional response to this individual, you are more likely to be set down a memory recall path with olfactory information related to him. A random individual, or one you had little emotional turmoil with, would not be trained into your olfactory detection system, and thus it would not happen for them.

I don't know if you like this theory, but there it is.

[baudrunner]

One is tempted to call Robert's experience a quantum fart but, and bearing in mind that I do not own a PI badge, not that one could necessarily figure this case out, yet I think that in both cases the other fellow probably saw him first. That is not a QF so much as ESP.

We are but metal plates in a vacuum.