[throwaway_4638]

The only remotely paranormal experience I ever had was when I was in the Pyrenees mountains in France. It was the middle of the night and I sat alone between large rusty metal structures, that had been airlifted down from an old abandoned mine higher up.

It felt historically significant to me and being young and stupid, I decided it might be an interesting experiment to "open my mind" to the material. Not that I had any idea what that entailed. I just sat there and let my mind drift, while consciously disabling anything that felt like a firewall on my thoughts.

Suddenly I got jolted into the far too real experience of a mine elevator cable snapping and men screaming as it went down. In fact, I felt like I was one of them, screaming along with them, fully experiencing the sensation of immediate life threatening panic. It was completely unexpected and quite terrifying. I jumped up and ran out of that field, only calming down when I was far away from that place.

I would not qualify it as an actual trip to the past. More as an example of what kind of things the human brain can create when given free range. But I won't completely dismiss the possibility of material holding on to some form of memory, mostly because of how vivid and unexpectedly intense this experience was.