Before, during, or after your deconversion, have any of you had experiences that prevented you from completely writing off some sort of spiritual or "other" realm? [Serious]

I've had a few experiences that are hard to explain away. One that has really stuck with me happened about 8 years ago. A paranormal obsessed friend of mine forced me and another friend to go with him to check out an old, supposedly haunted hotel in the town we were living in. I didn't believe in ghosts, so I had no fear or excitement or anything like that that could cause me to see things. I thought the whole thing was stupid. We stayed outside and took pictures of the "most haunted room" where a man had killed himself ages ago. We took dozens of pictures of the outside, then sat in the car and looked through them all. The first few showed nothing special, then there were a few that had a glowing orb (like what you see in photos on paranormal shows). It wasn't the camera flash, which you could see in the reflection a few windows above. It looked like it was coming from inside the room. We kept looking, then noticed a face in one of the pictures. A clear, super creepy, face that didn't look human...I don't even know how to explain it. This was before the hotel had been reopened, and all the lights were out, so no one should have been in that room. We looked all over and couldn't see anything that could've just made a weird reflection. We looked through all the photos, then went back to the one with the face and it had gone completely black. It was still there, not deleted, but you couldn't see anything. We looked through all the pictures from that night and all of them that had an orb or "ghost" face had gone completely black, but all the other pictures from that night were fine. We freaked out and drove the hell out of there. During the drive, I had this overwhelming feeling that someone was sitting in the backseat next to me and my right side (facing the empty seat) felt really hot, like I was sitting next to a fire. I didn't say anything, figured I was imagining it because of how freaked out I was by those pictures. When we got out of the car, the friend who had been sitting in front of the empty seat said "I didn't want to scare you while we were in there, but it felt like someone was sitting next to you and there was a heat radiating from the empty seat". The orb and face could have been weird reflections or maybe there was someone inside. The camera could have had some kind of malfunction, creating the weirdness of the photos and blacking them out. The feeling we had in the car was probably just our own imaginations. Still, a whole lot of weirdness and it all sure felt real.

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