Odd question - smells of the deceased?

I dont know, could be paranormal or just a memory thing.

Sometimes memories will trigger a phantom smell, atleast for me, ive experinced smells from my childhood straight from memory.

Maybe the thought of your mothers friend triggers her to remember that smell so vividly? then again it could be paranormal, maybe your mothers friend enjoys visiting her...?


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My Grandmothers house is located next to her mother's house. Every once in a while I will walk into my Grandmothers, I can distinctly get a whiff of my Great Grandmothers house. It makes me happy to think that she is around in spirit. I have not been in her house in probably 18 years, possibly longer.

reply to post by brintonwhite
I'm on the fence about these widely-reported experiences and find some of them fascinating. In science, they're explained as grief hallucinations and the research is full of accounts that appeal to our sense of something mysterious.

Carlos Sluzki’s cat died a while ago now, but he still sometimes visits. Now more of a shadow cat, the former pet seems to lurk at the edges of Sluzki’s vision, as a misinterpreted movement amid the everyday chaos of domestic life. All the same, the shadow cat is beginning to slink away and Sluzki notes that as the grief fades his erstwhile friend is “erasing himself from the world of the present and receding into the bittersweet world of the memories of the loved ones.”

Originally posted by Kandinsky
[In science, they're explained as grief hallucinations and the research is full of accounts that appeal to our sense of something mysterious.

They are not "explained". It is a speculative theory. A speculative theory full of holes, to boot.

It does not explain why so many people in profound, flesh-tearing grief never experience it; or why it is often experienced by people many months after the death, when they aren't even thinking of the deceased at that moment. (I am alluding here to cases I know.)

I am on the fence myself - only, I suspect, there are many more than two "sides" to this, so it's not really a fence.

Originally posted by strafgod
I dont know, could be paranormal or just a memory thing.

Sometimes memories will trigger a phantom smell, atleast for me, ive experinced smells from my childhood straight from memory.

Maybe the thought of your mothers friend triggers her to remember that smell so vividly? then again it could be paranormal, maybe your mothers friend enjoys visiting her...?

 

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I think it's the other way around: smells trigger memories.
But it is definitely possible to trigger the memory of a smell by a conscious effort.

However, many smells can linger in matter for incredibly long periods.
I am sure many have experienced this by returning to a place - say, a house - after many years of absence. Houses and places in general usually have a "composite" smell that doesn't change, unless a person with totally different habits (compared to the previous dwellers) has been living in it for a very long time.

So, it could definitely be a real smell, coming from the environment itself.
Or it could be something else.

My grandmother, with whom I was very close, died in 1992. Three or four times in the 2 years after her death I had vivid dreams in which we'd just have a nice visit and chat. I woke feeling as though I had really been with her and could smell her scent for hours. I felt that she'd visited and was sorry that the visits ended but at peace with her moving on.

Yeah my mom smells a cigar burning in our house occasionally, and no one here smokes!