There used to be — maybe still is — a psychological test called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or "MMPI."

It was a battery of hundreds of true-false questions, and the subject’s answers to the questions were supposed to establish what types of psychoses, neuroses, and bad habits the tested subject might have.

It was a popular test, judging from the number of times I was forced to take it years ago — when I enrolled in a psychology survey course in college, when I applied for jobs, when I volunteered as a subject for a graduate student’s research project.

One statement on the test, to which the subject was supposed to answer "True" or "False," was, "I have had many strange experiences."

I knew better than to answer "True" to that one. Answering "True" would have marked me as a hopeless fantasizer, maybe even a schizophrenic.

But which of us, I dare to ask now, has not had many strange experiences?

In 1968, when I was living in Buffalo, N.Y., then a city of about 500,000 souls, I kept seeing the same man in my vicinity, wherever I went. I was convinced that he was following me. I finally confronted him, and he owned up. He was a private detective, working on a divorce case, and he had been tailing the wrong man, me, for days.

One dark, moonless night in 1974, I stopped my car at a traffic signal in a section of Rockingham that had no streetlights. I stopped, even though the traffic light was green, because I had a feeling that I should. An instant later, a car without headlights barreled through the intersection at high speed, running the red light. Had I not stopped, I might have been killed.

In 1978, my wife-to-be and I attended a motion picture in Fayetteville. We arrived just in time for the feature, and the theater was so crowded that we had difficulty finding two seats together. Finally, we found our seats and settled down to watch the movie — whereupon I discovered that I was sitting with my wife-to-be on my right and my ex-wife on my left.

In 1983, my wife and I had a close encounter with an Unidentified Flying Object. I have written about this experience before, and I won’t repeat the story now. Suffice it to say that, while I have arrived at a sort of explanation for what we saw, it continues to mystify me.

And then, there is the story of the easy chair.

As a college student in 1962, I rented an apartment in Chapel Hill from the writer John Ehle. The rent was cheap: The deal was that Ehle could use the apartment as a studio in the mornings; another local writer, Leon Rooke, could use it in the early afternoons; and I had it the rest of the time.

The apartment was furnished, but Ehle advised me never to sit in a certain chair in the living room/studio area. "The last three people who had this apartment before us," he said, "all considered that their favorite easy chair — and all three died violent deaths."

I didn’t know how Ehle could possibly have obtained that information, or whether he had made it up. In any case, the chair became my favorite chair during the several months I spent in the apartment.

I didn’t think about the chair again until 1968, when I read in a newspaper about the death of a student in Chapel Hill. The student, according to the story, had become "high" on LSD; and, under the illusion that he could fly, he had jumped out of a window of his apartment onto the street below, killing himself.

He jumped from the apartment I had rented, and he had jumped from the window closest to where that ominous chair had sat throughout my stay in the apartment.

I have had many strange experiences.