When I was in university as an undergraduate student I had an unhealthy on/off relationship with a girl who fancied herself a bit of a witch. Maybe "witch" is an exaggeration on my part; she did not call herself that, but she claimed to be attuned to the spiritual side of things and to have various peculiar sensibilities. One of these was the ability to detect people's auras, which she percieved as a thin corona of coloured light around people's edges. Now, this girl suffered from debilitating migraines, so perhaps this was just a symptom which she had given a meaning to; but I indulged her anyway out of curiousity and the desire to come across as open minded (something I have grown out of, thankfully). According to her, the aura would inform her of the qualities of the person - in modern parlour, it gave off certain vibes that were a reflection of their personality. Most auras were actually quite bland and uninformative*, she told me, but she recalled with anguish a particularly bad aura she had come across once. It was not someone she personally knew, but simply a patron in a restaurant she was having dinner at. Apparently the moment she entered the restaurant she immediately noticed this woman at a table for having the nastiest, most rotten aura she had ever seen. It made her physically sick just being in the same room with this woman and while she did not leave, she spent the evening in distress until the woman finished dining and went away. She gave me to understand that the woman in question had done nothing wrong during her dinner - it was simply a matter of the vibes being extremely off. I never for a moment gave any credit to this story and to the whole auras ordeal - I just found it a curious tale, even if based on entirely preposterous premises. Years later however, I experienced something similar myself which I have not experienced since.
At the time I had progressed to the postgraduate stage and I was lucky to have a rather lively group of friends in the department's postgrads group. Among these was a portuguese guy, a rather nice fella with good taste in music and a generally interesting person to talk to. Occasionally he could have a mean streak, be a little catty; but he was sensible, and I always thought he was genuinely nice underneath. I hope I was right about him. His best friend in the world, he used to tell us, was a portoguese woman who lived in Lisbon. She was a little older than him and featured prominently in most stories he told us of his time in Portugal; we had reasoned she must have been a nice and interesting person as well. He being gay, there was no chance of his feelings for her being the result of infatuation, they must have been entirely genuine. We were therefore quite eager to meet her when he told us she was finally coming to visit him. We planned to go out with the two of them for a routine evening of pints and to get to know her that way. I remember that, for one reason or another, I had to remain at the department for longer that evening and I was therefore late to the meetup. Once I got to the pub everyone was already there. I looked around and identified the portuguese woman, chatting with the people sat next to her. I instantly got a bad feeling, somewhere in my guts. I felt very confused because everything about the occasion was joyful - we were in a pub, there was alcohol, laughs, music, friendly faces - and yet I was experiencing something quite negative, almost ominous. I asked myself whether that sinister awareness was the result of some other subconscious process going on inside my head, but my mind kept going back to her as the source of it. The vibes were off, so to speak. We were introduced briefly and I did my best to keep a straight face, but I let her go back to her conversation right away and intentionally sat at the opposite end of the table to put some distance between us. I had no intention of interacting further with this woman, but I was still trying to be rational and to convince myself that what I was experiencing was just a fluke, my primate brain misinterpreting some signals. Part of me wanted to say "she has a bad aura", but I do not give credit to ideas of this type. I relaxed a little by way of chatting with my pals and by getting a few pints in me, but throughout the evening I kept glancing in her direction like a nervous mouse eyeing a sleeping cat. I could not get a proper read of her, just that gut feeling. She was not behaving strangely at all I would say, she was drinking and engaging in lively conversation, even being somewhat histrionic; the people she was conversing with appeared absolutely fine and not distressed in the slightest. And yet I was on edge. I even felt guilty - was I the only one thinking something was not entirely right with her and the atmosphere around her? was I the problem? I did not say a word about this to anyone. As a matter of fact, I think this might well be the first time I have ever told this to anyone.
The evening of drinking kept unfolding along the usual comfortable lines, until something happened that made me feel vindicated for my gut feeling. The portuguese woman got up and went to the toilets, which were down a flight of stairs that led also into other venues; there was a lot of foot traffic. She had been gone for a few minutes when we heard a commotion coming from the stairs and the portuguese woman was coming up while arguing loudly with a bouncer who was following her. The bouncer was telling her firmly that she was no longer welcome and she had to leave the premises; she was telling him she had done nothing wrong and that she was not going to leave. She was being quite argumentative and outright dismissive, but the bouncer was not giving her an inch. Another girl came up the stairs behind the bouncer, a stranger none of us knew, looking somewhat distraught and staring alternatingly at the portuguese woman and the bouncer. She did not say much at all but it was clear that she had been at the receiving end of something. At this point we were all captured by this scene because of its otherwordliness - not only we had never seen anyone being kicked out of that venue, but we never imagined we would be involved in it. Yet, for all the attention we were paying, no one could make out what had happened in the female toilets between the woman and the stranger. To this day, we have no idea. What could have been so serious as to grant being asked to leave? what did she do to that stranger? The bouncer eventually threatened to forcibly remove her, at which point she said "Fine, I'm leaving" and started angrily gathering her belongings, cursing under her breath (in portuguese, I suppose). She stormed out without saying goodbye and my portuguese friend got up and followed her outside muttering "Oh Lord...", like this had happened before. We asked him whether we should follow too but he said no as he turned a corner and disappeared. That was the last I saw of the portuguese woman and her bad aura.
* Obviously I did ask her what my own aura was like, but I can't remember for the life of me what she said.