The Ghost in the Sleeping Bag
Back when I was 16 I was on holiday with my folks in a lovely little cottage in North Creake, Norfolk. The room that my brother and I were sharing was over the living room and the chimney rose up the wall opposite the door and, should've, as you'd expect, warmed the room quite nicely when the fire downstairs was lit.

The room was ALWAYS colder than the rest of the house, even on a sunny day it was uncomfortably cold in there.

One night, as I lay sleeping I was woken by the sound of someone moving about in the dark but thinking it was my brother I ignored it and went back to sleep. A few minutes later I became aware of something tugging at the zip on my sleeping, trying to unfasten it. I rolled over to tell my brother to stop mucking about, and turned to see him fast asleep on the far side of the room and noone else.

Thinking I'd imagined it I rolled back over and drifted off again. Some time later I was woken again by the zip being opened again only this time it was halfway down my back, maybe six inches from where it started and the bag was very obviously more open than it should be. I grabbed the zip, backed up against the wall and stayed awake until morning.

It turns out that the mother of the owner of the cottage died in her sleep, in that room and had been seen by other guests too.

I never went back. Even just writing this down sends uncomfortable tingles down the ol' spine.
( SubCulture Hero ... ... He... .... Comes ... ...., Thu 3 Jul 2008, 12:24, 3 replies)

The ghost in the garden
I woke up early in the morning about 3 a.m. Something just didn't seem right in the house. I lay there awake for a while and then decided to go downstairs to the kitchen to get a glass of water.

It had been raining the night before and I could see outside through our sliding glass door that looks out onto the back lawn that it was a little misty or even foggy out. I poured myself a glass of water from the tap and then sat down at the kitchen table. I was looking outside at the lawn through the sliding glass doors. I could see our big sycamore tree next to the fence; just beyond it was barely visible through the fog. That's when I saw it. That's when I saw the ghost.

I could tell that it was a human figure. It was so white that it seemed to glow. It was kind of billowing, too, like seeing a person who was swimming underwater. You can see them, but you can't really make out the edges. It didn't have legs – it’s body just sort of dissolved away toward the ground. It floated there for a moment or two and then I guess it must have sensed that I was looking at it because it turned a little toward me and then... and then... it just ascended straight up into the sky.

I stood there for what seemed like an hour, just waiting for it to come back. I didn't even realize that I had been standing. I must have stood up when I saw it fly up into the air.

The next morning I was telling my mother about it and she got this look in her face. I could tell that the story had got her scared. She said "You're moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-air"

I whistled for a cab, and when it came near, The license plate said "fresh" and it had dice in the mirror. If anything I could say that this cab was rare, But I thought "Nah forget it, Yo homes to Bel Air."

I pulled up to the house about seven or eight, and I yelled to the cabby "Yo homes, smell ya later!" Looked at my kingdom, I was finally there, To sit on my throne as the Prince of Bel Air.
(kebabking - salad and garlic mayo pls, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 12:20, 5 replies)

A couple of years ago
I was out of my province (I'm Canadian, incidentally) with my best friend and his family, staying in a nice little cabin. Well, everybody had a room to themselves except for me, I had a fold-out futon couch, in the living room area, which had windows all over (and I've never really liked unshuttered windows at night)

I slept well enough, occaisionally sharing my bed with their small dog, occaisionally having the thing to myself. Except one night, where I awoke, and the moon must have been full or something, for there was just enough light for me to make out a massive man-shaped shadow. At the foot of my bed.

Needless to say, I was scared shitless and spent the next four hours, terrified of sleeping, playing my friend's Gamecube on his TV.
Terrified, I played that Gamecube without moving for several hours, never once taking my eyes off that screen for fear I might see this visitor again.
My friend's mom eventually found me staring at the TV and she was able to convince me that sleep was, in fact, a good thing.
(UndeadChicken Eating poultry farmers since 1987, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 12:10, Reply)

Why?
Do birds suddenly appear?

Every time, you are near?
(Jugular, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 12:07, 12 replies)

Ghost
I grew up in a house in the middle of nowhere that was built in 1905. It was dark, creaky, the water pipes would make awful noises and loads of people had died in it. Did I see any ghostly activity? Did I bollocks. So you could say I was an unbeliever in all things paranormal.

A couple of years ago at the tender age of 29 I bought my first house. Having been built in 1968 it was reasonably modern, only 2 families had lived in it and nobody had died there, which is why I jumped a fucking mile when I saw out the corner of my eye a man in the kitchen watching me. He was gone in an instant. At the time I put it down to being in a new house, the previous owners had only just moved and it felt like I was in someone else’s home.

There was a lot of decorating to do, so for 6 weeks I lived with my parents and went over my new place every evening & weekend to decorate. In that time I saw what I thought to be a man in the kitchen a few more times. I had heard that some ghost sighting have been put down to carbon monoxide poisoning, so I had the gas combi-boiler serviced and I bought CO detectors (both electronic and the type that change colour).

A few days after moving in I saw him again. I had always got the impression from my fleeting glimpses that he was confused as to what I was doing there, so I stood in the kitchen and talked in a loud clear voice about who I was, where the previous family had gone, that I was more than happy to share the house with him but I would appreciate it if he would stay out of my bedroom.

About a week later I had a friend over to watch a DVD. I have known this friend for most of my life and knew that despite having a university education and a responsible bank job, he likes to hide when you leave the room so that he can jump out and shout “BOO!” I left the living room to use the toilet but he must have thought I was going to get another beer from the kitchen because from the stairs I heard the big ape “silently” move to the kitchen door followed by “BOO-FUUUUCK!". He calmed down once I explained that it was a benign ghost, not the vengeful type that crawls out the TV.

I very rarely see him now (the ghost, not my friend although he's still a bit wary about my house), when I do I say “Hi” and carry on with what I was doing. I am still sceptical when I hear about other ghost sightings & I refuse to watch “Most Haunted” and “Ghost Hunt”. I don’t consider myself as living in a haunted house.
( Colonel Dracula Two manky hookers and a racist dwarf, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 12:04, 5 replies)

The Shadow Spectre
Heard this from a friend who was doing some contract work in an office in Chester. Now, Chester was founded as a Roman fort and there are lots of archeological digs going on at any one time. The office my friend - we'll call him Paul - was working in was right opposite this dig where they reckon they'd found a second Minerva shrine, there was a lot of excitment over it and during the day the office workers would watch the excavations from the first floor window.

One night Paul decided to stay late to finish some work. This was in October so it was dark outside by half 6. Now the room he was working in was a big open plan affair, with windows at the far end and a double line of tall filing cabinets in front of the windows. Paul was working at a terminal at the other end of the room, on a desk up against the wall so his back was to the room and the windows and filing cabinets were some way off to his left.

He got quite into his work and oblivious of his surroundings, as you do, but at about 7 pm he became aware of a banging sound, as if someone was running up and down between the rows of filing cabinets and kicking them. This startled him, but it only happened the once so he put it down to 'building sound' and set to work again.

About ten minutes later the sound happened again, only louder. Paul tells me that he literally felt his blood run cold, as no way could this sound be attributed to any settling or shifting building noise. It sounded like someone or something was running up and down between the rows of cabinets and hitting them with a something metal.

Now these cabinets were only 4 foot high so if there was someone there he'd have been able to see them... unless they were a midget or a child... or were bending down in order to stay out of sight...

The sound got so loud that Paul closed down his PC and was getting ready to leg it - no way was he going to investigate - when the sound abruptly ceased.

Then, in the sudden silence, a figure rose up from behind the front row of filing cabinets.

At this point Paul tells me that he felt the most scared he had ever been in his entire life. He literally could not move.

This figure appeared to be the outline of a man - totally black, like a shadow come to life. Paul coud only see the torso, head and shoulders as it was behind the filing cabinets, but as he watched it walked forwards THROUGH THE CABINETS and marched down the office towards him.

Paul couldn't even scream as the spectre drew nearer. It was very definitely the outline of a man, with striding legs, swinging arms and an odd, oval shaped head. And as it came nearer to Paul, he noticed the weirdest thing of all about the apparation. He noticed that it wasn't solid at all.

It was made out of tiny black spheres about the size of a marble, arranged in the three-dimensional shape of a man.

Paul remembers seeing the hand of this shape, the fingers opening and closing as it marched closer and closer, the fingers made of individual black marbles...

It was coming straight for him but he could not move. And, as it passed by him, it paused - AND TURNED TO LOOK AT HIM with its blank, oval head. As though it had just noticed him.

At that point Paul broke and ran blindly from the room, screaming his lungs out. He can't remember much about the next few minutes but the security guards accosted him running through the foyer crying and shouting.

He refused to go back to the room, in fact refused to go back into the building, and lost the contract.

He told people what he had seen but no-one else ever saw or heard anything unusual happen in that building.

The archaelogical dig was a false alarm, they never found a second Minerva temple, instead all they found was remnants of a Roman gladius (sword).

Dr S
(Dr Skagra glorious glargzhem, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 12:00, 11 replies)

OK, so it was probably nothing...
When I was about ten my parents took my sister and I on the “holiday of a lifetime” to Oz, not being of the rich persuasion we stayed with distant relatives,- the kind where you rarely talk to one another accept when you need somewhere cheap to stay on holiday (this explains the entire reason why our extended family keeps in touch).

After a full day and a half of travelling we finally arrived in kangaroo country and were picked up from the airport by some distant relations. We made the two hour journey to the house of the actual relatives we’d be staying with-an uncle and auntie and their two young children, my parents last saw this family a decade earlier but my sister and I had never met any of them. We arrived in the early hours of the morning and so only saw our uncle-everyone else was asleep and our family all settled down for the rest of the night in the room we would share for the next couple of weeks.

I woke up at 6am-ish. There was a little boy standing at the bottom of my bed staring at me. He was pale and a bit gaunt looking. I said hello to my cousin before promptly dropping off again.

Later on in the day we were introduced to our cousins properly…yep, unsurprisingly seeing as this is a tale of the unexplained, both cousins were podgy looking sods, the kind used to taking full advantage of “eat as much as you want” meal deals that we saw everywhere in Oz. Neither of them was the skinny little kid I saw earlier on in the day and who I never saw again.

Looking back now I don’t know if it was a dream, the strange hallucination of a knackered and jetlagged child (in which case why could it not have been something more interesting?) or if it’s entirely common for strange children to come into other people’s houses at 6 in the morning in some parts of the world.

*insert spooky music here*

I guess I’ll never know.
(Ella Mentree, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:58, Reply)

UFO?
A couple of years ago I was going down to my mates house. Being that it was the first time I had been there he told me that he would meet me at the train station which was a short distance from his place, this was a great plan as it would mean that we would get the beer on the way down and not have anything disturbing our night of drunken PS2 playing, other than the pizza turning up!

At this point I’ll just say that it was a nice and warm early autumn evening.

So we had just turned into the road leading to his place when we see a bright flash in the sky. At first I thought that it was a plane, but the longer we watched it the less it looked like one.

It was sort of round and silvery and appeared to be moving very slowly. Now I’m starting to think that it some kind of radio controlled helicopter or some such but my mate pointed out that it was above trees that were about a mile passed his house. The thing must have been fecking huge.

As we got closer we could see what looked like two wheels attached to either side on the bottom. It wandered about for a bit and then vanished. To this day we still have no idea what it was!
(Herr Doktor Lemminge Is bored, so cheer me up!, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:53, 4 replies)

How to capture an alien
Apparently, 5% of the population of the United States believe that they have been abducted by aliens at some point in their lives. Whilst this goes some way to explaining the popularity of books like Whitley Streibers, and episodes of the X-Files, it also does beg some questions about our extraterrestrial visitors.
5% of the population of the US is about 15,000,000 people. To abduct and anally probe that many people, even over a 20-year span, would mean sneaking into the homes, snatching away and molesting the rectum of over 2000 people very single night for that time.

Assuming that your average American is reporting honestly, there is only one conclusion which we can draw from this: the aliens have an obsession with anally probing people which doesn't so much border on pathology as represents full-blown psychosis. Who knows why it's US citizens who get the abduction treatment more than anyone else in the world? Perhaps the sheer vastness of the American arse is uniquely alluring to your alien prober. Perhaps it's something in the American diet. Who can say?

Well, the aliens could, obviously, and that's how you go about capturing one. Simply get a sizable number - a few hundred, or thousands - of US citizens to drop their trousers and raise their arses to the sky on a clear, starry night and the saucers will descend in force. It's impossible that they won't; such is the obsession with backsides demonstrated by the aliens that an opportunity like this will be too powerful for them to resist.

And then we spring the trap.

Who's with me?
(davywavy, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:52, 7 replies)

High Spirits
This one happened when I was but knee-high to a grasshopper, so we’re going on the word of my Mother on this one.

The year is 1984. DiT is 4 years old, and the family Tights are living in a house in the quaint little village of Hawkspur Green, Essex. Dad was working up in the City, leaving Mum and a junior me in the house on our own.

Regularly, or so it is told, as Mum was reading me my bedtime story, I would giggle and watch something over her shoulder. I’d then point and say “Mummy! It’s a man!”

“Of course it’s not dear. Now, go to sleep.”

At which point she would tuck me in, turn out the light, close the door, and then tear downstairs in to the lounge where she would lock herself in and not move til my Dad arrived home. Cheers Mum, I love you too.

Anyway, a few nights later, my Mother awoke in the early hours of the morning. She saw (she supposes) what I had been looking at. A little old man in the corner of the room, staring at Mum and Dad.

“Kim!” She whispered (for it is my Dad’s name) “Kim! There’s a man in the corner!”

“Wstfgl.” Said my Dad, and then: “Don’t be silly. Go back to sleep.”

We moved out of that house a few months later. At that point my Dad said to Mum “Remember that old guy you saw? You weren’t dreaming.”

I suspect the kick my Mum delivered to his balls is the reason that I’m an only child.
( Devil_In_Tights the *real* DiT!, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:49, 1 reply)

IT
.
Working in I.T. shows you a few strange things. One of them is that some computer systems are sentient. When the owner or user is trying to work on it, it'll display bizzare symptoms, bugs and crashes but, as soon as a techie hoves into view, it'll purr like a pussycat and refuse to throw up a single error. Diagnostics will show it to be clean and the sweating user will be bleating:

"But it does it every time I try something. I can't understand why it's working now!"

I'll just tell them I believe them because normally, I do. I've seen it happen too often for there not to be something in it. Computers *know* when there's a techie in view. They can sense us. Sometimes, and I shit you not, you have to sneak up on the bastards to catch them doing something naughty.

And while we're on about techies, some of us have developed odd superstitions or rituals over the years. With me, it's my magic paintbrush that I keep in my toolkit. It's a very fine-haired paintbrush that I use to clear dust out of circuit boards. If a machine has an intermittent hardware fault (those are the ones all techies hate 'cos they're a bastard to find) then out comes my magic paintbrush.

But I'm not as bad as a mate of mine. He has a voodoo rubber chicken that he keeps in his inside pocket. When he's stumped, he takes out his chicken (stop sniggering at the back) and waves it over the computer. He swears it works.

I just wish he wouldn't do it in front of customers. Gives the rest of us a bad name.

Cheers
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:48, 11 replies)

UFOs and car stops and fog, oh my!
I was round at a mate's house watching a TV programme about UFOs, and electrical things going odd and car engines stopping because of powerful magnetic fields from them. It was a gloomy, misty night - just the right sort of night for a mystery...

The programme finished, and I headed off home in my rusty trusty Volvo 340. It was about 9:30 at night, and I realised that if I took a single-track road shortcut over the moors (ooooh!) I'd just be able to catch the Chinese in the next town before it shut.

So off I went, and as I climbed a steep hill I noticed that my headlights were flickering. Bright, then normal. A few seconds later, it would do it again, bright, then normal. Hmm. Well it's too dark and misty to do anything about it now. Let's just turn the radio up and press on.

The revs dropped as I climbed the hill, and then as I cogged it down from 4th to 3rd, the engine cut out completely - as did the lights, the radio, the CB, in fact *everything*. You know the phrase "deafening silence"? Not so much as the ticking of the clock on the dashboard. No electrics. Dead.

After a couple of moments I popped the bonnet and tightened the battery terminals, thus relegating the mystery to the realms of the entirely explicable ("oh that's tight enough, I'll nip it up later...") I still didn't hang about on the way home.

Length? About 18 miles, the second half of which passed in an adrenaline-fuelled blur.

(Edit: yes, I did make it to the Chinese in time.)
(gordonjcp, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:47, 2 replies)

In the summer of ’96
I went on holiday to the West Country with my parents. We were staying in an old farmhouse that backed onto a river. It was a nice spot, although terribly dull to a 16 year old mind. One afternoon, I was so bored that I decided to go and doss about in the room I was sleeping in. I sat on my bed and started to read a book, with my CD player on the bed next to me.

I am a cynic. What happened next I have tried to explain and failed. It is coincidentally corroborated by other members of my family.

You will all know the feeling that you’re being watched. It’s a survival hangover from our days of being hunted by wild animals. I was getting that feeling. I looked around, but of course there was no-one in the room. I figured I was being stupid and went back to reading.

And then I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. Again, there was nothing there. I was getting very nervous. My mind and body were telling me that there was something in the room with me, but my senses were saying I was alone.

This is where things got a bit weird. Up until now you could claim paranoia, or somesuch mental thingy. Something sat on my bed.

I am dead certain of this. It sat on my bed. It was right next to me. I looked up and there was still nothing there. No indentation in the bed. Maybe a slight distortion in the air, but nothing I could swear to. I could see and touch nothing but my whole body was screaming at me that something threatening was right there. I began to get goosebumps on my left arm and I seriously started getting scared.

And then an intense feeling of curiousity came over me. It wasn’t my feeling, it wasn’t coming from me, but I could sense the curiousity in the air. And I understood. It was puzzled about my CD Walkman. Now, I don’t claim to be psychic or in any way supernaturally inclined but I got the distinct impression that it was a girl. Maybe about 12 years old or so. I got a picture in my head of a blonde girl wearing a sort of smock thing with an apron. It seemed to be aware that I was scared, too.

I left the room. I spent the rest of the holiday sleeping in my brother’s room. My parents didn’t even question the decision. As it turns out, they’d got the feeling that something wasn’t right in that house, too. The previous night they had slept with the lights on because something about the house was making them nervous. My mum said that she had actually checked on me, the first time she had done so since I was little.

We stayed there for about a week or so and when we left, we went to check the guest book. Yup, practically every message mentioned a ghost.

Great.
( Kroney, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:43, 7 replies)

WOW
Looking through the QOTW ideas, I successfully predicted that the new QOTW would be Tales of the Unexplained. I was 100% sure of it and now, here it is.

Now, that is SCARY...

On another note.

When I was in scouts, we went on a 2 day camping trip in Dumfrieshire. The scout leaders wanted some time on their own i guess. They sent us on our way with packs, tents and food etc for 2 days. We had maps, compasses etc...hidden booze and fags etc etc.

We walked for a few hours and noticed it was starting to get dark. We found a very nice location to pitch our tents. It was a valley between 2 hills with a stream running down the middle of it and some nice camping locations next to the stream. We explored the location for sometime, getting to know our local environment etc, we noticed an old farmhouse. The house was in very good condition..no holes in the roof etc, no broken windows etc. It also had a garden which the owners had grown veg such as potatoes, carrots etc. We picked some of the veg for our evening meal cooked over a primus stove (heh, remember them). We were going to get our tents unpacked, when someone had the great idea of sleeping in the old house. We thought this was a great idea and went into the house. Inside it was very dusty, the windows were pretty dirty, but intact. In the room we chose, there was a wooden table in the middle of the floor, a fireplace and some empty tin cans strewn about the floor. We cleared the place up a bit and lit a fire in the fireplace. We lit a lamp, settled into our sleeping bags and got our beer and fags out...oh we had some sweets as well so we ate them. As young teens do, we started telling ghosts stories to each other...As the night got on, we decided it was time to sleep.

Later when we were all asleep, we were woken by loud clanging. The tins can that were strewn around the floor, we had piled in the corner of the room. Now these cans were flying around the room, banging against the walls, making a terrible racket...some of the scouts even got hit by them, but thankfully not seriousley. The house was making a loud creaking noise..like walking upstairs on creaky floorboards. There were shutters on the windows and they started opening and closing quickly...we stared at this for a few minutes until common sense took us and we fled from that place..ran as fast as we could...we left everything...none of us could sleep that night...in the morning, one of us had to go back and get the stuff we left...and I tell you now...noone wanted to go...oh man...I still have memories thinking about this as it is ultimate proof that there exists something beyond all our knowledge...and it terrifies me :(

On our return to the campsite, we mentioned this to our leaders who told us that the house had been abandoned by its owner due to unexplained activities...they had just....left.

Wish I could find it again...it's not far from Wanlockhead...
(scotsbloke, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:37, 2 replies)

Not the best way to be woken up
Over a decade ago, my girlfriend at the time (T) had had a sister who was - before I met T - murdered by her husband. The sister had a son (M) who, poor kid, had to be walked through the room where his dead mother lay. This turned M who was intelligent enough into a bit of a case, which one can understand.

Anyway, when I met T, M was inside prison - first offence - a bit of thieving from hanging around with the wrong crowd when he was in his late teens. When he got out, I met him every week at the family Sunday meal held at T's mother's, where he was living.

I liked M well enough but obviously he was a damaged person; I didn't feel particularly close to him. This bit is important when I describe what happened next.

One Saturday night, T and I were asleep in bed. We'd had a couple of drinks and smokes, but nothing major - I didn't go to sleep even half-cut.

I woke up, or was rather woken up, at 3 in the morning. Something was in the bedroom - like a column of light.I saw it for a split second, and then I was:

a) shit-scared like never before
b) convinced that something was wrong with M.

The former feeling I could understand - for a split second I had felt, in fact seen, something which I still consider to be an Out of Context phenomena, as Iain M Banks would put it.

The latter knowledge though appeared to have been planted in my head. Nothing had been spoken by the spirit, no words echoed in my head, just awareness, instant awareness, that someone I knew was in extreme peril.

I woke T up as calmly as I could and explained the situation to her. "We must phone your mum up and get her to check on M" I said.

Nothing doing. It was 3am, she wasn't inclined to believe my fairy story - despite this being somewhat out of character for me. Eventually, fitfully, I slept.

Next day was a Sunday. We walked to her mother's for lunch as normal. This time, no M.

He had tried to kill himself the night before with an overdose of paracetamol, which I hope we all know is not a good method (damages the liver something awful if you don't succeed, if you do, you tend to end up in horrendous pain before dying. Don't do it kids !)

Thankfully, he survived.

I still believe that it was his dead mother who found me and alerted me that night. Why me and not her sister or mother, I have no idea.

I have never felt inclined before - or since - to mess with the spirit world. I think it exists, I can't think of a rational explanation to this episode I've related above. I think mediums are frauds and ultimately there's lots of money on offer (James Randi award) if anyone can demonstrate anything supernatural.

I'd welcome people's comments on working out a rational explanation to what happened that night. I didn't think even in the back of my mind that M was a likely suicide candidate, it wasn't something he'd spoken of to me or anyone else to my knowledge - so where did my certainty come from ?!?
( I_Was_Mordred, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:35, 6 replies)

my grandfather was a tough, hard-working type
and it was the death of him. He died of pneumonia, that he caught shovelling snow from his driveway in the middle of winter his 80s.

Now, this isn't a once-off 'I thought I saw him out of the corner of my eye and when I looked OMG HE'D VANISHED'.

EVERY winter I'll see my grandfather, at various places around his home town. And not vaguely out of the corner of my eye; solidly, right there in front of me. And it only happens in the coldest part of winter.

Mind you, he did look exactly like a snowman.
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:29, Reply)

Mrs Spimf
...is a member of the Edinburgh College of Parapsychology

Mrs Spimf believes she can communicate with the dead. Mrs Spimf claims to be a ‘medium’ - but she’s actually very petite.

Naturally this provides a near endless source of amusement for me.

Why she would imagine there is higher spiritual existence where presumably the mysteries of life, the universe and everything were experienced as a single consciousness - a dimension where spiritual entities that could transcend space and time and experience all existence would want to use their supernatural abilities to knock on tables surrounded by a bunch of dried old powdery old biddies in Leith is truly a great mystery.

...an even greater conundrum though, is why this elite band visionaries with incredibly powerful gifts of inter-dimensional communication and temporal foresight would need a shitty little photocopied newsletter to plop through the letterbox once a month to inform them of the coming months events is a paradox I will never stop ripping the piss out of.


daft bint!
( spimf ™ is whoever you want him to be, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:29, 3 replies)

I'm not supposed to talk about this but...
I see dead people. Walking around like regular people.
They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead. I see them ALL THE TIME.

Yours,
H.J.O.
( Agnostic Antichrist Baltimora, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:28, 2 replies)

Coming home from the pub
I had to walk through the graveyard and it was about 5:00am, it was going to be a lovely sunny day and the first rays of dawn sunlight were peeping over the horizon.

I noticed a figure crouching behind one of the headstones. "That's peculiar for someone to be out this early" I thought.

As I got closer, I could see that it was an old man with a wisened, weather beaten face and a twinkle in his eye.

"Morning" I said.

"Nah, just taking a shit!" he replied
(oneinthepink is at your cervix m'lady, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:28, Reply)

Explain this if you can…

Only the other day I was invited to a small social gathering with a couple of friends in the happy borough of Nuneaton.

As I turned up at my mate’s house, he presented me with a 3 litre bottle of cider and told my to ‘start the early drinking’

Once despatched, the three of us walked into town whereupon we visited several pubs…

…and here’s where it gets spooky…

~~~~~~~~ Wavy lines ~~~~ woooooo ~~~~~~~

I have absolutely NO MEMORY OF THE NEXT 12 HOURS!

Based on the subsequent investigation I have drawn up a shortlist of possible explanations:

Alien Abduction: On waking I had an overpowering sense of dizziness and nausea (and my arse certainly did smart a bit the next day). I also discovered strange green lettuce-like ‘vegetation’ over my clothes and odd stains similar to chilli sauce down my frontage. Perhaps in my transportational state the aliens had attempted to pass communication for my return to Earth – This would explain the strange code scrawled on my hand next to the name ‘Chesty’.

Demonic possession: Witness statements mention my ‘speaking in tongues’, and people not being able to understand a ‘single fucking word’ I said. This could also explain the strange red marks all over my neck and inner thigh, and the reported lack of control over my bodily functions which apparently led to the ectoplasmic gloop I later discovered in my undercrackers.

Conspiracy Theory: Perhaps sometime during the night I witnessed a government 'hit' – or inadvertently overheard the royals laughing it up about how they bumped off Diana or something; so subsequently MI5 were despatched to ‘zap’ my mind in a ‘Men In Black’ stylie. This would solve the mystery of why my head felt like a baboon had shat in it.

Well there’s the evidence but I am still at a loss to explain exactly what happened that fateful night.

I’ll leave you to form your own opinion.
( Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:26, 7 replies)

My grandad
once saw a woman turn into a chicken.
(you FUCKING *BANG* BANG*BANG* AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:24, 4 replies)

Fan Death
It's not ghosts and it's not aliens, but in my opinion it could easily be classified as paranormal.

Over here in South Korea, you are warned every summer not to sleep with an electric fan on, and if you use a fan, make sure a window is open. Or you could die. Every year, there are a few dozen reports of people who die due to electric fans.

Last year, a group of men entered into a suicide pact and slept in a hotel room with the fan running. The next morning they were all alive so they tried again the next night. One of them decided he wanted to live and he unplugged the fan, so he was credited by the media for saving their lives.

This is seriously something that everyone believes. Intelligent, educated, informed people, even doctors. I remember having a conversation with a doctor about fan death, and he was trying to explain to me the numerous theories about how fans kill you in your sleep. They are:
-the fan blowing on your bare skin cools your body too fast and you die of hypothermia
-the fan creates a vortex over your mouth and nose, vacuuming out all the air from your lungs and suffocating you
-using up or pushing away all the oxygen and giving you carbon dioxide poisoning
-chopping up the oxygen molecules so there is no breathable O2

To me, all of these suggestions seem counterintuitive. When I sleep, I have the fan on, and I've been doing that my whole life, summer and winter. If the fan's not on, I feel like the air's stuffy, probably as the air expelling from my lungs lingers over my face. So fans help me breathe easier. Also, if I ever get too cold, I just move a bit or cover up with a blanket.

In all of this insanity, who would you expect to be the most anti-fan death? Not the media obviously as they're the ones fueling it. Not the cops, because if they don't want to investigate a death too closely, it's easy to just write down "fan death." Well, what about the damn fan manufacturers themselves? Don't they have a vested interest in educating people that they do not manufacture lethal home appliances? Nope, they believe in fan death too. If you buy an electric fan, it contains a warning that you shouldn't fall asleep with the fan on. Also, all fans come with timers, so you can set them to turn off before morning.

My wife believed in fan death at first, and she used to yell at me that there's a scientific reason for it. She gave up complaining after we slept with the fan on all through the summer.

If you don't believe a whole country is capable of thinking this, just click on this link and read point number 1. This is a press release put out by a government agency in 2006.
(racetraitor has an alibi for, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:24, 7 replies)

Pt. 2 of 'Creepy Shit That's Happened to Pigeony'
For my 10th Christmas, my cousin – my best friend – got me an ID bracelet. It was a cheap thing, all gold plate over nickel, with my initials engraved in the front and ‘Marry (yes, misspelled) Christmas. Love, Jeff’ (for that is his name) engraved on the underside. I put the bracelet on and it swiftly because my good luck charm. For years I wore it and, after my aunt’s unfortunate passing, I vowed never to remove it in order to ‘keep her memory alive’. It was like grief displacement – as long as I wore that bracelet, she would be OK and I didn’t have to cry.

Year later, we were out zipping around a lake on my cousin’s boat; my bracelet, at this point, had turned to tatters with gold flecks. My initials had been reduced to mere scratches, but yet, I would never remove it. I stuck my arm in the water to feel the splash, then felt the bracelet rip itself off. It skipped over the top of the waves, then sank. IT WAS GONE, 30 feet down on the murky bottom of Lake Michigan, there was no mistaking it.

I was beside myself with teenage grief. For days I cried, then I resorted to praying. Not being the Christian sort, it was more like begging to the ether, but I gave it a try.

A couple of days later, my mom walked into my bedroom when I was sleeping.

“Pidgeony, why’ve you been crying all week?”

“Sob cry weep moan, I lost Jeff’s bracelet!!”

“Oh, you mean this one? I just found it in the cushions of the sofa.”

(…)

And it was that self-same bracelet, same misspelling, same shite worn-out look, same pattern of gold flecks. A close inspection revealed that my parents had not purchased me a new one to sate my teenage sadness; my good-luck bracelet, the one that held my aunt’s memory, somehow made its way out of the water, travelled 100 miles and landed in the cracks of my mum’s sofa.
(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:19, 3 replies)

My Aunt Betty
My Aunt Betty swore to her dying day (RIP) that this was true...

She lived on the edge of a graveyard in County Durham because her hubby, my Uncle Joe, was the gravedigger/grounds-keeper, and in those days the church supplied the keeper with a little house on church land.

The story goes that every now and then, Betty would be woken by a cold feeling. And then a ghost, a man dressed in a suit, would walk across the room from one side to the other, passing through her bed.

For ages this went on, until one day she plucked up the courage to say hello. The ghost stopped and just looked at her. After a while, she asked him if he would please stop walking through her bedroom. He walked off through the wall, and she never saw him again.

Where was Joe in all this? Fast asleep. The apocalypse would have to happen twice to wake him up.
( Damocles wants no part of your debauchery, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:17, 1 reply)

spooky
My brother Thomas died when i was two, 8 years later my youngest bro Joe who was 2 at the time, who hadn't been told about Thomas said to my Mum one morning "Why didnt u tell me about my brother Thomas, we were playing with a hula hoop by the gates last night" My Mum fell apart, too too weird!!
(airyfairy, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:16, 1 reply)

so i was
eating dinner in my kitchen the other night, and i really couldn't be bothered to get dressed. roast vegetable and chilli flaked broth.

i guess you could say that was a soup au naturel experience.




fuck it, if you can't beat 'em...
( rachelswipe with a fork, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:16, 5 replies)

The Bloop
A brief explanation here; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop

I can't help but think that the Bloop would be more famous if it didn't have such a stupid name. The very concept of it fascinates me. This isn't some lights in the sky photo'd by a man with Parkinsons on a box brownie. This is a noise that confirms to no other signature ever recorded be it biological, mechanical or geological. It wasn't reported by a man with an overbite and a history of delusions, it showed up on one of the most sophisticated pieces of microphany ever devised (and futher to the wiki article also cropped up on an Australian submarine sonar telemetry) and was recorded for posterity. Despite this, nobody seems interested.

It fascinates me that we (by which I mean society not me personally) watch "Britains most haunted bus stop" or wherever we've sent Derek Acorah this week and lap up the X-Files and yet when something provably mad showed up and was recorded, we shrugged our shoulders and went back to the TV's.

Length? Well if whatever made the Bloop was biological, it would be a big ole bastard.
(Leonard Hatred briefly did some work on, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:14, 9 replies)

I always seem to be telling stories about my mum on here
But this is a favourite. She's a bit of a sucker for the supernatural (whereas I'm a full-on scientific atheist type). When trying to decide on things to do, she used to do the I Ching. One day she had a dilemma, and decided to throw the yarrow stalks or whatever you do.

The answer she received seemed fairly meaningless, so after much deliberation, she gave up and tried it again. She was rather freaked out to get exactly the same hexagram (which is pretty unlikely in itself). Bewildered, she threw it again. This time the result was this: (seriously)

THE JUDGMENT


YOUTHFUL FOLLY has success.
It is not I who seek the young fool;
The young fool seeks me.
At the first oracle I inform him.
If he asks two or three times, it is importunity.
If he importunes, I give him no information.
Perseverance furthers.


That was the last time she consulted the I Ching
( flatfrog Staring vacantly into space, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:13, 11 replies)

I don't really believe in all this stuff,
but there has been once incident that left me slightly shaken.

I was 13, in my final year of prep school, and the father of one of my classmates had died about a week previously.

Myself and another classmate were walking from the library to our classroom during lessons, to get something. No-one else was around, they were all still in class. Well, there was one other person. An old(ish) man, with a white beard, sports jacket and corduroy trousers was walking quickly across the playing fields at the front of the school. My friend and I stopped at the same time, looked at each other, and simultaneously said "that looks like Dan's (the grieving classmate) father". He was the spitting image of him, and was wearing exactly the same outfit that he always had. We looked back, but he'd vanished.

That spooked me out for a bit, but then the cynical part of me kicked back in with cold hard logic: this was in Cambridge. It's full of old(ish) men in sports jackets with beards. Hell, my father dresses like that. And our school was next to the University Library. So it was almost certainly just another identikit academic taking a short cut through the school. But a tiny part of me is still saying "what if...?"
(The Empress it seems you CAN polish a turd!, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:08, Reply)

Hooters
My missus has got SUPER natural tits, not a hint of silicon.
(oneinthepink is at your cervix m'lady, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:05, 3 replies)