I saw the ghost of Justin Fashanu once
didnt half put the willies up me
(wEEjOCKpOOpONGmCPLOP He is ugly though isnt he OOOH YESS!, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 23:06, Reply)

Jim
There was once this bloke in my local, used to come in three or four times a week, and sit by himself drinking. He was quite tall and thin with a mullet and beard, a rather lined face and a haunted expression. Probably late forties, early fifties. He kept himself to himself, never caused any bother so people used to leave him to his own devices - drinking, and sometimes reading the paper or a book, but mostly drinking and staring into space. So what, you may ask, pubs are full of such people. And so they are. This chap became a fixture over the years, a part of the furniture, never speaking to any of the other regulars or customers, only speaking to ask for another pint and chaser. He'd only seem to come out of his shell a little when Arsenal were playing, then he'd move slightly closer to the main crowd and get engrossed in the game. But most of the time he'd sit alone, drinking, from 7pm until closing time. He never seemed to be pissed, would just appear less haunted after he left the pub after 7 or 8 pints (plus chasers).

Then one week, he didn't show. I remember one night thinking something wasn't quite right with the pub, and the landlord pointed out that Jim (not his real name) wasn't in his usual chair. So what, he's probably moved house, or died, or perhaps given up the booze (we all laughed) and then forgot about him. A few more weeks went by and it was as if he had never existed. And then one evening as I entered the bar, he was there, in his usual place, a pint and a whiskey chaser in front of him.

He looked different. Somehow smaller, as if he had shrunken inside his 80's style brown leather jacket. He kept blinking a lot, exaggeratedly, almost like a wince. He kept shaking his head and his hands, when not employed in conveying glass to lips, were clutched tightly in his lap.

Everyone felt uncomfortable but no one had the emotional courage to go up to him and ask him what was wrong. Or perhaps they didn't care. But as I thought back over the years and years of Jim coming to my local, the sadder I felt and my heart began to feel heavy with sympathy for the poor man. As I watched from the bar he put his head in his hands and began to sob quietly, his thin shoulders shaking.

That was it for me. All very well to mind your own business and take the piss, but I just couldn't leave it. So what if he told me to fuck off, at least I'd have tried. So I walked over to him with my pint and sat down opposite him. "Come on mate, it might never happen." It came out without me thinking about it, the sort of inane platitude you blurt out in serious situations when words are inadequate, like asking someone very clearly injured in a car accident "are you all right?"

He looked up at me, his blue eyes awash with tears, his lined face all red. "It won't leave me alone," he muttered. "Won't fucking leave me alone." He had a beautiful voice, deep with a slight Irish accent. I'd never noticed before.

I dreaded to ask, but I had to. "What won't leave you alone, mate?"

"The baby... the...the baby." He broke down into sobs. I summoned the landlord to bring more drinks and waited for Jim to recover.

"Do you want to talk about it?" I asked hesitantly.

He glared at me for a moment, then took a sip of whisky. "You won't be able to help."

"I might."

Jim shook his head. "No. You won't." He leaned back in his chair and his face creased again. "No-one can!"

After a few more sips he calmed down, though he still looked haunted. And he told me his story. Those looking for a funny story will be disappointed; those who type TLDR fair enough, or think I’m making this up fair enough, but I'm not.

This is what he told me: thirty years ago, at the age of twenty-one, he'd got married to his childhood sweetheart, Rachel. He was a plumber at the time and her parents were "posh" and didn't approve of the match. But Jim and Rachel defied them and made the marriage work; within a few years he had his own plumbing business and Rachel (a teacher) was pregnant with their first child. All went well until this child was born. It was severely deformed with anencephaly (Google it but BE WARNED, the photos of babies with this condition WILL give you nightmares for the rest of your life). Babies with this condition never live very long and their child, a boy, lived for three hours after which it died from complications.

It was a devastating shock to the young couple, but Rachel soon recovered from it and began to talk about planning for another child. That was when the visits started.

One night, Jim was awoken by a noise from the next room - the room they were going to use as a nursery, but was now a general store-room. He got out of bed without disturbing Rachel and went into the room and turned the light on. There, propped up in a corner, was the corpse of their anencephalic baby. It stared at him with its dead, protuberant eyes. Jim froze to the spot - he says he never felt anything like it - he went cold all over and was overcome with this feeling of absolute terror.

And then the baby spoke, in a high, piping, lilting voice:

"Why are you scared of me, Daddy? I can't hurt you - I'M DEAD."

Jim blacked out. Rachel found him the next morning but he put it down to work stress, and didn't tell her what he'd seen and heard.

These visits came almost nightly after that. Jim became withdrawn, morose, and took to drinking. The drinking took over, Rachel left him, the business collapsed, and Jim began the downward spiral that led him to this pub, my local pub. He was now living in rented accommodation and claiming benefits for mental health problems. He spent a couple of months in a psychiatric ward after he tried to kill himself. He was prescribed meds but he found the only thing that helped was drinking heavily. But a few weeks ago his doctor had told him to stop drinking for the sake of his liver. Jim had complied - and the visits had started again. Always exactly the same - he'd be woken by a noise from another room, go inside, and find the baby there with its chilling statement. He'd tried not going - but then the baby would appear on the bed, or, once, inside it with him.

So now he was back, drinking again, despite the risk to his life.

After he'd finished his story he looked a little less haunted, as if the telling of it had relieved some of his pain. I told him that he was right - I could not help him - other than to suggest he goes back to his doctor or psychiatrist, because self-medicating with alcohol in his condition could only have one outcome.

He thanked me kindly for my advice though I knew he'd never take it. I stayed with him for the rest of the night and we talked about other things, mundane things like the football and the telly and antiques (on which he was a bit of an expert). When he left the pub that night he seemed almost cheerful - or rather, a shade less haunted and miserable.

I never saw him again and that was five years ago.

Wherever you are, Jim, I hope you have found some peace.
(Dr Skagra glorious glargzhem, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 17:49, 11 replies)

I'm not sure it was a ghost
but when I was a child I did have an odd experience that I can't rationalise.

When I was 8 Mum and Dad bought a house in a new area. It was one of the bog-standard, 3 bed-roomed, 1930s terrace that you can see all over the UK. It was all very exciting as my sister and I went to school from the old house and came home to the new one.

That evening Mum sent me upstairs to unpack things in my bedroom and I was quite happy up there arranging all my stuff. I was sitting on the bed with the bedroom door on my right when I saw something in my peripheral vision. I looked up and for the briefest of moments saw a old woman passing the bedroom door. It was a split second glimpse but long enough for me to see that she was dressed in a Salvation Army uniform. (I was familiar with the SA's clothes as my nan lived down the road from one of their meeting halls.) I remember that I wasn't scared, just surprised and I stepped out onto the landing to see who it was. There was no one there. The only place she could have gone, based on her direction, was into the tiny front bedroom so I checked but that too was devoid of life.

I trailed down to the kitchen where Mum was and told her what I had seen, still quite undisturbed by the whole thing. Mum, however, dismissed it as imagination and forbade me to say anything about it to my sister. She says she just thought I was acting up or letting my imagination run away with me.

I kept my promise to my mum and didn't breathe a word of it to my sister. In fact, I pretty much forgot about it. Mum's reaction had convinced me that I had dreamt the whole thing and moving house was so exciting to an eight year old me that I had too much else to think about. Mum, however, was not best pleased when a couple of weeks later my sister announced at breakfast that she had woken up in the night and seen an old lady in a Salvation Army bonnet standing at the end of the bed. Mum assumed that I had been trying to wind my sister up with a ghost story and told me off. My outraged denials were ignored and I felt most aggrieved.

A few more weeks passed and again we all forgot about it. Then one morning Mum got chatting to one of our new neighbours, a lady who was in her 60s. She told Mum that she had moved into the road with her parents when the houses were newly built and had lived there since. She remarked how much things had changed over 50 years, not least the people who lived in the road. All the original tenants had, like her parents, been members of the Salvation Army.
(Innogen, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 16:08, Reply)

Carry On, Matron.
Let me first point out the fact that I'm not a believer in the afterlife and all that. I'd rather shit a stickle brick than watch blood sucking parasites Derek Acorah and such like peddle their particular brand of bullshit and I don't get scared at much at all.

Between the ages of 15-18 I had a summer job as a filing clerk in at the Leicester Royal Infirmary hospital. It was a mind numbingly dull, endless job that involved replacing the files that had been used around the hospital into their correct cabinets. This takes a huge amount of space. They converted one of the old wards into a filing room years ago to accommodate a lot of the files.

The ward was a great big long building with an old fashioned conservatory at the end for the 'big files' (serious stuff). It was lined with cabinets, stuffed full of files. Sound did not carry through the room at all. It had that silence that you get in carpet shops, make sense? You could see down to the other end of the ward but not shout to people. The ward got dark quite quickly as the windows were partially blocked with cabinets. For this reason the lights were on motion sensors down all the aisles.

Several times, working down there alone or with another lowly file monkey, I got the impression I was being watched. Once or twice when looking up from the files I caught a glimpse of what I thought was someone moving in and out of the aisles. That's fine. I didn't mind that. It was the lights that bothered me. As you made your way down the corridors of files the lights would go on and off again once you passed. I was sat drinking tea on my break at the desk and watched as the lights at the far end of the ward turned on. Then the next. Then the next, getting closer and closer. They got to the end of the aisle and nothing. I knew there was no one down there filing with me that day. That scared me a bit but again, perfectly explainable stuff. The feeling of being watched continued and the light thing happened once more but faster and on an aisle I was looking directly down. That scared me more.

On the way out of my last shift of the summer (off to uni so knew it would be last shift ever) I turned around at the door and looked at the long gloomy ward. I'm not sure why but I said 'see ya' under my breath. All the lights turned on at once and burned very, very brightly. I turned around and ran. That did scare me.
( magictoast, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 14:21, 7 replies)

( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 13:22, 9 replies)

I JUST SAW NUTKINS
Bumming an otter to death
(magic the cat will someone please think of the kittens, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 13:20, 1 reply)

my name is jacob marley and i live in limbo. it is not fantastic. i sound like an owl. i like owls. one time they were not what they seem. i went to heaven but some cherub burnt my neck. i didn't like it.

( stuj (^(^;;^)^) GO TEAM SPIDERS!(^(^;;^)^), Tue 18 Sep 2012, 12:27, 1 reply)

Lovely bit of serendipity/micro-body language reading at work.
A colleague and I were working together on a project, and were sitting side-by-side in silence, working away on the respective assigned sections.

Casually he said, without shifting his eyes from his computer screen, "No I haven't, but H said he'd send the files over at lunch and we'll do it then."

"Grand - cheers" I replied.

And then realised that I hadn't even asked him a question.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 11:18, 4 replies)

Hmmmmmm
Many moons ago I was on a bus from Gloucester to the village I lived in when something really strange happened.

The bus stopped and an old man got on. He was holding the side of his head as if he had a very bad earache, I was the only other passenger, it was late October, 6.45pm and was dark outside.

As I said the bus was completely empty but the old man shuffled along the aisle until he reached my seat, he stared at me for a second and seemed to mumble something under his breath. He then walked on, but sat immediately behind me. As the bus pulled away I was sure he mumbled something again.

I felt very uncomfortable.

After about 10 minutes the old man got up from his seat, still with his hand to the side of his head and walked towards the driver. I was very relieved that he was no longer behind me, but I had a horible feeling that something terrible was about to happen.

As he drew level with the driver he turned to face me and smiled whilst lowering his hand from his head.

I was petrified, as the bus driver seemed oblivious of the mans presence, and the bus was motoring along dark lanes at high speed.

Then the old man reached up and pressed the button to tell the driver to stop at the next bus stop.

As the old man got off the bus and walked down the side towards me, he looked up and smiled. It was then that I recognised him.....it was the old man who got on the bus every night and sat behind me.

I normally had a chat with him most nights, but I had not recognised him with his hand on the side of his head.

(This post may contain previously used material and was produced in an environment that might have a few nuts lying about somewhere)
( insignificantsnivellinglittleturd I Like Peas, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 10:50, 3 replies)

Professional coffee servers lift my mood.

( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 9:43, 4 replies)

Ectoplasm
My girlfriend awoke the other night after a horrible nightmare.
Apparently in the dream something was holding her down and she couldn't move.As her terror intesified she began to hear the heavy breathing of an invisible attacker. The whole ordeal lasted an agonising ten minutes where upon she woke up.
I listened to her story dumbfounded as she then rubbed her face and her hands came away covered in a thick sticky cold substance and she screamed before running to the bathroom and washing it off.
I know what you're thinking, but a combination of sleep paralysis and an open window would eventually lead to this happening. Personally i was more suprised i managed to last ten minutes and that she didn't notice that her old boyfriend was lying dead at the foot of the bed.......
(shake'n'bake Tally Ho, Biatch!, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 6:50, 1 reply)

UFO
A few years ago, I was driving north through the empty desert night, on Highway 95 near Beatty, Nevada. Great Basin nights are achingly empty, and apart from a few turnoffs to darkened trailers advertising (entirely legal and entirely scandalous) 'massages', the road was desolate.

www.coasttocoastam.com/
I was all alone in the night, half-listening to George Noory on his Coast-to-Coast-AM radio show. As America's premiere late-night DJ, Noory is the worthy successor of uber-UFO-aficionado Art Bell. I like Noory, because he seems to be almost infinitely-gullible, willing to broadcast any ridiculous theory, and he is never, ever unpleasant or rude.

As Noory cut to a commercial, he promised his listeners a "UFO Extravaganza" after the break.

Suddenly to my left, I saw a light in the sky, heading south. The light looked like a very bright planet - like Venus - but in motion. I did a double-take, thinking it might have been a reflection, but that was not the case. Something was flying south through the air, not very high, and not very far away.

A UFO Extravaganza! That's right! This is where UFOs gather, after all! The Nevada Nuclear Test Site was located just over those hills and highly-secret Area 51 wasn't far away!

It is quite plausible that the light belonged to a small private airplane. There is a small airport located just south of Beatty, equipped with flashing beacons for nighttime travelers, and the airborne light was heading in that direction.

But still, private planes are supposed to be equipped with colored blinking lights for nighttime flight. This light was not blinking.

Ooooowwwwweeeeeeoooooo!
(Perv With A Dog had his eyes pecked out by scrub jays on, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 6:23, 1 reply)

Pearoast
I wrote this one before, I think, so short version:
We used to have a room at the hospital-6139- that patients died in statistically significantly more often than the other rooms. (We prolly helped the stats along by putting gomers in there, towards the end) The weird thing was, many times the call light would go off by itself after a death until we got someone else in there. It got so that we didn't even bother to check the room after a while, just muttered "Shut up, Ghost" and canceled it from the desk. The very young candy stripers would claim it was freezing cold in there, they felt a presence, they thought they saw a shadow, blah blah blah.

Us ol' battleaxes knew they were full of it.
(TDub Nunc id vides, nunc ne vides on, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 3:35, 5 replies)

For Monster Munch.....
As indicated before, my mother died very suddenly. It was a coronary thrombosis (I think that was the technical term), basically a DVT went on a little journey from her leg to her heart. All in the matter of around 14 hours. Said ‘see ya later’ to her as I went off to work in the morning, never saw her again. She was admitted to hospital that day, but we were told not to panic, everything would be fine, under control etc etc…..
Unfortunately, things weren’t under control and they had to transfer her, in ambulance, to our major hospital (that deals with these things, funny she didn’t go there first! Questions were asked, but doctors know best apparently……) Whilst transferring, clot moves through heart, massive CPR given, no result, bye bye mum. (also spooky, she told us many years before that a psychic had said she would die a violent death – thanks for that Ms Psychic, something to live with until your UNTIMELY VIOLENT DEATH – but I can just imagine that it wouldn’t have been pleasant if she was in anyway aware.)
So, blissfully unaware this is happening, I am home, in bed, in my jammies, reading my book (possibly Stephen King) when one of our cats, who was my mother’s favourite cat, started up with some scary and mournful yowling. Not your normal ‘get out of my yard or I’ll beat you up’ yowling, but it freaked me out so I went to call her in but couldn’t find her, no amount of calling would bring her in. She stopped after a short time, but still wouldn’t come in.
Then the phone rang. It was the hospital. My dad answered it, said ‘alright then, I’ll be there soon’ and hung up. He then told me he had to go to the hospital, mum wasn’t well and they asked him to come in. He left, I freaked out, rang the boyfriend and got him to come down to keep me company. I had no idea what was going on, and the idea she could die was not even in my thoughts.
When he arrived he made us a cup of tea, and we were sitting in the kitchen and there was a cardboard box sitting away from us on a cupboard. Noises started to come from it like somebody was playing around with the top folds of the box, and with the sticky tape that seals it. This went on for a minute or so, and I thought there was a mouse or something in it. Boyfriend got up to look and as he approached, it stopped. He looked in there, nothing apart from the tops that had been folded in and the sticky. No mouse, nothing seen escaping from it, nothing.
I then rang the hospital (for I am impatient and I don’t like not knowing). They put me through to emergency, they put my dad on the phone, who told me that mum had died. (as nicely as he possibly could under the circumstances, poor guy, and she had actually died before they rang home so he went in to see his dead wife. Not nice).
So as I said before, it was much later after that I remembered the strange happenings and came to the conclusion that she had come back for a final goodbye. No hugs, no cold spots, no sheets with holes for eyes, just unexplained stuff. Makes me wonder though if there is that moment just after death when you become a free spirit and then…….who knows?
I like to think that there are different dimensions in time and space, and sometimes they meet/cross over. That would be cool. I’ve been watching too much Dr Who……
(Monkee girl not a monkee, not a girl, Tue 18 Sep 2012, 0:48, 12 replies)

Mediums/ghost whisperers what the fuck ever!!!
A little back story -
In 1995 my bestie Al decided for his own reasons to do the mortal coil shuffle. To say I was devastated would be grossly understating what happened. With his death a small part of my life was lost forever.

FFWD a few months and I had recently moved into a shared flat with a couple of young sisters. They in turn had fell in with a rather loose and *ahem* MASSIVE DRUGS taking crowd. Since drugs had been Al's downfall I tended to avoid them as much as possible.
A couple of young blokes - brothers in fact, were in this crew. They had decided that they had other-worldly powers and could communicate with the dead. They found about the recent demise of my best friend. Despite me making it very clear that I didn't even want to discuss the situation with them and that I was still very much grieving, they persevered and attempted to contact my friend "on the other side".
I wasn't there so this is just hearsay but apparently Al made his displeasure at being disturbed very clear - even to the point of telling them to "leave [ringofyre] the fuck alone!"

I didn't believe a word of it of course and suggested that their heavy and prolonged use of Ecstasy may have some bearing on their belief that they could communicate with the dead.

The only plausible thing about this tale is that I can well imagine my friend deciding that these 2 self-styled psychics (psycho's more likely) were utter cunts and need a good telling off. If that's the case then - cheers Al, miss you mate.

EDIT: I watched these guys rip-off my housemates by supposedly going to get some eccys (with all of their money) and returning, then shooting a half a tab up and claiming it was paracetamol.
You get what you paid for...(I did tell the girls not to trust them btw).
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Tue 18 Sep 2012, 0:31, Reply)

The old lady in the wheelchair
I was awakened one cold, dark, autumn night by a muffled thump downstairs. It sounded like something heavy had collided with the wall downstairs, directly beneath our bedroom. This was followed a few seconds later by a quiet female voice, then silence...

My wife and I had just bought an large old house that required everything doing to it. The previous owner, an old lady who had recently died, had been mostly wheelchair-bound. Manouvering a wheelchair in this house resulted in many of the walls and skirting boards to be bumped and scratched. So, letting my imagination run riot at two-thirty in the morning, my brain conjured a wheel-chair bound spirit coming back to haunt our house.

After a couple of minutes, I managed to haul myself out of bed and check each room downstairs - nothing was out of place, and there was only silence. I ensured all the doors and windows were secure, and returned to bed.

Within 20 minutes or so, I had drifted back to sleep. Not for long, though. Once more I was roused; another 2 thuds in quick succession. Again, a few seconds later, I heard the same female voice quietly talking downstairs. Then, once more, stillness.

I lay absolutely still in bed, hearing only the gentle swish of the trees outside our bedroom window. I rolled over and looked at my clock. Ten past four. Haunted, and what's more, the alarm clock had decided to taunt me further by flashing the time rather than displaying with its usual familiar neon glow.

The penny suddenly dropped - a power interruption makes an alarm clock flash like that.

So the source of the thump? I leave my stereo amplifier on all the time; attached to the amp at the time were a large pair of floor-standing speakers. When I did occasionally power the amp down, you would get a distinctive thump. There must have been a couple of brown-outs during the night - enough to cause the power to briefly interrupt on the amp, but not enough to reset the time on the clock.

So the final piece in the puzzle? Who was the mysterious lady talking downstairs? Well, when we moved in, there was an old answering machine already set up which had belonged to the previous owner. Once we had unpacked ours, we had disconnected the old answering machine from the phone line, but had omitted to unplug the power cord. So when the brief power outages occurred, the old answering machine booted-up, and the default message played.
(eukaryote, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 23:21, 1 reply)

Let's just clear this up right now.
There are ghosts and they are real and there is undeniable evidence for their existence.
I shall elucidate.

The bible is the word of God. God is infallible. Therefore God's word is unquestionable. The bible says there is a Holy Ghost. If there was only one ghost God would not have had to qualify this with the word holy it would simply be called The Ghost. Ergo there are many ghosts.

Glad to have cleared that up for you, please carry on with your day.
(Figmaus, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 23:04, 13 replies)

My friend claims to be a medium.
Looks more like a large to me.
(Vigilante Man weeps because you're stupid., Mon 17 Sep 2012, 21:04, Reply)

I don't believe, however...
Not so long ago, I was lying in bed around 3am. Right below my head in the room below is my guitars.
I heard the bass being plucked. I knew which string it was, it was coming from exactly where the bass was in the room. I was the only person in the house. No pets or anything. It wasn't being picked with evenly spaced intervals and there was nothing around that would have caused it. It was just the one string.

I didn't go down. Just laid there with a bit of a cold sweat trying to rationalise.
Haven't heard it since.


Another time was when I was working public duties as a guard. Working between Windsor Castle, St.James', Tower of London and Buckingham Palace.
Mid January, about 9pm - I was in our guard room at the Tower. I was by myself in one of the rooms and was getting my uniform on ready to go and take part in the keys ceremony.
Just put my overcoat on and was fastening the buttons and one of the other lads came in, walked across and put his hand on my shoulder as if to lean in front of me to pick something up.
Went to step out of the way and let him by and there was nobody fucking there. Hastily exited the room and never mentioned it to anyone for fear of having the piss taken out of me.

My only 2 personal experiences that were a bit odd. I'm sure there was an explanation for both. I just don't know what those explanations are.
( Terry_Tibbs Coarse and violent nudity. Occasional language, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 20:53, 3 replies)

My bin is full of tissues covered gooey ectoplasm
Spooky eh?
(The Oscillating Gibbon is eating curried squid, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 20:15, Reply)

These stories are frankly rubbish compared to some on this epic thread on haunted wartime airfields that's been running for 8 years:
forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?t=22567
Those stories are full of menace & nostalgia.

Anyway, my wife maintains that when she was a youngster, and the whole family was in their living room, they'd hear footsteps on the landing ... and then the upstairs toilet would flush by itself. Boringly, google says there are valid plumbological reasons why this can happen sometimes.

I'm pretty sure that once when I was in bed at the age of 7 or 8, my bedroom door creaked open a bit and then closed on its own. Could have been my parents, but I always heard them coming up the stairs, and I hadn't. Expect I was asleep.
(anonybloke, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 18:46, 2 replies)

Bearing in mind what I've just posted about mediums, below this...
One of my friends (who's a great believer in the spiritual, power of crystals, all that sort of stuff) went to see a medium, not long after Jess died. I didn't know she was going, but a few days later she came to see me and told me she had a message for me from Jess.

After explaining that the session with the medium had been booked for several months, she played me a recording of the session. At the end, the medium starts saying she's got someone else there to talk to, and after much deliberation over who it could be, my friend decides it's Jess.

I've still got the recording, and I listened to it the other day. It's very odd, and I really don't know how to explain it... the medium starts talking about Jess, what she was like in life, how she died very suddenly, and how it was a massive shock to everyone. At that point a clock in the room strikes fifteen. Then she speaks about how it is "on the other side" and how it's great to be able to communicate, although it was unexpected to be doing it from this side. All of that part sounds exactly like Jess. Not her voice, but her choice of words and her phrasing. Bearing in mind that I'm in a much better frame of mind these days, I fully expected that part to be a figment of my desperation at the time - listening to it again the other day though, I still heard it.
Also, she came out with something that I'd been thinking about which I hadn't told anyone (no, not topping myself) - now if I'd been there I'd have put this all down to her reading me (which is how I'm pretty sure most 'mediums' do it), but I wasn't there - where was she getting this from? She spoke about Jess for about twenty minutes, and there's very little in there that doesn't make any sense.

tl;dr - Medium comes out with some amazingly accurate stuff. No idea how
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 18:00, 12 replies)

Mediums. Speaking with the dead!
"I'm getting something through... it's your grandmother"
"She's still alive"
"Your mother"
"She's still alive"
"Sorry, my mistake. I heard 'gran' and assumed. I think it's your grandfather, is he still alive?"
"No, he died last year"
"Yes, I've got him here. He had a very long name"
"No"
"A very short name"
"Yes!"
"Bob"
"No, Don"
"That's it, Don. I've got Don here"
"Grandad?"
"He says to look upstairs"
"I live in a bungalow"
"He means the loft"

"Woooow, she was amazing! I got a message from my grandad!"
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 17:51, 1 reply)

My friend is a missionary, and on his last visit abroad brought back with him the chief of a famous tribe.
His name is Great Boo. He's been suffering from sleeping sickness, and he's obviously just woken, because as you've just heard, Great Boo's up.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 17:34, 3 replies)

The Shadow Spectre
First ever pearoast:

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 Skagra glorious glargzhem, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 17:34, 2 replies)

My boss told me this one...
She went round to see some friends in their new house for the first time. Sitting round, having a chinwag, that sort of thing.
Off upstairs to play go her son & their kids. All is well & a convivial evening is being enjoyed by all.

Later, they're saying their goodbyes & my boss's son says to her friend "They don't like you, you know".
"Who doesn't like them?" asks my boss
"The other family that live here" comes the somewhat chilling reply.

Further investigation revealed that while he was upstairs, he'd gone off to the toilet. After a longer than expected absence the other kids had gone to look for him & found him talking to apparently no-one in the main bedroom
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 17:25, 2 replies)

Weekend break in Cornwall
Stayed in a varnished and charming old listed cottage owned by one of those couples who were born to own B&Bs, he reminiscent of a vicar and she looking the type to have her own recipe for strawberry scones. The first night of my stay I ate an entire battered wing of skate and chips while looking out over the molten mercurochrome sunset, and properly unwound. By complete chance, I’d booked the weekend right in the middle of a local fishing festival, so on the Friday night the entire village descended on the one pub there and drank terrifying amounts of alcohol, while singing raucous songs and waxing lyrical on lost comrades. Sat at my table was Harald (always Harald, not Harold - he even insisted you pronounce it that way - otherwise his Danish father would have a fit), who as fate would have it was staying in the B&B even though he lived in the village, because his son and daughter-in-law had come to stay and he’d leant them his house for the week. Five hours of rum and shrubs and Harald’s exhaustive history of the village later, we retired to the B&B and I retired to bed. Harald was still in fine form and I could hear him singing and clattering around in the unusually modern kitchen for a while; he probably did this every year and had known the owners for forty years so it must have been like having your brother come to stay.

The next morning at breakfast I gently tilted my head to prevent my brain sloshing around too much inside it, and exchanged amused glances with the owners as we discussed last night’s festivities. There was no sign of Harald, nor did any of us see him for the rest of that day.

The wind was rough and salty that day and it was a perfect day for walking, so I set off across the dunes with my compass, cane and Ordnance Survey map. After a decent climb I picnicked on a granite block a hundred or so metres above sea level and looking out over the windswept grasses. One photography session later, I was back at the B&B and tucked into a frayed armchair with a mug of tea and a National Geographic. There was a small iron bushel of logs next to the fireplace and with the owners’ permission I got a fire going, feeling the cold unfurl and collapse out of my bones.

A couple of hours later I was feeling so tired that I felt in imminent danger of nodding off head-first into the flames, so I went up to my room and lay down on my bed for a while. Inevitably, I fell asleep, and woke again just after midnight, jolted by something going on downstairs. After getting my bearings I listened and could hear banging and scraping coming from the kitchen. Oh ho, I thought: Harald has returned. I wondered if he’d been out all day drinking with some fisherman mates of his who’d returned from a catch; in any event I felt thirsty after the heat of the fire so I decided to go down to get a drink of water. Too bad if he realised his drunken logic of not singing to as to convince everyone he wasn’t there had failed. The clattering and fumbling kept up unabated as I creaked down the stairs, and I pushed open the door to the kitchen with a wry half-smile on my face.

There was a child in a loose dress standing by the kitchen table. On the table were a cup, a carton of milk, a bowl of sugar and what looked like a packet of biscuits. Everything was knocked over and torn; the milk had spilled all over the tabletop, the cup was on its side and the biscuits had been broken open, showering crumbs everywhere. The child’s long hair went most of the way down her back and tumbled over her face, and she was running her fingers mindlessly over the surface of the table as though navigating by touch. Carefully I tiptoed towards her, wondering if the owners had forgotten to mention their sleepwalking granddaughter with a penchant for midnight snacks. If her grandparents woke up in the morning and found the kitchen in this state, she’d have her pocket money cut off for a month. By the time I reached the table I could hear her breathing, a ragged, asthmatic wheeze that never stopped as she fumbled. It was a very disturbing sound. Gently I righted the leaking milk and the cup in front of her and moved round the table to rescue the sugar bowl before it fell off and smashed outright. As I moved between the kitchen table and the window, the girl twitched her head back to free herself from her hair and at that moment her face came into the full moonlight. The whole of her face was twisted and burned into a livid mess of scars. Her eyes, swollen and white, weeped as she wheezed into the semi-darkness. I stood transfixed by a mixture of pity and horror. Her hands still grasped blindly for the treat in front of her and even if she were sleepwalking, I wanted to make sure that she at least returned to bed with the object of her quest in her hands. I picked up a biscuit and reached out to take her wrist, and as I did so I felt the touch of her skin against mine. She felt cold, and slightly damp, as though the night sweats were an accompanying condition of her sleepwalking. I pressed the biscuit between her fingers and returned to my room.

The next morning I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast and struck up a quarter-hour’s idle banter with Harald, who had surfaced the previous afternoon and taken his boat and fishing rod out as a tried and tested hangover cure, as the owner went up to change the bed. Not wanting to poke my nose where it wasn’t warranted, I said something neutral about the B&B being a very traditional and Olde Worlde place, but I supposed they had to move with the times and fit a more up-to-date kitchen if they were going to cater for paying guests. Harald immediately gained a dramatic and conspiratorial twinkle in his eye, and, edging closer on his chair, said that the owners used to take great pride in their original kitchen. When they started having paying guests, however, one family came down and managed to start a fire that gutted the entire room. All the original wainscotting, the ornamental plates, the Aga...everything was lost, so they thought they might as well get the latest and greatest when they refitted it all. When I wondered aloud how a family could possibly manage to start a fire somewhere that offered full board as part of the reservation, Harald stage-whispered to me that their daughter had apparently gone downstairs in the middle of the night and tried to make herself a glass of warm milk. Of course, she’d never used an oven like that before; never had anything like that at home. In a matter of minutes the whole thing got out of control and she panicked...got burned alive. The family didn’t want to go to court and the whole place almost shut down for a year or two after that, but it happened such a long time ago that you’d have to be from round here to remember. “What was the girl’s name?”, I asked Harald. “Rose, it was. Pretty as a rose she was too.”

On the walk up the hill to the station outside town I stopped near the peak and took off my rucksack. There was a small knoll of meadow grass beside the road, from which you could look down and see the thatched roof of the B&B and the curl of steam rising from the chimney to indicate that Sunday lunch was ready. On the top of the knoll I picked and left a single flower, for Rose, and a biscuit.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 17:01, 1 reply)

I was somewhat loathe to post this week, even though I have a story to tell.
Ghost stories aren't real. Everyone knows that.
But...
This actually happened to me, and I have no explanation. I was there. I didn't dream it, it wasn't a hallucination.
Several years back I worked in a nightclub. About halfway through my time there it was sold, and the new owners closed it for a few weeks to renovate. It was completely gutted, dancefloors and bars had their positions swapped, new doors were installed, the cellar was rebuilt. Big work.
When the work had finished and the grand reopening (a normal night, but the tarts dressed tartier and the champagne was free) was a few days behind us I experienced something odd.
The building was spread over four floors: The cellar and toilets in the basement, the office on the top floor, and two different bars in between. A twisting staircase ran right up through, from the very bottom to the top.
I was in the cellar with the manager at about 8am, getting a delivery in. When we were done we walked up from the cellar, past the ground floor, up to the top bar. We kept the internal door to the top bar locked, so I paused with the manager here to unlock it, finishing whatever stunning witticism I was currently spouting. Having unlocked the door and delivered the punchline I walked into the pitch-dark room (no windows, and weak emergency lighting). John the manager followed just behind, striking off towards the gents toilets in the dark, just on the edge of my vision. I turned all of the lights on, and asked John a question; I forget what it was.
There was no answer.
I went to look for him, checking first in the toilets, then the DJ box, then in desperation (and stupidity) in a small store cupboard. No sign.
I eventually found him in the office. He hadn't followed me in, he'd continued up the stairs, and the CCTV backs this up. Even now, 7 years later, I can remember something following me in the dark, just over my right shoulder, walking from the entrance to the toilets.
Not too weird on its own maybe (expecting someone to be there had possibly made my mind invent someone) but two further events followed.
A week later, about an hour after closing on a Saturday night, I went downstairs with a tray of glasses, leaving one guy stocking up and two girls stood at the end of the bar chatting (Come on girls! Time to lean? Time to clean!). I returned a few minutes later, and the girls did a double take; I had already returned, they said, and gone into the toilets. Of course, we checked, and there was no-one else in the room. They hadn't looked straight at the other person, since they'd assumed it was me, but they both said he'd walked from the entrance to the toilets. Again, we checked the CCTV; again, nothing.
Two weeks later, the bottom bar was open during the day, and a new member of staff had gone to restock the top bar, which was closed. He returned barely a minute later, looking slightly shaken up. He had, in his own words, turned on the main lights just in time to see a figure walking across the room. It looked like "the shadows and highlights you'd see on a person, without the person". When pressed to say where, he revealed that it had gone from the entrance to the toilets.
I'm drawing no conclusions from this. I know what I saw, I just don't know what it was. Nor do any of the other three. A few of us even camped out in the club one night when it was closed, hoping to see something, but we were disappointed.
The only other pertinent thing is the renovation; apparently many other 'ghost' sightings happen after a building has been disturbed. Everything that occurred here happened within a month of the reopening.

TL:DR? I saw something weird. So did three others.
(Paolo Nutini's Bikini Better than Frederick Fleet's optometrist, Mon 17 Sep 2012, 16:11, 3 replies)