To ask for your woo tales?

@CorCorvusPurpureus
Wow! I just love that! 💜

the house I grew up in was haunted. Loads of things happened and as a child I used to hear the voices of a man and woman but could never y what they were saying. I always felt watched and was scared to go upstairs alone. I used to sit desperate for the loo and too scared to go. One day our lovely golden retriever who was very docile started barking and snarling at nothing, she got in front of me as if she was protecting me and had her teeth bared and hackles up and looked fierce. Her whole body was growling. All that was in front of us was the external wall of my mums bedroom but she could see or sense something and she thought it was dangerous. Even wit strangers she never acted like that., type of dog that would lick you to death.

Loads of weird stuff happens and we found out one of the previous occupants hung herself and her teenage son found her. There were bolts on the outside of all the bedroom doors. When to dig was put down me and my mum heard her upstairs. The thump as she got out of bed, then her collar jangling and she had a good shake. We just looked at each other and said ‘did you just hear that?’

She was wearing a smart black coat, the type they've been making forever and hair in a bun, so not old fashioned enough to stand out but also not super modern.
Nowhere she could have gone that fast.

DH walking home from work along the gravelled towpath of the River Lea near Rye House. Winter-ish, quite dark, he saw two people coming from the opposite direction. As they passed, he noted that they were a man and a woman, dressed in dark clothes, but he could not see their faces...there were no faces. What freaked him out was the fact that there was no noise from the gravel, other than his own footsteps, and as they passed, there was a strong scent of violets. He is a programmer, ex Royal Navy, very down-to-earth and no-nonsense, but was pretty shaken when he arrived home.

There are some amazing videos on youtube of ghosts throwing glasses around pubs.

Some of them have various copyright bits on them so I won't link but do google!

Not woo as such -but the weirdest coincidence. Vaguely knew a guy from a sports club, He moved away. About 2years later out on my boat with friends we passed some lovely riverside flats and my friend said how she’d like to live there. I said oh yeah they have a great view -went a party there , a guy from the sports club used to live there.
At that moment WhatsApp pinged and it was him. We’d never been friends and hadn’t heard from him since he left the area. The message was to say he was back in the area and trying to get into the club house but had forgotten the code and could I remind him.
I literally had not given him a thought since he moved and we hardly knew each other then.

Someone walks up the stairs most nights in my (now) Mum and Dad's house, usually between 2.30 and 3am to the top bedroom. Two of my four children have seen him when young children (6 years apart, same description) but two do not see him at all (or are maybe asleep). He moves things sometimes on Mum's bedside table. Mum and Dad are not "woo" but Mum has admitted crossly that "someone has been in and thrown my bathroom towels all over". Had two sets of tenants before Mum and Dad moved in, both moved out because of it. It is recorded as having a young man who died in the 1st world war. I think he is probably coming home. I know I would hear it, and won't stay there.

I get something like this too. Not dreams, but sometimes I just know things that I couldn't possibly know. It used to happen much more frequently when I was a child/teenager.

I also sometimes feel like I've lived parts of my life before, and I 'remember' certain events as they are happening. I don't know how to explain it, but it's a bit like having read a book, many, many years ago, and you get to certain chapters where you recognise or 'remember' specific events. It's really odd!

Like you say, a glitch in the matrix! 😂

I can't believe that you still live in the house! 😲. How do you shower knowing that you are being watched all the time?! 😆

If this happened to me the house would be on the market the next day. I'd be buying a new build and never be going back! 😂

I have a few. I used to walk home alone late at night after closing up the pub, because 19-20 year old me was a bit of a twat, there were 2 routes I could take home, one night a middle age woman appeared and told me not to go a certain way, she looked sad and frightened, she wouldn't say why just said "please, for me, walk the other way" and hurried past me, it was a rough bit of town, the route she was saying not to go was quicker but a bit sketchy (included an unlit alley) so I decided to take her advice, turned to tell her that and she'd disappeared. A few minutes later I came across a young lad, maybe 15/16, in a terrible state, unconcious, laying on his back choking on his own vomit. I managed to clear his airways and waited with him until the ambulance arrived. He'd taken some pills and drank too much and his mates had just left him. If I'd walked the way I usually did the chances are no one would have found him in time.

Working in the pub one night a glass flew off a table, flew across the room and smashed in the middle of the floor, there was only me and 1 customer in and we were stood at the bar chatting. The pub is 15th century and there are often noises and things wouldn't be where I put them, things out the corner of your eye etc but it's the only time I ever actually saw anything move.

I also occasionally get a strange feeling like someone is watching me, particularly in bed, which I've had all my life it comes and goes and I just do my best to ignore it. Except recently we got a dog, and everytime I get that feeling now the dog comes and puts his head on me and the feeling goes.

A hundred miles isn’t far away unless there are circumstances that keep you from doing the journey - why does Pontins have to be the last time you’ll see her?

Not my stories sadly, but I used to work for a heritage organisation which owned and maintained many historic sites. One of the sites was a castle with a warren of underground tunnels used as a secret hospital during WW2. The tunnels were eventually opened to the public and presented as they would have been when used as the hospital. Anyhoo, two of my (very levelheaded) colleagues were down in the tunnels having a look around pre-opening when they saw a man wearing an old-fashioned camel coloured dressing gown with a red towel slung over his shoulder. He was quite far ahead of them and disappeared around a corner. They said he looked exactly like someone wandering back from the bathroom to go back to bed.

Another colleague worked in a house with connections to Queen Victoria. For a time, the house was divided up and used as a convalescent home. It has endless corridors and many, many rooms. My colleague says that in one of the corridors you hear ladies laughing, running footsteps and doors opening and closing. But if you go and investigate there's nobody there.

Finally, a colleague lived in a lovely house in the grounds of an ruined abbey. She sometimes woke at night to find a robed figure peering at her.

Just remembered another one from when I was very small. Maybe 5 or 6? It could, of course, have been a dream or something, but my mum also remembers me telling her about it at the time and apparently I was insistent that I wasn’t asleep.

I grew up in a very old farm house, and my bed was at one side of a fairly big bedroom. One night I was lying in bed and I saw, very clearly, the shadow of an old man in a flat cap walk all the way across the wall at the other side of the room. The door was closed so it couldn’t have been a shadow thrown from the landing, and the shadow was cast on the wall with the window in it, so not light from outside either.

Placemarking, love a good woo thread.

So mine both happened, if I remember rightly at age 5 or under, so mid to late 1980s. We lived in a maisonette built in the 70s, so no creepy setting, although the decor back then was freaky, a girl who lived there before we moved in, and had my room, had holly hobbie wallpaper which I was stuck with until my dad put wood chip up for me, at least I could pick that off!

So internal doors back then generally had oblong windows above them, I remember laying in bed, looking up at this window, and a man and a woman were smiling and waving at me, I wasn’t scared and remember waving back at them.

The other was one day I went up to my room to fetch some toys, but there was an older boy in front of my door who wouldn’t let me go in my room, he pushed me back, I ran downstairs and told my mum and dad, my dad went straight up to look, but there was no one there.

I am these days a sceptic, so I know both of these things could be explained with various scenarios, but they are two stories I remember clearly happening to me.

This is then further compounded by confirmation bias - remembering the times that fit the pattern, and discounting those that don't.

This is interesting, thank you.

Do you think the patterns are truly random? Or is it possible that someone nearing death triggers other end of life patients to pass over too?

Sometimes 3-4 months would pass with no deaths, then one terminally ill patient would pass away closely followed by others in the same bay. Often patients we didn't expect to pass would suddenly deteriorate. If the clusters were truly random, wouldn't patients in other bays on the same ward pass over in clusters? Why is only one bay affected? (The patients were all terminally ill so deaths weren't unexpected, but many would have treatment then go home)

My mother is a nurse and she said they all used to see spirits come when people were about to pass and they usually just were in the corner waiting

Yes, we sometimes saw strange shadows or misty shapes in the corridor just before someone passed, but mostly put it down to sleep deprivation so as not to freak each other out on night shifts!

One time in the nursing home, a very hot late summer evening, an elderly lady rang the bell and asked for a cup of iced tea and 2 jammy dodgers. She was sitting in her chair, smiling and chatty. I went to the kitchen to make her tea and get the biscuits, about 5 minutes later took the tray to her room. There was a very odd atmosphere in the corridor, sort of charged with static. I tried to open her door but couldn't, so I put the tray down and tried again, thinking it was jammed. I stepped back confused and saw a dark shadow against the door, it sort of dissolved. Could have been a trick of the light but such an eerie feeling. I tried the door handle again, it opened, and the lady was still in her chair, eyes open but not breathing, clearly just passed away.

In one hospital we always opened the window when someone was about to die, an old tradition to let their spirit out.

I'm afraid I'm here with a rational explanation. Not that I don't believe in woo, but I think it's important to rule out/understand other explanations.

It's to do with the way randomness doesn't appear random. As humans we are quick to spot patterns, to the point we will see a pattern where none is there.

In terms of deaths, if they occurr truly randomly, it is likely that some will appear to cluster together, because that is the nature of randomness. If the deaths were more spaced out, more one at a time, that's the thing that would require some organising/not be random.

This is then further compounded by confirmation bias - remembering the times that fit the pattern, and discounting those that don't.

I'm not sure how well I explained that so here's another illustration. Have you ever sprinkled hundreds and thousands on a cake? You have to put some effort in to make sure they are sprinkled fairly evenly over the cake. If you just did it at random/with your eyes closed, you'd have some bits of cake with loads on and some with hardly any. Such is the nature of randomness.

OTOH - haunted rocking horses and so on - I've got nothing!

I worked in our village pub. People have said its haunted for years. Landlady had videos on chairs moving, things falling off shelves etc.it was a pub that split into 2 bars/rooms. I used to hear whistling all the time with no one in.
One night I was on last shift, I put all the drip trays in the wash. They come in 2 parts. When they finished I went to put them away and 1 had 1 part missing. I looked everywhere, toilets, near the fire at other end of the room, anywhere I thought id been if for some weird reason I'd taken it. Landlady came at closing I apologised I'd lost it. She had a look, couldn't find it. She text me in the morning to say when she came downstairs it was there... right in the middle of the bar floor.

That is fascinating!

My mother is a nurse and she said they all used to see spirits come when people were about to pass and they usually just were in the corner waiting.

My paternal aunts and i can all see auras. I thought everyone could tbh. I was once at a funeral and I saw three human shaped auras standing next to the coffin with no physical humans there. They were gold light (like all the auras I see- except once when I saw a black aura which freaked me out) and just standing there together. It was very peaceful.

I've told this before
I was born and bred in york-known for being haunted
Many years ago,I was about 17 and out in town with my then boyfriend
We'd had 2 beers (no way where we drunk-id made sure wed eaten loads before we went) and where walking home
We where walking up micklegate bar (york has the bar walls-the original york-this part is where royals come and go-its 3 openings in the walls,one main one and two small ones either side)
Above this is what looks like a very old flat with small windows
Both of us clearly saw a little girl,aged about 6/7,sobbing her eyes out-I can still see her blonde ringlets
We tried to grab the attention of a passing policeman but he shrugged us off and walked away
She seemed to have gone so we walked away and wondered if she was OK (now I would have rang the police on my phone but we where a lot younger and no phone)
I always wondered,mentioned her often but nobody seemed to have a clue about her-i put it down to a trick of the light and the beers
About a year ago,I was watching a YouTube video about the ghosts of york
Second story in was about a little girl called Sarah brocklebank
She lived in the flat and her father was the one who shut and locked the gates to the walls every night (they don't lock them now in respect of him)
This day she'd had a birthday party and somehow the keys had got lost
Dad couldn't lock the gates,lost his job and home so they ended up on the streets
She was often seen in york,looking for them while alive and her ghost is often seen at the window-always crying
A picture of her flashed up-it was the same girl we'd seen that night-same hair,ringlets,pale yellow/cream dress and huge eyes
It seems she's always going to be looking for those keys

Others who work in healthcare, have you experienced any of the following?

In 4 or 6 bed bays, patients who are nearing end of life often die within hours of each other. Sometimes we'd have 6 critically ill patients in a bay who were all doing ok for weeks, then one deteriorated and within hours others started going downhill. Once we had 3 patients die on the same night, between 2-5am, when there had been no deaths on that bay for over a month!
I've observed the same thing happening in nursing homes, no deaths for months then one resident dies and others in nearby rooms start to deteriorate.

My colleague insists there are times when it's 'easier' to pass over, so patients who are critically ill sometimes wait for the right time. Thinning of the 'veil' between life and death. Other nurses say it's to do with pheromones or chemicals the body releases when it begins to shut down, prompting the bodies of other end of life patients nearby to do the same.

Anyone else have a theory as to why this happens?