To ask if anyone has had any paranormal encounters/experiences

[HowlingBitch]

Or do we all need another ? I just find it all fascinating.

kalinda the barracks is there,the household cavalry.They do take them out really early and it is like something from WW1 when you see them.They take different routes,sometimes down through Camden-I used to work on Camden market and we would all stand awestruck when the horses came through.

HB, it brought me great comfort thank you!!

Holy crap!! Why did I start reading this when i'm at home alone... The story with the laughing man on the phone has really freaked me out. It reminds me of that film 'When a stranger calls'. I saw the first 10 minutes of that when I was younger and it scared me shitless.

K, here's another weirdy one I've posted on here before but if anyone has any light to shed on it, I'd be much obliged as I can find none myself.

My husband and elder two children are Edinburghers. He and DD1, I'll call her 'H', even more so because we did not move through here, the Western Highlands, until she was 4 and even now, her tones are still have the tint of the Lowlander.

She is also dyspraxic, dyslexic, a number of other things, suffice it to say she is 8 and has poor reading skills, although she is quite skilled in a number of ways not-traditional to academic sort of learning.

Before we moved through here we sought first to move towards where my husband's mother's people were originally from, from the Perthshire Highlands, though their surname is a Western Highland one.

With such an aim we would go exploring there, on day and overnight trips.

When she was 3 and had no so much or such clear speech we stayed overnight in a village there. On the way south on the A9 my husband said he would fancy a break in a village on the river called Dunkeld.

Now he knew this place, but none of the rest of us had ever been there in our lives, myself being foreign and he being of the reticent type.

But the second we exited the motorway, H becan to say, very clearly, oh, yes, stop here, I want to see my sheep.

We parked in a council carpark on the banks of this river. She began to repeat herself, very clearly.

So we went along, DD2, a baby, in her buggy, and H started to detail the place, then saying, 'I mean to see my sheep,' and 'I want to see my sheep.' We'd pass this place and that. She'd tell us, very clearly, and round the corner is this or that. And it would either ring true or when we asked a local have been true, for it was Autumn and there were not many tourists around.

Finally DH got fed up of her rabbiting on and a bit freaked out, for she even pointed out two kirks. He said, 'Fine then! Take us to your blood sheep!'

And she lead us, again very clearly, to an arched doorway in a wall that we'd have walked by.

But when we went through it there were pens full of sheep, three of them. She went ot the northeastern one, and I'll be damned if she didn't walk to that damn fence and make some weird noise and those damn sheep came flcoking up to it and her stroking their foul heads through the fence!

we got the hell out of there!

the same happened to that same mate with the freaky maisonette in edinburgh, with his first son, in N. Berwick.

when it was only him, before the other two were born, as his father was only 18 and his mother 16 when their first came along, he and his wife took a day trip there. and the boy, who'd not been there in his life but was 3, grew very excited when they approached.

he proceded to give accurate details on the layout of the place, leading them about to this place and that, remarking, 'oh, this used to be XYZ,' and when they asked some old yokel it would be true. his wife was well freaked out.

finally, he lead them up a hill saying, 'come now, i'll show you where i'm buried' and up to the left was a cemetary, anyone who knows N. Berwick will know that place. but that boy had never been there in his life and believe me, his parents aren't the chatty types. that was them out of there.

Kalinda, I can probably explain the horses in Madia Vale/St John's Wood. They are the King's Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, and exercise their horses regularly in the streets around there. I used to live in St John's Wood, and they used to go past my flat every so often, usually in the very early morning when the streets were less busy. They do go on bus routes and big roads. Sometimes they would go past in full regalia with all the horses being ridden or dragging the First World War era saluting guns (presumably doing a full practice for a ceremony of state), but at other times many of the horses were riderless and simply being exercised.

The horses were always beautifully behaved (which is I'm sure mainly down to the excellent soldier equestrians), and mainly trotted quickly, although sometimes at the back a couple of more excited horses would break into a controlled canter, which could have looked a bit like a gallop.

If this was 13/14 years ago, there may well have only been a rider at the front flagging any traffic to stop. Now that the roads are much more congested, they have vehicles at the front and the rear to ensure traffic stops and waits for them to pass - or at least they did about four years ago.

It's a gorgeous thing to see. How lovely to have seen it in the fog as well.

However, as for the other stuff, I can't explain that!

Sorry, I didn't spot Hellymelly's much more concise and to-the-point explanation

A couple of odd things have happened to me as a child, but DH writes them off as a hallucination and a coincidence.

When I was about 10 or 11, I was reading a book lying on an armchair with my legs draped over one of the arms and my back propped up against the other. To my left, almost immediately behind the chair were some French windows, leading out onto a patio. Somebody - a child, although I only really saw the sillhouette - walked quickly past the windows. I immediately stopped reading and waited to see them go past the other window (they would have to pass this to keep going in the direction they were going). At that point I assumed it was a neighbour's child who for some reason had broken into our garden. However, the child did not emerge, which must have meant they were standing on the patio in front of the wall between the windows.

I shouted to my mum that there was a child on the patio and she went out to look while I watched both windows, waiting to see the child appear in either of the windows. It didn't. Mum came back saying there was nobody there, nor in the rest of the garden. She said I must have imagined it, but it felt very, very real.

The other one sounds a bit silly. In my stocking one year, I was given a musical Donald Duck calculator. I was about 6. I liked but, but one night had a hideous dream about it. I can't really explain what happened in the dream, apart from the fact this item embodied evil and would demonstrate this by playing by itself. The dream hugely disturbed me, but I didn't get rid of the calculator although I stopped playing with it. Some time later - over a year, but I sure as hell remembered that dream very clearly - I was in my room and the calculator, which was on a shelf, started playing by itself. It was under a load of papers, and I still explain it to myself as a coincidence that at that moment the pressure of the papers got too great and pressed on some of the buttons. The thing is still in my parents' house somewhere - I'm kind of hoping it isn't in the huge box of stuff they brought up last month for me to go through.

DH saw his family ghost when he was little, but had no idea who it was until years later when he and my ILs were looking at old photos, and he said "That was the man on the landing!"
Before I knew about this, I would occasionally smell pipe smoke really strongly in odd places around the house, and we now luke to think he pops in to see the family!
He gets credited for all the fortunate coincidences, so maybe he likes the positive vibes :)
He does, however, spend most of his time at a pub he helped to build (the ghost, not DH!) and by all accounts he's not as benevolent there. Glasses fly across the room, it will get very cold in the place he used to sit, animals won't go into the room when he's 'there', and no-one likes to go down to the bar at night!
We did go to the pub once, and without the landlord knowing about DH's connection with the ghost, he told us all about it. No sign of him though, which is possibly a good thing, as apparently he doesn't believe that women should go into pubs - the biggest disturbances always happen when women are there.
A medium also saw him next to DH's Nan, and described him perfectly!

Hellymelly, you are the Scully to my Mulder! Thanks for solving that. The fog, the fact that I walked that route at least 4 times a week for a year and only saw this once and that nobody else I knew had heard of such a thing....all made me wonder if it was really real. It definitely was like something out of another era, not at all what you'd expect to see in our health and safety conscious times. Awesome and beautiful, though, I'd love to see it again.

The Mystery of the Maida Vale Ghost Horses has been solved!

Perhaps this thread needs a sister, an X Files thread, post your weird experience and see if anyone can shed some light?

Thanks again, HM!

Thank you too, Kalypso, just saw your response. I'm not very experienced in horses, and the fact that they appeared then disappeared in and out of the fog so quickly probably made them look like they were going faster than they actually were. I really don't remember anyone at the front, though. But still, a beautiful and magical memory.

another strange thing........we all know sat navs don't work in buildings. Anyway our sat nav we have to sit waiting in the car until the thing decides to turn on due to no battery and thats before it finds satellites etc. One night me and dh were sitting chatting and all of a sudden we heard "turn around when possible" we sat looking at each other and it said it again. I clicked, got the sat nav out of the cupboard and out of it's pouch. It was turned on, don't know how esp when it's always out of battery.

footballmum - sorry for picking you out and I know that everyone on this thread ios here becuase they want to believe and put theri fingers in their ears and go lalalalalalal if anyone mentions rational explanations, but your post

"When I was little I remember regularly playing in my garden with a little girl and boy who used to come from next door through a gap in the garden hedge. We moved from that house when I was 8. I never thought anything of it until years later when I mentioned it to my mum. She told me that the house had been abandoned and derelict for years and there was no other access to our garden other than through the house. When I thought about the incidents more I realised that the children had been dressed "oddly" and after research discovered they were in typical Victorian dress. I also realised that they never actually said a word to me. Spooky!"

is actually the plot of several well kown children's books. It's so easy to internalize things we have read or been told until they genuinely become like our own experiences.

When I was about 8 one night I awoke to hear someone walking up and down the hallway ,big heavy footsteps. I was frozen with fear it seemed to go on for hours but I eventually fell back to sleep. This made a really big impression on me and evolved into me acting out the drama with my friends as a game! My mom admitted years later that she had also heard something but did not want to scare me.
Also I had an experience a few years ago whereby I awoke to feel the prescence of a man standing at the entrance to our bedroom. I am still uncertain as to whether I could actually see anything or just it was the overwhelming feeling. I was having a few problems at the time letting go of a previous relationship,grieving almost and when I told my dp of many years he said jokingly perhaps it was my dad checking up on me. (his dad died when he was 13)

Werm Town Hall

This is one of the best photos I have seen.

I'm intrigued to see if anyone can come up with a rational explanation for this.

seeker that's the trouble with threads like this; people are apt to genuinely misremember, embellish and in some cases, just plain make things up.

That photo LadyFlump is to me fake looking...the angle at which the girl is standing seems wrong when you compare it to the balcony rail.

werm town hall ghost Sorry, LadyFlumpalot.

Lady Flumpalot - this picture has already been proved to be a hoax. It was in an article in the Fortean Times. The little girl is off a local postcard (unless she was haunting the site where the photo for the postcard was taken of course!)

OK here are mine:

1. Had some prophetic dreams including my (healthy) cat dying, a favourite plate breaking and the exact day and lesson when I would be inspected by OFSTED (weird!)

2. 'Spoke' to my Granny (we were very close) in a dream about two days before she died. I didn't think she was going to die but in the dream I was sobbing and crying, 'It's gone, it's all gone' My Granny walked in through the door (of her old house) and laughed at me, telling me not to be so bloody stupid and that the things which are important (I knew she meant love) would never go away. This dream has given me a lot of comfort.

3. When I was a teenage we lived in a very old house. My DB and DSis heard footsteps walking about upstairs WHEN NO ONE WAS THERE! They were literally weeping with fear (I was there too but didn't hear anything). My mother thought it might be a burglar but when we investigated there was nothing there. My father told me recently that he used to lie in bed and hear footsteps going up and down the wooden hallway downstairs. Mind you, I loved that house and always felt safe there.

4. My ex DP's (now deceased mother) moved house to get away from a ghostly lady. Everyone who stayed there saw her (sitting on the end of the bed etc) EXCEPT ME (obviously I am a ghost repeller). EX MIL was deeply embarrassed and ashamed of the ghost and we were all sworn to secrecy. The ghost was very likely that of a lady who had died falling down the stairs in the house and the activity was largely centred on the stairs and a bedroom facing the stairs. She was an 'interactive' ghost as she got to the point of appearing in ex mIL's bedroom doorway and calling her by her first name (to which she shouted, 'What the hell do you want?'!! Poor ghost was probably just lonely and never did any harm.

5. DH and I had a weird experience in a shared house we lived in briefly. We were in the (stereotypically freezing) attic room which had its own set of mini stairs. One night we were both sleeping when someone/something booted the door violently open. There was a pause then THREE clumpy footsteps down - then nothing. Yet there was no one in the house and no way in or out. DH searched the house like mad for ages. No one believed us about that one. DH doesn't believe in ghosts but he was very spooked that night. I reckon something came through. We had been using a red lightbulb for a while in the room and I remember Doris Stokes saying low entities like to travel through red light so she didn't recommend it.

WOOOOOOOHHHHHH!!! (These are all true btw!)

There is a wood near where I used to live that has always been considered haunted.
A long time ago 60's/70's a group of teenagers decided to go camping there. In the middle of the night, they all ran home and wouldn't go back to get their stuff, and wouldn't tell anyone what had happened.
Fast forward to the 90's, one of them is now the local policeman (another is a headteacher, another is a dr, don't know about the others) so this policemen was on good terms with a woman I lodged with in 98. She asked him what had happened that night.
They were all woken at about 1am by strange noises, so looked outside the tent, and saw a line of little people, no more than 6 inches high, walking through the undergrowth. None of the boys stuck around to investigate, unsurprisingly.
This isn't the first or last sighting of that kind in those woods, or other areas of the country, but it certainly isn't talked about openly.
I've never seen anything like that, but there is no way I would set foot in those woods.

Oh my god, reading this thread has scared me shitless!!! I told my dp about it, we went out and I came home to find he'd put a small pot doll of my grans on my pillow to scare me. My Dad was picking a mannequin up for me from a vintage shop and it's not coming in my room tonight now!

My Grandma has recently moved into a new old folks home. She has seen lots of ghosts before and says she woke up at 3am and there was another older lady in her nightie in her room.

My Dad is a very religious man, and believes that he has seen angels. I don't disbelieve him. It was in a period of struggle for him, and I think they made themselves visible to him for guidance. He says they were in the local church, normal looking people (ie no wings or halo) but dressed in white and very high up above the alter.

We lost out eldest dog in January, and me and dp have both seen him still laid out in the living room out of the corner of our eye. We have hard floors and he used to make a lot of noise walking up and down them, sounded like tap dancing, and we've heard him walking down there at night. DP went to make food on Friday night and heard a dogs steps on the floor, he thought it was our current dog but he was asleep on our bed when he came up. Its really comforting and we think he's been around a bit more lately because we're getting a new puppy in a couple of weeks and he doesn't want us to forget him. (We never could, he was our first dog and a lovely chap!)

My parents live in a big old Edwardian seaside boarding house up north. (It's no longer a boarding house, not that you'd know from the catering quantities of tea served every half hour.) When I was little, my elderly godmother lived in the top flat and I used to spend a lot of time with her, playing and reading and keeping out of my mum's way while she looked after my younger sister.

A few years ago, Mum and I were talking about the old days, and I mentioned the 'friends' of my godmother's who'd come to stay in the spare double room next to her little bedroom. I'd chatted away with them - they were an older couple - and remember being surprised that that were allowed to smoke in bed. I also remembered the bed wasn't where it was/is now, and said that maybe we should move it back, since it made the room feel bigger. Mum looked a bit freaked out, and said that the bed had never been there in the thirty years they'd owned the house, that my godmother hadn't ever had friends to stay, and that even if she had, was it really likely that she'd have happily let me in there to natter away while they were in their pyjamas?

I sleep in there now when I go home, but sadly have never seen the couple again. (Not allowed to move the bed either.)

Huh, well every day is a schoolday!

No need to apologise seeker. I wasn't issuing a challenge, I was genuinely intrigued.