To ask what's the weirdest/strangest/creepiest thing that has ever happened to you?

[fruitysmoothie]

As the title says...

I have another 'sort-of' one, that I think was probably suggestion/psychology rather than 'woo'. I was visiting London when the Tube train I was on stopped at King's Cross St Pancras. This would have been a couple of years after the fire, not that long after the station reopened. So the fire was uppermost in my mind as I sat on the train, which seemed to be stopped for longer than usual. Gradually I became aware of the most awful, sickening smell of smoke. I was nearly gagging on it, could feel it in my throat, my vision was clouding, and I had an awful, oppressive feeling. I remember thinking how terrible it was, to have re-opened the station with this terrible smoke still lingering. I looked around at the other passengers in a panic, but nobody was reacting at all. And then it all suddenly went away.

I lived in London for several years and spent a fair bit of time on the Tube, but never experienced anything like that again. I do think the human mind is a strange thing, though, so would be very prepared to believe that my brain somehow created it all.

Some years ago a boyfriend and I were just relaxing in my flat when we heard voices coming from my lava lamp. We just looked at each other and legged it down to the pub. A few days later it happened again. As there were 6 of us in the room we felt brave enough to stay and listen. Turned out the lamp was somehow picking up the local police frequency.
Karma, please don't tell me that it isn't possible!

Has the poster with the random woman who walked into the rental cottage that they were staying in been on?

It had happened before and was a ghost?

Does anyone know that story.

Woman in the kitchen.

The house I grew up in was occupied by the ghost of the previous tenant, let's call him Joe. We were on fairly friendly terms with him, he responded to his name and everything. He initially mostly liked to play tricks on my eldest sister, turning things on or off in her room, swinging her door open wide in the night, ruffling her curtains when the windows were closed etc. When she eventually moved out and I took over her room he would do it to me instead. It never felt malevolent, always felt very much like a practical joke IYKWIM. None of us were ever afraid of Joe.

Joe slowly got less and less active as the years went on but a few incidents occurred that confirmed for us all that he was friendly and looking out for us.

My other older sister was asleep in the living room one night and was suddenly awoken by my Dad's lathe turning on in the basement beneath her. She got up and turned it off and as she came back upstairs heard water running. Turns out a pipe had burst in the downstairs bathroom and water was slowly flooding the house so she woke my Dad up and he fixed it. We think Joe turned the lathe on to wake her up on purpose. If he'd woken anyone upstairs up they may not have heard the downstairs pipe leaking.

One incident was one morning when my eldest sister and I were in my younger brothers bedroom hurrying him to get ready for school. He never used to bother with his curtains and they mostly just stayed half open, never fully open or closed. Anyway we were talking to him when suddenly his curtains swung open very violently. The windows were closed and there was a bed between the 3 of us and these curtains so it definitely wasn't any of us. Anyway we all jumped and then stared, seeing our next door standing on top of his kitchen roof peering into my brothers bedroom! He looked as shocked as us! My Dad went totally mental, round there within minutes hammering on the door and calling him a paedophile etc.. neighbour claimed he was checking the pipes and police refused to take it any further. We've always thought Joe had opened the curtains to alert us to the peeping Tom.

Another incident was when my eldest sister brought a boyfriend home for Christmas. Joe really dislike to him. We hadn't actually mentioned Joe to this guy as this was later on when he'd gotten really inactive but the boyfriend complained repeatedly of being poked and feeling small pushes etc. Not playfully like he had with us as children but actually hurting the guy, leaving marks and stuff. At one point the boyfriend was having a quiet row with my sister and went to follow her out of the living room when my mum and I saw the back of his shirt lift up and he was dragged back into the room. I knew then that it was Joe and he was trying to scare the guy off. This boyfriend turned out to be a right nasty, controlling, violent piece of work.

These aren't the only things Joe did, there was lots of other stuff that we've never found an explanation for. I'm not especially woo about things, I do believe the vast majority of woo stuff has rational explanations. But at the same time I firmly believe in Joe.

Yorkie - Mum did say if she could she would come back and let us know she was OK.

Round - get rid of the mirror. I have a horrendous woo experience involving a mirror about 30 years ago. It is only now that I have mirrors in the house (because the rest of the family insist on them), but I very rarely look in one.

DP and I have an agreement that if one of us dies we will let the other know if we are OK. We have a secret code.

Desertmum we need to hear your mirror story please!

EverySongbirdSays I think you might mean me. I have posted this before.

DH and I rented a cottage in Donegal. It was an old farm building next to a Georgian house.
On the last night we sat outside watching the sunset and had something to eat. We had a drink each because we were getting up early to drive to the ferry - 2 hours away.
As it was getting dark we went inside into the kitchen to wash up. I washed and he dried. We both saw a woman walk across the room behind us as if she had come in the outside door and was crossing to the bedrooms/bathroom.
She looked totally normal and was dressed in very ordinary things - I saw a shirt and cardigan. She never looked at us, seemed unaware of us and just walked behind us through the room.
We both turned because we actually thought someone had come into the cottage. There was no one there. DH went through to the bedrooms/bathroom. No one there. There was no other door for her to get out.
We were terrified. We locked our bedroom door and lay awake and were up and in the car in the middle of the night and slept in the car at the ferry terminal.

It was very strange. We saw her in the window- it was almost dark outside and all we could see in the window was the room behind us which was lit.
The window faced into an old walled garden that we had the key to - she could not have been in the garden, the walls were about 10 ft high.

When we got home, we spoke to the bloke we rented the cottage from and DH asked him if anyone had ever reported anything odd. He said immediately 'The woman in the kitchen. Did you see her?'
We have never gone back to that cottage and it was very beautiful but we would never have slept. We talk about it occasionally and have tried to think of rational explanations but just can't. Just can't explain it at all.

Karma - it’s perfectly possible for Marklah’s record player speakers to have picked up the taxi rank signals. That’s how radios work. It used to be quite common until control of radio frequencies was tightened up.

I could do the science bit, but I’ve just had a large dinner and glass of wine, so all my energy has sprinted from my brain to my stomach. But basically, there’s a whole load of electromagnetic frequencies all around us, and if any bit of that gets focused, as it does in a radio broadcast, then anything that can vibrate at that frequency will pick that up and resonate. Infrasound is an example of that, and that’s pretty weird.

Yes that's the story Lulu shit yourself stuff

There are a lot more people than I thought who have had some unexplainable happenings and experiences, it seems, dare I say it, quite common....

Lulu

I’m mostly sceptical about the paranormal, and I do find possibly scientific explanations quite fascinating in themselves. There could be loads of reasons why people experience what they do, but often they’re not believed by scientists/engineers who then don’t investigate. From memory, the discovery of infrasound and its effects was by an engineer who had dismissed other people’s reporting of strange dread feelings when working in a particular laboratory, until he experienced it himself – only then did he investigate.

But science can’t (or maybe won’t) explain all the phenomena that people experience. The only genuinely “woo” experience I’ve had, that I can’t explain, goes back to when DC1 was still a tiny baby. One day, when she actually fell asleep(!), I put her in her pram just outside the open patio doors in the shade, and I’d fallen asleep on the sofa. One of those very deep sleeps, from utter exhaustion.

I had a feeling of being dragged back into consciousness, and saw a woman bending over me, gently saying “Your baby’s crying.” (Which she was.) But it was how the woman was dressed which was inexplicable. Think about the Norland nanny uniform – as was worn by the Cambridge’s nanny at Charlotte’s christening. It was like that, but a much heavier material, perhaps wool, and it was ankle-length. How could my subconscious mind have constructed that image, when it was nothing like anything I’d seen in real life? It was an old house, though, so maybe it could have been a previous occupant. It never happened again, which is a pity because that was a very nice experience.

Sleep paralysis - someone please tell me they've experienced it.

They say you don't know real fear until it happens to you

Blasian - I don't have personal experience but watched a documentary about it and sounds just awful :(

Blasian

Sleep paralysis - I've had it, and it IS terrifying.

Had a sleep-over round at cousin's house as a child and I "woke up" early in the morning (it was summer) and was convinced, absolutely certain, there was a horrible monster outside the window just waiting to look in through the gap in the curtains.

I couldn't move, and it felt like it went on for hours and hours. I had no idea what would happen when it did look in at me, but the sense of dread was indescribable.

Never had it since, thankfully. Even though I didn't see it, I knew what the monster looked like - it was from one of those man-in-a-rubber-suit 50s horror films (and obviously not real, though it felt like it at the time!).

I should add - knowing that the monster was invented for the film makes it easy to see the experience for what it was. If it had been some random evil being, I imagine it would be much harder for me to write it off as a figment of my imagination. After thirty years it still feels more real in my memory than many of my actual memories!

I should add - knowing that the monster was invented for the film makes it easy to see the experience for what it was. If it had been some random evil being, I imagine it would be much harder for me to write it off as a figment of my imagination. After thirty years it still feels more real in my memory than many of my actual memories!

Decades ago DP and I stayed in a lonely spot on the coast - we'd only ever lived inland before. One foggy night we were terrified out of our wits by a deep, mournful sound like all the souls in hell coming to get us.
Important word here - foggy.
We'd never heard foghorns before.

This was my DH's experience of sleep paralysis:

So, I had taken the dc camping for a night with friends. He was working, so stayed at home with the dog. It was just him and the dog in the house. Now the dog loves me - nobody else. He wouldn't settle, because I wasn't the one 'putting him to bed' ( ) So the dog's barking and whining, and in desperation, DH puts him in the hall, by the front door - to 'wait for me'.

DH tucks himself back into bed, the dog settles. He's then awoken by heavy footsteps thudding up the stairs, and then along the landing. He's lying in bed, and the bedroom door slowly starts to open. He's wondering if it's me come home early - but the footsteps weren't mine, they were too heavy. He's watching the bedroom door opening - and he can't move.

He said it was beyond terrifying, all the more so because he felt so awake. I think this was the only time it ever happened to him - spooked by the dog and the empty house.

BlasianFashionista I had it from early childhood until I was about 28. The last experience was waking up to see a little demon like creature hunched up and sitting in the bed between me and DH. He had a wide mouth full of tiny razor sharp teetb. He said "I'm going to tear your little family apart" I screamed and he vanished. That was 12 years ago, we're still together.

Once, many years ago I was woken up by a man shouting something in the room. I thought he was an intruder until he vanished. I didn't understand what he said but asked DH, who was just my boyfriend then, if it was something in his language. He said it wasn't but that it sounded very like Spanish for help me. We were in Texas at the time. It was really scary.

I've also seen cats, horses, a fox, shadow people and the old hag. The shadow people used to walk around my bed and whisper hush. It is terrifying. I hope it never happens again.

Pleeeeaaaasse can we have your mirror story desertmum?