To ask you to reccomend or tell me true stories of the strange and unusual? Not paranormal....just strange!

[MrsOverTheRoad]

Please?

I love an "odd" story...things that are just a bit weird or unexplained but not really ghosty.

Bump!

My daughter would tell you few strange stories about the creatures which live in our house.
This morning there was a little monster with huge yellow eyes and a black coat sitting on my husband's desk, watching her with mean eyes. And beside it there was a chopped off arm of a man. The one-armed man was nowhere to be seen though.
She was banging on the door of the bathroom where I was holed up, trying to get few minutes of peace and quiet on the toilet while shouting threats about what is going to happen to her if she enters the bathroom while I'm there.

Have you heard of the Green Children of Woolpit?

I've copied this from Wikipedia:

The legend of the green children of Woolpit concerns two children of unusual skin colour who reportedly appeared in the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England, some time in the 12th century, perhaps during the reign of King Stephen. The children, brother and sister, were of generally normal appearance except for the green colour of their skin. They spoke in an unknown language, and would only eat raw broad beans. Eventually they learned to eat other food and lost their green pallor, but the boy was sickly and died soon after he and his sister were baptised. The girl adjusted to her new life, but she was considered to be "rather loose and wanton in her conduct". After she learned to speak English, the girl explained that she and her brother had come from Saint Martin's Land, a subterranean world inhabited by green people.

There's also the story of the Devil's Footprints (again copied from Wikipedia):

The Devil's Footprints were a phenomenon that occurred during February 1855 around the Exe Estuary in East and South Devon, England. After a heavy snowfall, trails of hoof-like marks appeared overnight in the snow covering a total distance of some 40 to 100 miles (60 to 160 km). The footprints were so called because some people believed that they were the tracks of Satan, as they were allegedly made by a cloven hoof. Many theories have been made to explain the incident, and some aspects of its veracity have also been questioned.

dragonfree the devils footprints is a brilliant story. When I was last on Dartmoor (not far from where the devils footprints are rumoured to have appeared) I found this!

When I was about 5 I was sat on a bus with my dad and baby brother. The bus went past a row of shops and I saw something odd. A headless man in a suit lay sprawled out on the pavement outside a shop, pools of blood all around. But no one seemed to be bothered about it. People just going about their business, oblivious. "Dad, look at that man" I said, but he couldn't see what I was seeing. I always think there must have been some sort of explanation. Maybe it was a shop dummy or something. But just something about the way he was sprawled out on the ground and the blood around him and the severed neck...It gives me chills.

My nan had a great book about myths and legends of Britain. I loved it when I was a kid.

The story of the Devil's hoof prints was in it.

Also the Cottingley (?) fairies.

I've got the book somewhere. I might have a look for it later.

The story of Tarrare. (warning it gets a little gross). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarrare

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexham_Heads

Hexham Heads.

The Cottingley fairies qz.com/911990/the-cottingley-fairy-hoax-of-1917-is-a-case-study-in-how-smart-people-lose-control-of-the-truth/

I wonder if the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass incident will ever be resolved.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident

I have one of my own. When I was about 18 I worked in a shop for a few months during my year out. Some of the other people who worked there said they thought they had a 'ghost'. The rumour was that people used to lock things in the safe last thing at night and in the morning when someone else opened up the safe would be open and all the contents distributed on different shelves. I thought it was probably colleagues arsing about. I'm a proper sceptic.

One day I was in a room (really no bigger than a broom cupboard) sorting through a load of tickets. I had a load in my hand (at least 50) and reached for some more from a shelf. I felt the tickets in my hand drop. There was a pause. Then I realised I hadn't heard them land on the floor. Looked down - no ticket to be seen. Looked behind a couple of things but realistically, unless they flew, they should have been on the floor at my feet. I still have no logical explanation how I dropped a massive wad of tickets that then seemingly disappeared into thin air.

Spring Heeled Jack is pretty creepy;

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring-heeled_Jack

Blimey that Tararre story is so strange

My grandad died two days before my 21st birthday. In the early hours of my birthday my landline rang but when I pressed 1471 it said the last call was hours earlier. It kept doing this until I unplugged it. The next day my DM told me the call was around the time I was born. My phone rang like that every night at around 11pm, even after changing the phone, for a couple of years until I moved house.

I'm sure it was probably a fault on the line, but the timing was so strange.

I find local history quite interesting - my mum collects postcards too so often combine the two. A few weeks ago on a facebook page for the area someone posted a scan of postcard from a good 115 years ago of the village with the letter on the back. I found the letter quite interesting as it seemed as if it was from a younger girl writing to a friend (who lived in an area some 30 miles north). Made reference to a couple of in jokes which I loved - different to the normal 'weather great' stuff.

About a fortnight ago I was bored and eBaying postcards from the village. By sheer coincidence - another postcard, from the same lady to the same friend , was on ebay. Think it was dated about ten years later or so, seller lived about 400 miles away from where the postcard was first sent. I just found it really strange, in a lovely way, that I'd come across two from the same person - makes me wonder what sort of person she was and where she lived (as sender's address isn't on the cards).

google tte gibbons twins

I love these!
Tarrare sounds like my 3 year old!

I love the ‘Lore’ podcasts. I discovered them a few weeks ago, episodes are between 18-30 minutes long and cover everything from ghosts and witches to lobotomies and aliens. It’s recently been made into a amazon prime show.

Thus is my favourite (as it were) mystery/unexplained true story.
I check the blogs about it every few months to see if there’s been any new developments.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamam_Shud_case

My friend Kay was regularly taken to meet a friend of her mother's throughout her childhood. Every time she went she remembers the old man who lived there and used to smile at her whilst reading his newspaper.
Many years later she was reminiscing with her mother and asked her who the old man was, her mother had no idea what she was talking about and said that only her friend had ever been there when they visited!

This is...
DAYC!!

A colleague says her dad was obsessed with a tree on his journey to work that he said was dangerous- he said it would fall down & kill somebody one day. He contacted the council repeatedly but was ignored.

One day sure enough that tree did fall down and killed her dad in his car on his way to work. He was 40.

Very strange but sadly true.

• Mad Gasser of Mattoon
• The telephone number 0888-888-888
• Edward Mordrake and his “devil twin”
• The story of King Louis XIV and the “masked man”
• The Wandering Soul Tapes
• Laura Buxton “baloon friends” story
• Children swept up by whirlwinds and deposited back down un-harmed miles away
• La Mancha Negro
• June 28th, 2002, story of 19 cows in Argentina unexplainably bieng found inside water tank
• Elisa Lam (2013)

I can remember every detail of every single one of those stories.. they have all stayed with me after reading, for some reason!

Much less serious than some on here, but once we opened the bonnet of my car and found a banana skin and some prawn crackers sitting on top of the battery. For reasons I can't quite remember (probably a battery on its way out) we knew they hadn't been there the day before, and we couldn't work out who would have been able to pop the bonnet, or, more importantly, why they would have done so just to put a banana skin and prawn crackers in the engine. Never found out who did it or why, never will...