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.

@ScarletSienna your story is exactly the type that scares the shit out of me. I don't believe in ghosts (although I would probably shit myself if I saw one!) so although spooky movies etc might give me chills they're not actually scary.

Human beings are the scary things.

A musician friend of mine wrote a song about a little village in Wiltshire called Imber and I'd never heard of it so I looked into it and it's a sad and strange story.

Until Google satellite view, Imber never appears on any maps and is quite remote. All the villagers were evicted by the Ministry Of Defence during World War Two and told they could return after the war. The Village has never been returned to the villagers and is still population zero and under MOD control. They campaigned relentlessly over the years, all unsuccessful. Villagers and their families are allowed entry to the church once a year to visit graves but otherwise they can't go in. From memory, I think there may not be any remaining villagers from the time of eviction still alive.

I feel so sad for those people and how shafted they were.

When I was little, my family went to see the Long Woman's Grave at Carlingford in Ireland. Not a particularly scary story, just a local legend. For some reason though I had nightmares about this super tall woman for years afterwards.

irelandseden.ie/explore-eden/carlingford-the-cooley-peninsula/local-stories-and-traditions/the-long-womans-grave-omeath/

One time I took drugs and started hallucinating. I hallucinated that I was dancing with a woman with red hair. After the effects of the drugs have worn off, I kept on seeing this woman with red hair every few days for months and months. I don't mean I was seeing people who looked like her or even seeing the woman who had been the "basis" for my hallucination. I mean I was actually seeing this woman but never face-to-face, she was always reflected in windows or passing on the street if I was on the bus and always had a kind of hazy/ghostly look about her like she most definitely wasn't real.

It was really strange and creepy but I was quite disappointed when she stopped appearing after a few months.

thePeanut. thank you for that link about Tarrare, how fascinating! I'd never heard of him before. If it were a disease, as the article suggests, you would think there would have been other similar cases by now wouldn't you?

I enjoy stories like that much more than supernatural ones. Truth is stranger than fiction indeed.

One night I had the most bizarre dream - I was looking at a theatre/cinema and a man came out, I raised my gun and shot him. Someone shouted the King of Sweden has been shot. I woke up with a jolt, thought it was an odd dream but went back to sleep with no problem

When I saw the news the following day the Prime Minister of Sweden had been assassinated by being shot as he came out of a theatre.

I had no radio or anything on in the house but have always assumed a car stopped outside with the news on or I somehow picked up all the radio signals on my filings or something and this influenced my dream rather than anything supernatural but it still gives me the chills when I think about it.

I am shamelessly place marking

Look up some stories on cryptids. I am obsessed with that sort of nonsense. Oh, and sightings of big cats in the UK. Ooh, and better yet, the Bermuda Triangle.

DoJo re banana skin story: squirrels can do that (not sure if they take banana skins bit they definitely can store things in cars.

As for the man with the appetite, there’s a condition when people are hungry all the time. ... do people actually believe all these stories to be true?

Tika - yes, is that Prader-Willi syndrome?

I had a weird jewelry one. I have a ring that my mother bought me for my 18th Birthday. Because of the type of stone it is, I always used to take it off when doing anything involving water and hands.
I was volunteering somewhere and from what I remember, I took it off to wash up.
Got home that evening and realised I must have left it where I was volunteering.
Went back the next day and did a massive hunt in the kitchen area, no sign of it.
A couple of days later, having just changed the sheets and duvet on my bed, I turned around and it was in the middle of the freshly made bed. Still no idea how that happened but very glad that it did.

A cheeky place mark for later.

If you’re talking about Tarrare, people with Prader Willi are usually obese, which he wasn’t. They don’t typically smell awful or give off a visible vapour either. It was probably a bizarre mix of things wrong rather than one single thing which may be why no one else has had it.

There's a village in Dorset which sounds the same as the one in Wiltshire mentioned upthread -
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyneham

Following to read later..

Oooh, I've read it now. Great stuff.

Love the story of the mum who knew there was something wrong with Jane.

I love big cat stories too. I believe them 100%. There's one in the area I hike in, and I've heard many dour, immovable farmers swear to its existence

The stories about missing jewellery turning up after a holiday are making me think of the time I left my watch on a beach overseas only for it to fall out of my wardrobe on me from a height some months later.
I mean I KNOW I can’t have left it behind on the beach and it must have somehow come home with me, but it just fell out of the wardrobe. It wasn’t even near the suitcase or anything.
The time slip stories are fascinating. I’m sure I recall reading about the foundation of the KLF and Bill Drummond’s claim that key lines run through Liverpool. I’ve just looked it up and a forum says one runs along Bold Street.

A few years back I had a dream that water was running down a wall in my mum's kitchen, then got woken up by a phone call at 7 a.m. from my mum telling me that there was a leak from her bathroom basin and it was dripping down into the kitchen below.. the leak was exactly where I'd seen it in my dream.
The weird thing is as soon as I saw my mum's number calling me I knew she was phoning me to tell me about the leak before I even answered it and spoke to her.

I have a doppelganger and we have never met.
We have the same job, nearly the same mobile number, same name and I keep getting stopped by confused people who then realise I'm not her.
Although I've found it a bit odd as I feel I'm quite distinctive looking (I'm very tall as well and usually stick out a bit) I seem to look like a lot of people as, no joke, nearly every time I go somewhere someone will think I'm their friend or ask if I was so and so who they spoke to about such and such and this happens whether I'm in the local shop or at the other end of the country (and even abroad) so I didn't initially think much of it that I had been mistaken for this same person several times.
How I found out about it was when I started locuming and had an answerphone message for MyDobby to please confirm a shift at X place, Y time. I panicked because I thought I must have stupidly double booked myself or there was some kind of mistake I had made and I didn't relish the prospect of letting them down although I was sure I'd never spoken to them. Anyway I called and we went through things and we were both confused, turns out our numbers are different and there had just been a mix up.
I find it really weird that in a small home town and a profession where we mix at a lot of the same big yearly CPD events and 'know the locals' that I have never ever run in to anyone who looks like me let alone the person who practically, apparently, is me. Nor have my colleagues even though they've moved jobs. Nor have my friends and family. But she's out there, really close by. Not in the same league as other tales but it weirds me out a little bit.

I bet you wouldn’t think she was your doppelgänger even if you had seen her though, Mydobby. I used to go into another building at work for lunch and people would constantly greet me by a name that wasn’t mine. Eventually I tracked her down by looking up pictures of people of that name who worked in that building and found her. I could see why people might confuse us but I would never even have thought that we looked that similar. I certainly wouldn’t have looked twice at her on the street and thought she was my doppelgänger. Evidently others thought differently!

Years ago on holiday in Ireland, stayed in a very old cottage. It was quite cold at night so put the heating on. Obviously as it was so cold i didn't have any windows open. Come bedtime, I walked into the bedroom and every window was wide open. I asked dh if he'd opened them but he hadn't even been in the room.

Freaked me out a bit at the time.

I keep thinking about the locksmith one! Scarlet did anything else weird ever happen? What did the landlord say?

I am quite into mysteries in general and recently I’ve been into the disappearance of Maura Murray, an American girl who went missing after a car crash about 13 years ago. There is a podcast - Missing Maura Murray - which is a veritable rabbit warren of information and conspiracy.

Nearly 11 years ago my dad was given a terminal diagnosis and told to plan for 2-3 months. He immediately said he wanted to buy my mum a ring for their 40th wedding anniversary which it was highly likely he wouldn't make it to.

In the end he went downhill very quickly and died less than two weeks later, without having bought a ring for my mum.

When dad's gravestone was put in place mum went to take a look and there, placed carefully on the stone was a claddagh ring.

My dad was Irish and the claddagh is an Irish wedding ring.

I know it must have been dropped but what are the chances?

My mum has the ring but is too freaked out to wear it.

Oh Glitter that’s such a lovely story! He got her the ring after all. That reminds me of another thing that happened:

My grandfather died last year and he was very spiritual - although he defined as a Christian he was quite alternative really and believed in reincarnation - he always said he had lived before as animals and people, and would again. I was very upset when he died and a short time after his funeral I was walking home listening to a recording of him singing with his choir (he had a lovely voice). I was feeling quite tearful and thinking about him. A robin flew past me and kept following me all the way down the road, it’s about a five or ten minute walk so not a short distance. The robin kept apace with me and even ‘waited’ for me at various points.

When I got to my front door the robin sat on the step in front of the door and just looked at me. I tried to walk past it but it stood its ground. I thought this was very strange behaviour for a bird and I got this strange feeling that the two things were linked. I found myself saying quietly ‘Grandpa?’. The robin gave this little chirruping sound, looked at me again and then flew off.

Now rationally I KNOW it was only a bird and that I was thinking of my grandpa and that probably coloured my judgment - but it did genuinely make me feel better!!

There is a temple in India called Padmanabhaswamy Temple. It has many different vaults. Vault b has yet to be opened. It needs someone that speaks a specific ancient language to open it. It’s intriguing to day the least.