To ask for your woo tales?

[Tellmeyourwoostories]

I understand this isn't for everyone but I love a good woo story. Even if you've seen/experienced something but aren't 100% sure and are on the fence, I'd love to hear your stories.

I've had a few experiences myself, nothing majorly scary just in my old house I'd often hear loud clear footsteps when nobody could be there and often saw a shadow figure, sometimes right infront of me and other times in my peripheral so can understand why people think they've seen something but can't be sure. I also worked in a pub that had some poltergeist type activity and various figures had been seen by staff and customers. I'd love to hear yours!

Well, we did them all the time when babysitting in our teens, and both my teenage best friend and I have long outlived our ouija-predicted death dates, so I wouldn't lose any sleep over yours.

Not really woo but a freaky coincidence.

I was once driving very late in the peak district and came across a guy walking down a really narrow track with no torch so stopped and asked him if he needed a lift into town. I've never picked up any one before or even felt vaguely inclined to.

He gladly accepted, jumped in, gave him a run down into town, dropped him off and thought nothing more.

2 weeks later I was at a party in London and a friend introduced me to his mate, and it was the guy I gave a lift to

@OneTC that is weird! I've had a few freaky experiences myself of weird coincidences/synchronicity. Like not thinking of someone/seeing them for years, suddenly out of nowhere they come up in your mind and shortly after I hear from them.

I dreamed that my friend, who was due to give birth in two weeks, was in labour. I called her mobile and her mum picked it up and called me a witch because yes, she was at hospital having her baby! 😂

I've told this one on here before...

When I met dh1, he had a rather elaborately silver framed photograph of himself on the mantelpiece in his flat.

I was curious (well, tbh I took the piss) as a) dh1 was not really a 'framed photos of self' sort of a chap. Dog-eared band flyers blutacked to the walls was more his style & b) it wasn't the sort of picture you'd expect - it was in a very graduation/wedding type frame, but in the photo, dh1, aged about 19-20, is at a rock festival, wearing a Sisters of Mercy t-shirt & ripped jeans, & grinning into the camera, fag in one hand, plastic pint of cider in the other...

Anyway, he explained that his db took the photo, & his dm loved it (it was genuinely a great photo of him) so distributed framed copies to every granny & auntie she could think of. Then one of them died, & dh1 ended up with her copy as literally every family member who might have wanted one, already had one.

Fair enough! Photo followed us around through various flat & house moves, always ending up on a shelf somewhere.

Then dh1 died in a stupid drunken accident.

We were pretty much done by then - I loved him, but he had his demons & was impossible to live with.

The photo carried on following me around, from house to house, even though it pre-dated our meeting by a few years & even when I subsequently re-married. It was just such a nice image of dh1 - so it was always, still, on a shelf somewhere.

It was YEARS later when I was packing for a house move & suddenly noticed a minor detail in the background - I must have had the photo 20 years by then & hadn't clocked it.

There are quite a few people behind dh1, because it was taken at a huge music festival.

Two of them are teenage girls, backs to the camera, sitting on a blanket. One has waist length bright red hair, one has backcombed black hair a la Siouxsie, & both are wearing VERY 80s band t-shirts.

The redhead is my then best friend. The black haired girl is me.

Wow @CorvusPurpureus !

@Minimili I’m sure I could smell my dad’s cancer too. Would walk into the sitting room he had been sat in and there was a peculiar sweet smell, like he was chewing sweets, pear drops. It was only him in there and he never ate in the sitting room (neither did me or DM).
He hadn’t yet been diagnosed and wasn’t having treatment. He passed away from pancreatic cancer a few months later.

I went to visit my ex's GM. Drove past her living room window and saw another elderly lady sat at the far end of the room. I parked up and walked in and their was only GM sat there. I asked if she'd had any other visitors and she said not for a couple of days. It was so real!
About a week later, GM died unexpectedly. At her wake I was telling a family friend about this experience and they said I'd described GM sister down to a T and she used to sit in the seat I'd seen her in. She'd died years earlier!

@Changethetune I’m not sure if it’s because I have my own DD who has been in and out of hospital due to a condition she’s had for a couple of years but that story about your friend and the rocking horse has gave me chills…..🫣

@PeppermintPorpoise there is a girl on tik tok who has a really similar story.
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGeGjfEm6/

Before I had my own kids, I had this weird ability to predict if pregnant women were going to have a boy or a girl. I was never wrong a single time, and it worked for both women I knew and for famous women. I predicted that Jennifer Lopez was going to have boy-girl twins before anyone knew she was having twins.

Then when my own kids were born, I couldn’t do it anymore. I used to just have a feeling when I found out someone was pregnant, but the feelings stopped…

Only now I think they might be coming back. I have a very clear feeling that Justin and Hailey Bieber are going to have a little girl.

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?

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

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 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.

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!

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.

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)

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.

Placemarking, love a good woo thread.

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.

I'm really enjoying these stories 👻

I recently heard a story on the Uncanny podcast from a man who used to be a firefighter and he turned up one morning to put a fire out in a row of houses and on the end house next to the one he was dealing with, when he was stood outside a moody old woman came out and complained to him about the noise and how long would they be. He distinctly remembered the shuffling of her slippers and her grumpy face as she walked along the front of the garden to him. When they were about to leave, he told the person who's house had a fire that he can tell his neighbour it's all sorted now and the noise should stop and the man said the house had been empty a while and the woman had died there not long before.

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.

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?