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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

To ask for your woo tales?

336 replies

Tellmeyourwoostories · 03/07/2024 17:10

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!

OP posts:
violetcuriosity · 10/07/2024 07:16

Something weird happened to me the other day. We were staying at my parents after a party so we'd all had a drink. DP was snoring so I went and slept downstairs in the front room, you need to walk past the back door through the kitchen to get into the room and it's a sturdy stable sized door that you have to unbolt at the top and bottom to open. I was really unsettled when I was sleeping on the sofa and kept drifting off and in my dream I would wake up on the sofa but then I'd properly wake up. This happened a few times and during one of the dreams there was a really horrible, raspy, non-English hissing/talking coming from outside the living room. It really scared me but it was part of these weird dreams I was having. I was then aware of my Dad banging about the kitchen and coming to check who was in the front room. In the morning he said he'd gone for a wee in the night and had felt a draught in the kitchen and when he'd gone to the back door it was wide open, he'd locked it before bed. I would have noticed if it was open as either the top or bottom would have been ajar, it never stays shut even unlocked. We still can't work out wtf was happening that night!

OVienna · 10/07/2024 08:50

CorvusPurpureus · 06/07/2024 18:14

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.

Holy fuck!

Tellmeyourwoostories · 10/07/2024 15:42

Bumping this thread. Maybe some of you know some friends/family that have/have had a spooky workplace or house?

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Cursieputed · 10/07/2024 16:26

I have loads

Here's one, and I'll start by saying that the rumours where I live are that some of our houses were built on a very old gravesite. The nearby church is a few hundred years old and is opposite a deep and creepy forest.
How true the rumours are, I have no idea.

Anyway, I was driving back home from the shops one night. Teenage daughter was in the car with me.
We drove past the church and in the curve in the road, my headlights hit the forest edge full on.

Standing at the edge, behind a low fence, was a tall humanoid figure; taller than your average person. My headlights illuminated its robes and hood. The robes looked like a mid/dusky brown.
The entity had no face that I could see. (Hidden by the hood)

If you imagine the Grim Reaper's robes: that was the style.

After about ten seconds the entity turned and, I swear, it glided rapidly into the forest behind it. It glided!

My daughter was silent for a few seconds more and then said, "what was that?!"

It took me years before I'd drive down that road again and I still avoid it at night

Edited to add: my teenage daughter referred to it as a Harry Potter dementor, if that helps with the visuals

Itiswhysofew · 10/07/2024 16:56

CorvusPurpureus · 06/07/2024 18:14

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.

That's incredible.

Chypre · 10/07/2024 17:09

Whenever I see birds going like a carousel, lots of them and in a really dense circle, there will be sad news. Someone will die. Usually I see those carousels around the harbour, so I don't go there anymore.

Tellmeyourwoostories · 10/07/2024 17:14

@cursieputed blimey that's spooky. It's mad you both saw it as usually it's rare for more than one person at a time to see something. I bet you would have assumed you'd gone mad if you saw it alone. I don't blame you for being nervous to drive on that road again, I know I would! I'd love to hear your other stories if you're willing.

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Wintersgirl · 11/07/2024 00:11

SandandSky · 10/07/2024 01:23

I have a job where I often have to drive home late at night (anything between about 11pm-1am) and my drive is down little country lanes which I’ve always found quite spooky late at night. The place we live is quite famous for being a big witch gathering historically.

One day I was driving home at about midnight when suddenly from the hedgerow a man in black stepped out into the road but he was wearing what looked like a mask with no features on it, just big, dark eye holes. Quite shiny/plastic looking. It sounds silly but a bit like the ghost thing from Mario 😂He stood in the road for a second and then sort of played chicken with my car? Ran right at me and then avoided the car/made me swerve. But when I looked behind me he was fucking gone!!! He could have well jumped back in the bushes etc by the road but I honestly shit myself every time I drive that bit of road now.

Edited

That is bloody creepy!

Insidenumber09 · 11/07/2024 09:54

katebushh · 04/07/2024 09:55

I've never shared this before but here goes.

About a week after my son was stillborn a fox came to the bedroom French window doors ( we lived in a higgledy piggledy apartment which would have been accessible by any nimble animal via fire escape stairs and roofs) and proceeded to tap tap tap at the door. He was there for almost 2 hours.

I honestly couldn't think straight at the time and never really speak about losing my baby boy and my partner was with me in bed half asleep at the time and he's never been able to talk about it either.

I wonder what that fox wanted and why he wouldn't go. He or she just wouldn't go away, he stared at us and tapped for hours.

I had pictures of the fox. I might see if I still them.

So brave of you to share your story and I’m sorry for your loss. The picture of the fox is completely mesmerising, he looks so old and wise. Intriguing.

Verv · 11/07/2024 12:36

Im pretty sure Ive shared this before but my mother had premonitions. Properly serious ones, some of which left her hysterical when they actually happened and some that were minor in comparison.
When she was a child she would predict who was coming to visit and all through our relationship used to pick up the phone with "hello verv" - I used to ring the house phone that had no caller ID.

Anyway. I think I inherited a minute dose of whatever she had but on a far smaller scale.

I'd finished work one night when I was living in Edinburgh and was making my way back to the flat I shared with my best friend which was on the top floor.
On the way up the stairs I was reading graffiti which was spray painted black arrows pointing up the staircase and on every turn there were phrases like "dealer lives here" "get your heroin here" "xxxxx sells heroin" "drugs this way"
It was strange though as I dont actually remember walking up the stairs and wasnt altogether sure how I arrived at the front door as I was reading the graffiti in a sort of a dream state and not really conscious of stomping my way upstairs.
My mother always described her premonitions as losing signal and her surroundings being replaced by something else - and it was just like that but I wasnt really aware of what was going on at the time.

Got into the flat and said to my friend "that graffiti, bloody hell, have you called the council?" and friend was like "eh?" so I told her about the graffiti all the way up the stairs. She said there was nothing when she got home from work so went to go look.
Came back into the flat and said "are you having a laugh? TWAT!" as she had walked right down to the bottom of the stairs and back up again (so was winded!) looking for this graffiti and there was nothing there.
I went back out to check and she was right, nothing. So I scratched my head a bit, conceded it was weird, and ate, showered, watched tv, went to bed as normal.

Got woken up the next morning by friend who came into my room and OI!'d at me. She said she had just left for work, got outside the front door and the stairwell was covered in graffiti. Same as I had described, black arrows and spray painted slogans about a drug dealer upstairs.
She asked me if I had been on a wind up, or crept out into the stairwell at night and done it MYSELF to freak her out. Of course not!
There it was though, exactly as I'd seen and said, all over the stairwell from top to bottom.
That was insane as id seen it, id said it, friend had checked it the night before, and overnight it appeared.

Second minor incident was when Id moved out of the old flat because id bought myself one. Was still best friends with the same friend/ex flatmate and she had come round for dinner.
As she was leaving I went into my hall cupboard quite absentmindedly and said "you need loo roll" so gave her a couple. She looked at me and did a WTF because she had indeed run out of loo roll and had meant to pick some up on the way to mine but had forgotten. If I hadn't have handed her two she would've been drip drying or worse. Hadn't mentioned it at all, but I just knew.
Quite a random bit of information there. Sadly have never seen the lottery numbers.

I am fascinated by premonition. Ive had it. My mother definitely without a doubt had it but it's not supposed to exist.

Tellmeyourwoostories · 11/07/2024 13:00

@verv I think I remember your graffiti one from before 🤔 am pretty sure I've seen it before. I have had one or two premonitions myself before but it hasn't happened in years. I wish I got them more often, especially for lottery numbers lol Wink

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ElsaMars · 11/07/2024 18:42

Told this one before and I still don't know what to think years later.

When I was 14 or 15 me and my friend used to go into the village graveyard for a sneaky fag. There was a really old part and a newer part with hardly any graves and a bench at the end.

Me and my friend were sitting here and chatting, looking out for anyone who might tell our parents what they saw when we suddenly saw a man, in a black suit, stood at the end of one of the newer graves.

It wasn't dark, as it was summer and the only way in was via a heavy, large gate that scraped on gravel as you opened it, there had been no noise or anything.

We sat in silence, sheepish and worrying about being told off and also feeling freaked out. We asked each other if we could see him and we both could. We looked away for a few seconds, and when we looked back he'd gone. Vanished, no sound at all.

Tellmeyourwoostories · 11/07/2024 19:19

@elsamars That's freaky. Did you ever end up telling your parents about that? Lol.

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ElsaMars · 11/07/2024 19:29

No I was to scared to tell them 😁 We ran back to our friends and told them though!

IWanderedLonely · 11/07/2024 21:25

RickyGervaislovesdogs · 06/07/2024 18:51

@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 live near Eyam and I remember being told that the first symptom of the plague was noticing a very sweet smell.

Tellmeyourwoostories · 11/07/2024 22:02

I remembered another story on Uncanny about the actress Daisy May Cooper and her DS being in bed then seeing a child's legs appear running around the room by them 😳 I swear she said her house wasn't even that old either

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MumDoingMyBest · 11/07/2024 22:25

@Minimili and @RickyGervaislovesdogs you might have the same talent Joy Milne has. She smelled her husband's Parkinson's disease 10 years before he had visible symptoms, although didn't realise that's what she could smell until they later went to a support group for Parkinson's and everyone with the disease had that scent.

MistressoftheDarkSide · 12/07/2024 19:28

My main "haunting" occurred in a flat I lived in with my now ExH and my son who was aged between say 4 and 15. By bizarre happenstance too convoluted to go into we lived there twice, with a gap of maybe three years in between after a brief sojourn "oop North".

This flat was over a shop in a Victorian shopping arcade and was over two floors with the two bedrooms and a bathroom big enough to have been a bedroom in spacious attic style . When we first moved in we were somewhat disconcerted that the bathroom had a bolt on the outside of the door, bit never found out why.

That flat was so haunted we all had weird experiences, together and independently, and visitors often commented on feeling uneasy.

One night, during our first tenancy, DH and I were awoken in the wee small hours by a commotion in the loft space above us. We had sloping ceilings hence my reference to "attic" space but above that was the pointy roof with space underneath if you understand what I mean.

It sounded like furniture being dragged, footsteps, just an awful lot of noise. Now our bedroom was at the back, overlooking the alley three floors down behind the shops. My DS was next door at the front and his window looked out onto the curved glass roof of the Arcade. There was a small gulley that would have provided escape in a fire but at some risk lol.

His room was accessed down a very short narrow passage, and the trap door to the loft was in the ceiling directly outside his room. He would have been 3 or 4 at the time.

Now, the Arcade was down the middle of a big sort of oval arrangement of shops with flats above and is the sort of island in a gentrified shopping area. Difficult to explain but anyhoo. As a child I'd lived in a flat on the outside of the oval very similar in layout, and I knew that the lofts were all interconnected by gaps either side if the chimney breasts in the loft.

Therefore, I assumed it was the same in the Arcade, so it sounded as though someone had made their way along from another flat and was in our loft. I absolutely panicked, shot into my sons room and grabbed him out of bed because if someone was going to come down through the loft hatch they would be between him and us.

Meanwhile my burly biker DH rang 999 and the police arrived in due course with a dog unit as there had been a fair bit of petty crime in the area.

Very nice policeman went up the lift ladder with his torch and baton. The sounds had subsided by then but he did hear a bit so understood our concern and agreed with our logic.

The lift, predictably was empty and now silent. He looked at the area where I thought people might be able to come through and reported that unlike the other flats I described, there was no way of getting through, and likely never had been judging by the age of the brickwork at both ends of the loft.

After a bit of awkward discussion he surmised rats or squirrels but as this had only happened once in a few years of living there, we had doubts. Anyway, better safe than sorry....

Fast forward to when we finally moved out after our second tenancy. The flat was upgraded and rented out to young professionals. In between, the landlady's brother and teenage daughter, who I knew had lived there and reported some oddness. I was then told that on the first night one of the new young girls had taken up residence in our old back bedroom, she'd been woken by so much noise in the loft - bangs, crashes and dragging noises - that she bailed out that night, never went back, and sent for her belongings the next day.

There's more. Quite alot more. I'll add things as I remember them.....

Tellmeyourwoostories · 12/07/2024 19:59

@MistressoftheDarkSide Oh god that's crazy, I bet you were worried for your son but in a way relieved too when there was nobody there but also freaked out lol. I'd love to hear your other stories!

OP posts:
Cakencookieobsessed · 12/07/2024 20:21

All last week I kept getting the feeling that I should walk through the local cemetery, but I kept putting it off. Then I finally decided to walk the dog through there. I went to visit my aunt's grave, then looked opposite her grave to a new, recent grave that had a large photo on it of a guy I used to know on it. I didn't even know this guy was dead, but he died recently apparently. I just found it strange that I had kept getting the urge to go there and that I found his grave so easily, despite the cemetery being so vast.

VeryQuaintIrene · 12/07/2024 20:38

I used to call my mum an old bat (in fun) and she'd call me young bat. When she died of covid, I cried every day, thinking about all the times I could have been more patient with her (she could be very difficult, but I loved her). A few weeks after her death, we were sitting in my house with the back and front doors open for the through draft, and a bat flew in through the back, round the sitting room and out of the front door. And I knew then that everything with her was fine.

RubyBirdy · 12/07/2024 20:46

When I was in my early 20s I lived in a house share with a girl who had epilepsy. One morning I jolted awake and woke up my then bf in a panic, saying my housemate had had a seizure and we needed to find her. He had to break down her bedroom door as there was no answer from her and she had had a serious seizure. I’ve had things like this happen to me quite a few times.

SoLongandGoodnight · 12/07/2024 20:59

I’m loving these stories! When I was 15, I had a boyfriend that I was absolutely mad about. We only saw each other for a few months and I was devastated when he broke up with me. He went to England not long after and our paths never crossed again even though he came back home a few years later. Fast forward about 30 years and I randomly dreamt about him. He was trying to talk to me in a bar but I was ignoring him. I woke up thinking isn’t that strange after all these years and went about my day. I was driving into town and passed the graveyard on the outskirts. I remembered the dream and thought wouldn’t it be so strange if P was dead and buried in there, at the same time telling myself not to be stupid. When I got home I googled him and his obituary came up, he’d been dead a few years and was buried in the graveyard I had driven past earlier. I nearly shit myself, I had no reason to believe he could be gone in his 40s. I wasn’t the better of it for a long time.

WaffleDogg20 · 12/07/2024 21:26

I was 19 when my mum died of cancer and I remember being laid in bed on the day she died unable to sleep and crying. I heard her voice as clear as day say my name and that she’s ok.

Tellmeyourwoostories · 12/07/2024 21:45

Wow these coincidences are goosebump inducing. I do believe in signs and synchronicity personally (I'm quite a spiritual person). When I have dreams though I've never yet had a premonition in dream form, usually my dreams the opposite happens 😂

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