To ask what is the strangest/creepiest thing that has ever happened to you?

[JudgeyHotPants]

I have two strange/creepy unexplained events that stick in my head.

The first happened when I was teenager, my DF ran his business from our family home and we had a phone/fax machine in the living room. Whenever we picked up the phone we could always hear a radio station playing very distantly on the other end. I'll never forget the time I picked up the phone to ring a friend and could hear Penny Lane playing!

The other is slightly more sinister. My DM and I were at home alone one evening, it was summer and still warm and I had the bedroom window open. I can remember hearing a loud crash in the garden, thought maybe the cat had knocked something over and thought little of it. Then my mum suddenly popped her head around the door told me that she was going to bed and that she'd "locked all of the doors". Thought it was an odd thing to say, but thought little of it. That night I was kept awake by the next door neighbours security light going on and off, and when I got up the next morning my DM pointed out that the garden ornaments and solar lights from next to the fence had been smashed.

That's when she told me that she to and heard the crashing sound the night before, and got up to investigate and when she looked through the kitchen window she was convinced she could see a person peering through the window, as as if they were standing next to it with their back against the wall and peeing in from the side, but wasn't sure if she was seeing things or not! She was scared enough to lock all of the doors, but not to ring he police it seems! Still freaks me out now! I'm sure someone was in our garden for whatever reason!

2 things, one is so scary that many people who I tell it too get terrified, so perhaps I wont post that one.

But this one is OK;
I used to go jogging a lot early morning. I went to stay with friend near south coast for a long weekend (never been before). In the early hours of the Sunday morning, I dreamt I was out jogging in the local Ashdown Forest, along a wide sandy track by gorse bushes and in front of me was a snake, half on and half off a patch of grass and the sand track, just still looking at me.
I woke up at about 6.30am, let myself out and tried to find my way jogging around the forest in a circular route. Near the end I cleared the forest and came out into a wide sandy and grassy track.....a bit further on the path narrowed into both grass and sand....and there in front of me was an Adder in exactly the same position as in my dream, half on and half off the grass, perfectly still looking at me.

I thought it was very, very weird then after some time later I realised that I must have had 10,000 dreams in my life and it would be odd if something didn't happen the next day along the lines of a dream.

Loving this thread.
Oh go on HouseOfSand, I love a good scare

Please HouseOfSand. Is it scarier than the story on another woo thread about the werewolf spotted when out dogwalking late at night?

Weird rather than creepy...

I went to the cinema with my friend, and someone (a boy?) in the row behind us spent most of the film stroking and tickling my neck. I never saw his face.

Did you never think to turn around and tell him to sod off??

I posted early on in this thread but i've been reading it tonight (just got off night shift!) and thought I may as well post my weirdest experience.

For the sake of clarity, I don't believe in god, I am a complete atheist. I can't explain what I saw and I don't try to.

My brother died in 2000. He wasn't ill but he had a chaotic lifestyle and we were all worried. I went to bed that night and all was fine. I remember waking up at around 2 am and feeling weird. I couldn't get back to sleep. and I felt on edge. I got up and went to the toilet. We lived in a very old terraced house then and the bathroom was down two steps off the landing. You could sit on the loo and see straight down the stairs into the hallway. I was sitting on the loo and I saw, as clear as day, my brother stood in the hall, and then as quick as the blink of an eye, he was stood halfway up the stairs. I don't remember being scared I just remember thinking, that's not really him, he's died. I can't recall what I did or thought afterwards, i'd be making it up if I said what happened next, I just know I went back to bed and was woken up an hour later by a 'phonecall from my Dad saying my brother had died. Maybe I had been worried about him/thinking about him. Who knows.

I'm too much of a big jessie to read this thread in the middle of the night, but if you like this kind of thing you would like the 'It Happened To Me!' series of books that Fortean Times publishes. Amazon do them.

I have a small grandfather clock, purchased at auction, which has never worked since I bought it, so ornamental only.

Shortly after my father died, it started chiming off and on for several hours, which it has never done before or since. On three subsequent occasions, a few years part, when significant things were happening in my life, the hands on the clock moved forward by 20 minutes and then about 15 minutes, then about 7 minutes. The clock hands had to move up ie clockwise for the second two changes, so it wasn't as though they could have dropped backwards. I am convinced it was my Dad trying to contact me to comfort me in my hour of need.

dodged, that would be pretty amazing even Spikey had been alive!

The time ones are reminding me of something strange that happened when I was in school. I lived on the east coast of the US at the time, and there was a hurricane headed in our general direction. We listened to the radio in the morning to see if school was cancelled, but there was nothing. So I got the bus to school.

About halfway through the morning it started looking really odd outside, and eventually the sky settled into this bizzare dark purple. For some reason, I was looking at the clock (probably wondering how much longer I had in that room...). The second hand on the clock suddenly jerked back and forth instead of moving forward. Then it started spinning backwards, really fast. The whole clock spun backwards, hours and minutes. The class went silent as other people noticed, and eventually the class and the teacher was just watching the backwards-spinning clock.

It spun back 5-6 hours, then started going forward again. A few seconds later (before the teacher had time to comment on the experience), an announcement came over that school was cancelled and the buses were lining up to take us home. The hurricane hit that afternoon -- it wasn't particularly bad or anything. I have no idea what the clock thing was. It just struck in my mind as a very weird morning, with the purple light and the backwards-spinnig clock.

16 year old DS had just completed GCSE's but was fearful he hadn't done well and was resigned to possibly re sitting. I found him in his bedroom clearing out all his old work and, following a discussion, he agreed to store it all in the garage in case he needed it. The following day I was in the garage when he came in with bags of his work in black bags. The garage had no electricity and was in darkness. He stood very still and quietly said 'I can't explain it Mum but I just know I'm never going to walk back into school again' Admit to being a bit peeved and wondered if this was a ruse to dump his stuff but mostly had an unsettled odd feeling, particularly at his seriousness and quietness ( very unusual for him, a loud, happy lad with a roaring laugh and with his life mapped out with A levels and Uni)
Around a week later he was killed when hit by a car
He'd achieved ten GCSE's

Flighty woman, someone tickling your neck in cinema is weird and creepy.

Been watching/reading for ages and I've one strange one to share, from
about 8 years or so ago.

I worked in London and had a commute of around 45 minutes. One evening I got a later train home than usual. It wasn't my normal fast train, but one that was all stops.

I got a seat in the middle of the train, but it was what had been a front carriage, with a locked driver compartment, so you couldn't go forward into the one in front of us. The doors behind me, leading to the carriage behind were a bit 'sticky' , and had to be slammed shut, so I decided not to sit by them, and instead opted for the middle of the carriage, close to the doors.

I was reading my book, paying a little attention to the presence of people around me, mainly because it was getting late, and I was wary of being in the carriage on my own. As the train stopped, station, by station, the passenger numbers in my carriage dwindled.

As we approached the stop before mine (mine being the terminus), a man got up from the seats to the rear of the carriage, walked past me, and stood by the doors. I glanced up (not noticing particular detail of him) as we pulled away and saw he was still there. I assumed he'd been mistaken about which station we were at.

I returned to reading my book, and, as we got to my station, was stuffing the book into my bag as I got off the train. As I stepped onto the platform, I realised there was nobody else in my carriage. No sign of the man whatsoever.

If he'd gone past me to get further down the train I'd have heard the door. He couldn't go forward. I scanned the platform, but no sign of him. Very strange.

I have a few odd occurrences that have stuck with me over the years, all of which happened when I was in my teens. Nothing since, which is good since I'm a massive scaredy cat!

When I was about thirteen, it was the summer holidays, and Mum had gone to work leaving me strict instructions to clean my bedroom. So I was up in my room, sorting through things, when I started to hear a weird noise. The only way I can describe it was sounding like a huge crowd of people talking, but from a distance. The noise went louder and quieter, louder and quieter over and over, almost like the volume being turned up then down. I didn't have TV or radio on, and checked that my walkman in the drawer was turned off. This went on for a few minutes - it scared me, so I went downstairs until Mum came home (she didn't believe me, thought I was just trying to get out of tidying the room!). The noise couldn't have come from outside, but we DID live in a terraced house - so it could have come from next door, however they were usually out during the day, and I can't imagine what would make that noise.

In my late teens I was lying reading on my bed (same bedroom) when the curtain billowed out about 50cm into the room, like something had brushed past it. I shouted at the cat, who wasn't meant to be in my room. Mum shouted back upstairs that the cat was on her lap... The window wasn't open, it was a calm summers day and there was no draught that would have pushed it that far!

Another really odd one that has stuck with me was when I slept over at a friend's house, was probably about fourteen. The house had an odd layout - it was on a slope, so the kitchen was in the cellar (and had a back door), her bedroom and the living room were on the floor above (by the front door) and the other bedrooms and bathroom were upstairs. It must have been about 1am and we were up chatting quietly and being silly when we started to hear a jangling noise in the kitchen downstairs like the cutlery rattling. This went on for about one minute, and we were getting quite freaked out, then we heard this really loud scraping sound. I remember we were sharing a double bed, she sat bolt upright and I hid under the covers! We were seriously freaked out the next day when we were getting an ice cream out of the freezer and I bumped into an old storage bin (I think for coal?) and the heavy lid made the exact same grating noise. We just looked at each other, wide eyed, as it was the exact same noise. The whole incident really freaked us out - the cats were locked out on an evening (no cat flap) and it was a creaky old Victorian house, there was no way her parents or brother could have gotten down the staircase and into the kitchen without us hearing it... Never have been able to explain that one away! She heard/saw quite a lot of odd things in that house, it had a really weird feel to it.

Finally not long after, the same friend and I were walking home from a church in town (a friend of ours had been in a play I think) and we decided to creep ourselves out by walking through the churchyard back up to mine, it was only twilight though, I doubt we would have done it at night! However we both froze in our tracks at the gates as there was an enormous white outline of a figure glowing by the church door about ten meters away - it was transparent as you could see the hinges of the door through it. My friend said something along the lines of "you see that too, right?" We both stood there for about thirty seconds, then my friend shouted "run" and we legged it all the way back to mine!! She thought she'd seen it start to move. We went back the next day to see if it had maybe been a prank, or if anything was there, but we couldn't see anything. We also realised there were no lights anywhere near, so it seemed to have been glowing on its own.

I realise the last one sounds a bit cliched, but I absolutely swear on my life, the wine in my fridge, my lovely cat etc, they are all absolutely true. I'm also quite grateful that I seem to be quite 'switched off' to these things nowadays, as any old bump in the night freaks me out nowadays and I send OH to investigate!!

for notarehearsal I hope you and your ds have found peace. Well done on his GCSE results too x

one evening during WWII my nana was due to go to her best friends house. Her dad asked her not to go and when she asked him why, he responded with 'not tonight please, just stay here.' so she didn't go

later than night her best friends house got a direct hit, killing the whole family

That's sad Notarehearsal How long ago was it?

Ooh I'm completely non-woo but I'm reminded of something that happened when I was about 7.

My dad used to ride an old moped to work, out in the country. One day he had a minor accident down a country lane and ended up falling off the moped. He was uninjured other than a few bruises and the moped was fine but during the course of the accident the keys fell out of the ignition and he couldn't find them anywhere in the dark, so he had to walk a couple of miles to a phone box and phone my mum to come and get him in the car.

He left the moped by the side of the road, the plan being to go back in daylight and hunt for the keys.

So we duly went back the next day and started combing the grass verge.
I came across a largeish stone/rock that was well wedged into the long grass on the verge and it really shouldn't have been worth lifting it to see what was underneath. But I just KNEW it was worth a look. I lifted it up, and among the worms and beetles that scurried out from the hole were Dads keys.

Notarehearsal, I'm so so sorry for your awful loss.

Nearas truly weird.

Valancy the last house I lived in was about three quarters of a mile from a goose farm, and they sound exactly like a crowd of people all talking at once (like at a busy party, where you can make out the general hum of voices but have to concentrate to hear the conversation you're part of). Could have been that, maybe?

Not a rehearsal so sorry for your loss.

ToffeeCaramel almost eight years ago now, love and memories don't die thankfully

notarehearsal so sorry.

blackout234 that reminds me of a similar incident I experienced when dh and I were staying at my grandmas big old country house in cornwall.
Middle of the night ..dh is fast asleep and I get woken up by a heavy crushing feeling, i couldn't move or scream ...you could say it's a dream but I know I was awake , in my head I screamed "get off" and felt a massive weight leave me , as I sat up in shock with heart racing I saw a dark large seal like shape sliding over the bed, across dh and onto the floor ...I remember being so petrified I just sat in shock unable to do anything for ages.. Told dh in morning he of course said how horrible it sounded but told me I was dreaming .. But I know I wasn't.

This thread is great. Some really scary stories and near misses.

I've posted mine before but here goes.

My mum loves Scotland and we went a lot as children.

Once we were driving through Glen Coe after dark heading back to the holiday park. Both my brother and myself saw what we can only describe as a burning village. Our parents didn't see anything but we both saw exactly the same thing.

We didn't know about the massacres that took place until a few days later when we saw a monument about it.

Also in Scotland we visited Eilean Donan castle. As we walked over the bridge I had a strange feeling of being there before. Which got stronger as we walked round, I felt like I knew where I was going and at one point I felt hot and dizzy. I saw myself in an old dress and everything looked different. My parents thought I was ill, maybe I was but I was fine after about 30 seconds.

I've been there 3 times now and each time I get this strange sensation. I've never felt it anywhere else. I also have this sense of calm and belonging there.

I can not explain it at all.

notarehearsal so very very sorry, for your lad and for you. Heartbreaking

I'll post my non-woo but what if experience later. Atm my thoughts are with notarehearsals son.

for notarehearsal. "Love and memories don't die".