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!

bettersaul if you receive a ring from your husband for Christmas, then I can garauntee it was him that took it for the measurement.

In my final year at uni I lived with 4 friends. Throughout the year 4 of us were woken by three loud knocks on our bedroom door. It happened to each of us at the exact same time of night. My bedroom was downstairs in what would have been the dining room. When I heard it I initially thought it was one of my housemates trying to wind me up but both the stairs and the hallway outside my room were very creaky and it was nearly impossible to walk down the stairs or past my room without making any noise at all. Unfortunately I was too spooked to look!

The one housemate who didn't hear a knocking on her door had a bedroom at the front of the house where the old master bedroom had been divided into two and a new doorway put in. So hers was the only bedroom doorway that wasn't original to the house.

The elderly man who owned the house before it was a student let had apparently lived there his entire life and died in the house. We're convinced he was still around and was responsible for the knocking. We used to talk to him! We'd hear a pipe creak or something and we'd say "hello Mr. G..., how are you today?!"

I've often seen barn owls on the road. Usually eating roadkill. Don't remember anything spooky happening afterwards but will keep a watch out in future.

This one wasn't eating anything - just there and stared right into my eyes. Shat me right up. Driven/been driven along there since the 1960s - never before or again seen one there, again!

DH and I eloped to a foreign city to marry. A couple of close friends lived in said city. We stayed at their place and walked to the wedding venue. It was lovely, all very low key, which was exactly what we wanted. They took a few photos on the walk there. We were well dressed but not wedding-y.

An old man randomly stopped me, inquired about where we were going and chatted on the pavement. It seemed important to him. He seemed wonderfully happy that we were getting married. He was ever such a lovely man. For some reason chatting to him gave me a lovely warm glow. So much so that I took a close up photo of his face (with his permission).

Weeks later, hoo hah over elopement has died down, we show the wedding photos to my family. DF is flicking through the album. All is well. Suddenly DF goes white as a sheet holds up page with photo of man and exclaims "Why is there a photo of this man?!" I look confused and explain as per above then I say "What's wrong Dad?" DF says "That man is the absolute double of your uncle Bob."

Uncle Bob not real name is DF's much older brother, who was super lovely and who died when I was pre-teen.

We are all non-woo. Still freaky though. Non-woo DH says thank God only the nice members of your family haunt us from beyond the grave.

these are all beautiful signs that the universe and the afterlife love us. I just think they havn't deciphered so many ways to get through without scaring us, yet! {fwink}

Oh, I had totally forgotten about Marie!

My first student flat was an old house with a backyard, and access to the cellar and outbuildings were from the back yard. It was built in 1800 something, and formed part of the main street of my old town. The dwellings were set in a triangle, back-windows facing in to the back yard, front windows out to the streets and the city, and a central gateway from the main street to get a horse and carriage through. The house was three stories, not counting the cellars.

Marie caused a racket. She threw pots out of the kitchen cupboards, she stomped up and down the stairs at night. If we were out, we could sometimes see her looking out through the windows at us.

We were curious about her, and were able to find out who she was after I decided to explore the cellars. I found a painting of her, saying "Marie 1875". We checked the census in our local library, and found that the only young person living there was a young maid from the countryside. Her name was Marie, born in 1860.

Somebody must have fallen in love with this young maid, enough to paint her portrait!

i was leaving work once and about and hour before i'd left the police and fire engine had belted off down the High Street

as I started driving down the country roads I had a flash that I'd have to divert because of a red van stuck under a bridge, on a nasty bend.

when i got to the bridge there was a red van being hoisted onto a tow truck and a single police car just sat there.

they'd had to cut the driver out, hence the fire tender as well.

My great gf died when I was 12 leaving my great dg heartbroken. Five years later she died in her bedroom with my dad next to her. Right before she passed away she looked up, smiled and then said my great gf's name. It might have just been random things firing in her brain but it's brought us great comfort to know that in her mind she wasn't alone.
My dad and older dsis lived in the house with great gm and when she died my sis moved from the tiny back room into my great gm's old room. She was always being disturbed by the wardrobe door opening and the sound of footsteps. Freaked her out at first but eventually she'd just say hello nanna.

I have a few to share.

When DH, then DP, and I were younger and had just bought our first car, we were driving to the supermarket and listening to a tape (old car and no CD player). We were listening to Johnny Cash's Ring Of Fire. Once we got to the supermarket and DH had parked up and turned the engine off the tape obviously stopped, but the radio came on confused as to how as the engine was not on. The radio played Johnny Cash's Ring Of Fire from the exact point the tape had stopped playing!
DH and I just looked at each other, I asked if that had just happened with a face like this we both agreed that it had happened. DH is the least woo person I know. I like to think I'm not woo but shit my pants at anything that could possibly be woo related

DD1, now 7 years old, is quite sensitive to things. There is a certain entrance/exit in out local shopping centre that she point blank refuses to use. When she was younger she would completely freak out, crying, shaking, begging us not to use this particular entrance/exit.
It is actually built on the site of an old monastery, a well know local fact. Although a young 2 year old (when she first freaked out over this entrance/exit) wouldn't have known that fact or understood it.

Another happened this year and still brings tears to my eyes now, it is so very sad.
I had a dream in early January of this year, I dreamt about a date, March 13th of this year. I knew that something really bad was going to happen on that date to someone I knew. The dream didn't give me any more details of who, where, what or why. I just KNEW that something bad was going to happen to someone I knew on this date.
I never told anyone other than DH about this dream, and as I dream VERY vividly practically every night DH just took it with a pinch of salt.
Our very good friend died on March 13th, this year of a heart attack. He left 2 very young children and his wife
Even now I remember DH's stricken, white face as his wife called to tell us. He looked at me and said I hope you never have a dream like that again.

Place marking!

This isn't my story, but it happened to someone I used to work with - so heard it from the horse's mouth so to speak.

She lived (and still does I think) in a Victorian terrace with her husband and teenaged kids. She said that as long as they'd lived there, every now and then they would wake up to hear "Yankee Doodle" playing right outside their bedroom door in a tinny way - like a kid's music box or similar. Their room was on the first floor. Both she and her husband would hear it, but as soon as one of them moved to get up and look the music would stop. It carried on for years but they never mentioned it to the kids so as not to worry them.

Then my colleague and her husband went on holiday, leaving the youngest son at home alone for the first time, he was about 17 and had hisGF stay over with him - his room was on the second floor, in the attic. When she got back from holiday her son said mum, the weirdest thing happened while you were away, we woke up one night to hear Yankee Doodle playing right outside the bedroom door, but when we got up to look, it stopped...he'd never heard it before, or apparently since, freaky!

Some brilliant stories on here, so glad I started this thread now.

This isn't my story, it's my DM's but I don't think she'll mind me sharing it. When she was young child in the early 60's she became very,very ill with measles. The doctor told my Grandparents that she needed to be kept near and open fire to keep her warm, not sure why TBH, but there you go. So they got a camp bed for my mum to sleep on and put it not front of the fire, and my granddad slept on the sofa on the other side of the room to keep an eye on her.

One night when she was really, really bad, and her temperature was at it's highest, she was lying in bed delirious and and her arm fell off the side off the bed onto the floor. Now this could have been due to her having a high fenevee, but she felt someone reach from under her camp bed and grab hold of her hand. Everyone else was in bed, and her Dad was sound asleep on the other side if the room. When she got up the next morning her fever had broken and she felt much better.

That reminded me of one of my husband's stories.

In the 1960s, he was a boy scout and went away to a camp somewhere or other only a short while after his much-loved grandma died.

He couldn't swim. At all. One day they went on a walk and part of it along a canal tow path. He was daydreaming (is dyspraxic so falls over a lot and goes off into a world of his own) and somehow got detached from the others. Not looking where he was going he suddenly found himself in the water and although next to the edge was out of his depth.

He was panicking but just as he went under, he felt - quite definitely - a hand close round his wrist and drag him out on the tow path. There was no-one there and nowhere they could have hid or disappeared out of view, to.

DH's grandma told us one a few weeks ago that she says happened when she was first married - 1950 ish.

They had just moved into an old two up two down in Leeds. She said she and her DH worked shifts at local factories. One night she did a late shift and got home just before midnight. House was in darkness and she went straight up to bed. She got in and cuddled up to DH. He was lying on his side with his back to her asleep and she said he was freezing, but the house was always freezing upstairs.

About half 6 she woke up when she felt him get into bed and thought he must have got up for a pee. She said something to him to that effect- don't know exact words- and he said somehing like 'no, I've just come in. They knocked and said they needed an extra for the night shift. I left you a note on the table.'

He had. She hadn't seen it because she had gone straight to bed. She said they never had anything else odd happen in the house after that but she was terrified for months.

My mum used to on holiday with her childhood friend in the 1960's to Austria every year. They stayed in the same hotel every year. As time passed, her friend moved down South 200 miles away. Her friend is a major fan of car boot sales and went to one where she lives. She came across someone selling old postcards and noticed a black and white one with a picture of the hotel where they stayed. She picked it up and turned it over and it was the one she had sent to a family member during one of the holidays in the 1960s'

I found that so creepy and coincidental.

Copied from what I posted on another spooky thread, but I have some VERY wo family members who claim to have seen, heard or conversed with ghosts. My uncle used to run tea plantations in Sri Lanka and my aunt claimed that a lot of the big plantation houses built by the British were haunted. My grandmother says she used to hear the noise of chains being dragged along the grounds and then of gushing water at one house. Apparently a hundred years earlier the cruel owner of the house had been murdered by his manservant, who then used chains to drag his body away and dispose of it before washing to blood off his hands at a water pump. Then there's the story of my grandmother, the ghostly priest and the hidden confession but I doubt I'll be believed if I told it!!

The thing about the £1 coins reminds me of this which happened a few years ago.

I was sat at the dining room table MNing on the laptop. The wall was only about 15cm behind me. No shelves or bookcase, etc. noone else in room.

About half an hour earlier I'd had a shower, washed my hair and put my PJs on.

As I was sat there I felt something hit my back about halfway down, but under my PJ top, and roll down my back. It was a £1 coin. A minute later another one and then a third a few minutes later.

I started a live thread about it as it was happening.

LondonRach - if you ar still on this thread, it wasn't the old halls on Avenue Campus was it???

I lost a favourite book year ago, when I was in my teens. A few decades later I found a copy on eBay, bought it, and when it arrived unopened it to find my name written in the fly leaf. I'd bought my old book, somehow it had ended up in a second hand bookshop in Gloucester.

Cariad Please tell the story!

There's an old house in the centre of Norwich where a family was shut in because of plague. Afterwards they un-barred the door and found the corpses, but one of them was 'fresher' than the others. It was the daughter, who hadn't caught the plague, and she'd eaten parts of her dead father's leg from hunger. (I reckon though it was probably rats that ate it!)
Her ghost haunts the house and her face has appeared at the upstairs window .(it's on the 'Norwich Ghost Walk' tour) and if you go down in the basement of the shop next door there's a terrible atmosphere of fear. The other side of this shop is the 'Samson and Hercules', built on top of a plague pit with 3000 corpses. I can definitely feel the 'presence' of bad things in there, so I dared my dh to go in the shop. As he's African and has a great fear of evil spirits, I hoped he'd feel something, but he scoffed and said I was bonkers. He didn't sense anything!
Another shop in Norwich has a stock basement and there have been sightings of a group of Roman soldiers marching along, but only their top halves. Apparently, the level of the Roman streets is much lower, which would explain why their bottom halves are below the ground! Daft really....

Juan, this is another story courtesy of my woo grandmother and took place at another one of my aunt's plantation homes. She was staying there once and would notice in the evenings that she'd see a man in a cassock pacing the end of the verandah. My aunt told her it was the resident ghost, a priest who had lived there and died, quite suddenly, in his sleep, several years previously. But as he seemed harmless they just chose to live with him. So one day my gran decided to speak to him. He told her that he could not rest in peace because shortly before he died he'd heard a terrible confession in the confessional and written it out. He'd hadn't know whether to alert the authorities or keep it secret, as per his vows, so had hidden it in a book in the library. However he had died before he came to his decision and was restless as he was afraid that the confession would be found and wanted it to be destroyed. To cut a long story short, he told my grandmother which book it was in and believe it or not, she opened the book and there was a yellowing envelope. Now it would be an even better story if I said she opened the envelope and was shocked by the scandalous details of the confession contained within, but she's a religious woman and always listened to what a priest (be he alive or otherwise) said so she burned it. And the priest never haunted my aunt's house again!

This didn't happen to me but was a horror story told me by my Irish aunt. I was only six and it scared the pants off me, but I always asked her to tell it again and again.
In Victorian times a young woman was crossing the graveyard at night by a path, when a man with an absolutely enormous head started following her. He got closer and she broke into a run. He too began running and she could her his rasping breathing getting closer and closer (cue Aunt gasp gasp etc) She fled out of the cemetery gate and luckily a horse-drawn carriage was coming along. She flagged it down in desperation and it stopped so she could clamber inside. She gabbled that a man with an enormous head had been following her. Just then, the moon came out from behind a cloud and a voice from the occupant of the carriage said, "Juuuuust like miiiiine?"
"Tell it again Auntie!"

I love all these! Thanks Cariad I have a distinctly non-woo 'woo story' told to me by a priest. He is a monk and lives in a monastery in a graveyard. One night he disturbed some teenagers who were hanging about in the grounds (trying to have a scary night or do I don't know what)! Anyway, when they saw him they were scared and asked if he was a ghost. He replied 'Well part of me is' (meaning his soul, obviously), they screamed and ran off!!