When my son was around three or four, we were driving somewhere and I took a wrong turn and ended up in an unfamiliar neighborhood. It took me a few minutes and a few more turns to get oriented and headed back toward the main drag.
Son, strapped in his car seat in the back seat, kept looking around with great interest. “Mom!” he told me with a big grin, “I used to live here!” I glanced back at him distractedly. “No, no, son - we’ve never lived around here - I’m not even sure where we are!”
But he was adamant. He insisted, “Yes, I used to live here - a long, long time ago, when I was big…”
That sort of made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up a little bit…
:eek:
I went through a stage like that in college. I would hear a ring, tell people the phone’s ringing, then it would ring. I remember one very-stoned friend jumping up and saying “How do you DO that??? Stop it!”
I really think it’s a case where the circuit opens, the bell rings just a little bit, and then two seconds later would ring in full. I noticed I only heard the pre-ring on those old brick ATT phones that used to be ubiquitous.
It was back in college, and I was hanging out with a friend who lived at a co-op. The co-op had one shared phone line for everyone, so if it rang, chances were, it wasn’t for you, it was for one of the zillion other people who lived there.
We were sitting around, hanging out, and the phone rang. She ignored it. Without even thinking about what I was saying, I muttered, “Pick that up. It’s {her boyfriend at the time}.”
She rolled her eyes at me and picked up. Guess who it was?
It spooked her a bit, but it creeped me out more. I hadn’t consciously thought the words or anything - they just came out.
Man, I hadn’t thought of that moment in years.
Sorry I don’t have a kid post to add though. Keep 'em coming, though - y’all have some creepy little kids!
I’ve heard about kids saying things like, “When I was big, I used to…” and such, but I’ve never actually come across a first person anecdote until now. That is kind creepy, in a cool way.
I don’t believe in ghosts. I really don’t. But my youngest son was 3 when he told me about a long conversation he had with a “friend” who was “sort of see through”. He described his friend, and told me that the man had been “buried in a tree”. The creepy part was he was THREE, and described the costume and burial practices of the local Amerind tribe. I didn’t know that until I looked it up, as he was extremely insistent, and insisted that I was “hurting his friend’s feelings” by not believing him about being buried in the top of a tree.
Just today I was chatting with a friendly toddler in the checkout lane. He said
“If L*katt finds this thread, will never hear the end of it.”
Shakes I used to sleepwalk as a child. It was routine for me to wake up in a different room than the one I had gone to sleep in. AFAI can tell, I also once hid one of my sneakers in the bathtub whilst sleepwalking.
I was a creepy sleepwalking (and talking) kid regularly, and I never grew out of it. It still happens to me the majority of nights in any given week – and sometimes during the day if I nap.
My son was 3 and we were going to fly to see my sister in a different city. Every day starting a week before the trip I asked him “Where are we going on Thursday?” Every day he would answer “To Aunt Jane’s”.
Three days before the trip I asked him where we were going and he said “Heaven”.
Of course I kind of freaked out about that and thought I should cancel my trip but then what if in canceling my trip we did something else that sent us to heaven?
My sister and I decided that if I asked him the next day and he said we were going to her house we could forget about it. He did and everything turned out fine.
One day in the potter’s studio, with an extremely pacifist hippyish artist friend, her four-year-old son runs up with something he’d squished together out of clay:
Except for one problem. A boy in flodjunior’s class tried this, and when his phone rang, 27 other teenagers clapped their hands over their ears and told him to make it stop.
I remember when we would go to the TV and stereo section of the department store when I was a kid, there was a really obvious aural sensation. I didn’t even think of it so much as a noise, as a sort of high-pitched pressure on my eardrums, if that makes sense. I tried pointing it out to my mother but she had no idea what I was talking about.
I used to do that. Also, there were four years when I was a teenager during which Dad had this horrible Boss who’d call him home at times when Dad was at work (and the Boss knew it, they were regular work hours) and I always knew whether a mid-day call was him or someone else. Freaked Mom right out. I’d get up from the table, Mom would ask “where are you going?” “Boss is calling.” Ring, ring…
I also was extremely good at spying on the parental units. As a little kid, I was expected to be unseen and unheard, thus learning to move, play and open and close doors in complete silence. For some reason, my mother never figured out how I always knew so much about their going-ons (I do wish I’d known more about our financial state, that they did manage to keep hidden).
My partner and I play a lot of silly word games – like really long and involved strings of puns on a particular theme, back-and-forth rhymes, and like that; also, we’ll sometimes take up a nonsense phrase and wail with it at more or less random. That’s how come we took to saying “Harba-rarba-rooba-dooba-rarba-darba-DOO!” to each other at a moment’s notice, apropos of anything or nothing, about a year ago .
Of course, that isn’t the kind of thing grown men go around saying in public; like most of our word and sound japeries, the particular sequence of silly syllables I just typed out was used strictly entre nous for private giggles.
Then one afternoon while we were out on some kind of errand, we got in an elevator with several strangers including a guy and his little boy, who looked to be four or five. Dad and lad were having their own conversation, one that we weren’t paying any mind to, when all of a suden the kid said *“Harba-rarba-rooba-dooba-rarba-darba-DOO!” *, with exactly the same “metric foot” and speed of delivery we’d been saying it with, for the last week or so, in the privacy of our own crib!
We both suddenly got the same pole-axed expression on our faces; our stop came up right then and we got out of that elevator faster than was entirely decorous.
CRT monitors and tube TVs make a high pitch sound even when they’re muted, that only a small portion of people seem to be able to hear (I’m one of them, obviously). The LCD versions don’t seem to. So few games of “which monitor is squealing?” these days played by me and one or two other annoyed people while everyone else stares at us and claim that they can’t hear anything. I don’t miss it.
My dad still talks about how I used to make him uneasy when I was little: he said better than 75% of the time that he’d call me in from playing when I was a preschooler, I’d be waiting on the other side of the door, saying I knew it was time to come in. He claims it was at no fixed time of day and I’d even do it when he decided to take me shopping, so that’s what made it odder to him. I don’t remember what made me decide to come in, but I’m sure there were cues he overlooked, like seeing him though the window, or hearing him walk towards the back door. I seriously doubt I was psychic.
