This is a thread to post on about things that you see or that happen to you. Of course, these things should really have happened to you directly, ie, not something that you saw on TV or something.
Today while walking back to work from lunch I saw a troop of about 20 blind people walking towards the Metro (our subway system. They were beating around their seeing eye canes (I don’t know what they are really called) and just marching away. The leader of the pack of blind people was wearing hologram glasses with the holograms being eyes. Surreal.
Sounds like the movie, “The City of Lost Children.”
As a child on a family trip I once saw something surreal. It was night, we were driving along a freeway, when my parents pulled off at an offramp to check a map. On the side of the offramp was a big tree, barely illuminated by streetlights. Hanging from the tree were three people with ropes taut around their necks, their toes pointed at the ground.
Then they disappeared.
Being a fairly reasonable kid with plenty of experience being afraid at the dark, I assumed it was my imagination. But when my parents drove away I turned and looked out the back window and the spectral bodies were hanging again.
We drove on. I didn’t say anything about it to anyone.
I saw the disembodied head of a murder victim floating above the bed where she was killed (a friend’s family moved in the house) and she started talking to me.
That was pretty strange.
Then there was that wierd foot long ant that was in the downstairs of my house when I lived in Alaska.
When I was a small child I had an on/off imaginary friend named “Charlie”. He was a “big kid” and I didn’t see him too often & never seemed too upset when he wasn’t around. One day, I approached my mother upset that Charlie said he wasn’t coming over anymore. After an in depth discussion about why he wasn’t coming over and why I was so upset this time, we got into a description of Charlie.
It turns out I described my cousin Charlie, who wrapped his motorcycle around a pole on the day I was born, down to the sneakers he was wearing.? :eek:
When I was in College, I went to the movies with a group of friends who were all tripping on acid. Nobody told me they were all tripping, and I’ve never done acid, so I had no frame of reference. I had no idea what was going on. It felt like the world had gone insane and I was the last rational man. Or vice versa.
Driving through Houston’s Memorial Park (near downtown) one night, I saw a herd of pigs. They milled around in the median, and were still there when I turned around and made a second pass. Does that count?
Mr S. and I were driving down a county highway when we came upon a bizarre sight: a late-middle-aged woman riding a little motor scooter, weaving all over the road, trailing a kite up in the air behind her, laughing maniacally. She made eye contact with us and continued her cackling as we gingerly passed her. :eek:
When I was nine years old, I was at my grandmother’s, and I was running through the hose in my bathing suit when a bird crashed into my stomach and then flew off.
Standing backstage at the Watkins Glen Summer Jam concert, surrounded by security guards who are off-duty Buffalo policemen. On the otehr side of the fence 750,000 screaming rock’n’roll fans. (This is a long time ago, fans.) Through the backstage crowd, a guy comes loping along with the oddest gait, a long hopping kind of motion; he stops and grabs a tent fly pole for support. I realize that he is a) stark naked and b) that his left leg is missing form just above the knee. No crutches. Heck, he wasn’t wearing ANYTHING. The cops just stared at him. After a few minutes, he leaned forward and shortly was off again like some kind of bizarre kangaroo.
A while back, I had to change planes in San Francisco. I asked at the gate which way I had to go for the other plane, and was told it was a long way off to the right, straight ahead all the way, but there was plenty of time to make it.
I set out walking, on and on, and eventually got out my ticket to check the gate number. I started reading the ‘Terms and Conditions’ on the back, still walking, and when I looked up I was alone - nobody around, check-in counters bare, no terminals or scales, not even any signs. I thought I’d dropped into the Twilight Zone!
I kept walking and looking around, until finally an employee came out of a door and explained that the section we were in had started renovations quite a while ago but didn’t get the funding to finish.
When my oldest son was about 5, he learned to make those folded-paper snowflake things. One evening he came to me crying and clutching a crumpled paper that he’d folded and cut into shape. I asked him what was wrong, and he thrust this thing into my hands and said, “I made a snowf’ake and it SCARED me!”
Of course, I went into reassuring mom mode as I unfolded the paper, until I held it up and looked at it–and saw he was right! Somehow, he had managed to make, instead of a pretty snowflake, a monstrous face-shaped thing with fangs! It was the one of the weirdest shocks I’ve ever experienced when I first got a look at it. I should have saved it, but it freaked me out and I threw it away.
Once I was waiting in Newark Airport for my luggage; apparently the luggage conveyor belt had malfunctioned and they were repairing it. Then, with a few mild gurgling noises, the conveyor started up again and the first thing that popped out of the Mysterious Land Beyond The Conveyor was a human, dressed in a maintenance uniform, with a wrench in his hand. He got to the bottom, stood up, stepped off the belt and announced that it was all fixed. Then my suitcase showed up.
When I was a little kid, we were going to the ski area. There was a terrible blizzard going on outside. We shouldn’t have been on the road at all–visibility was almost nil. As we came from a side street to pull onto a two lane road, M-131, my dad asked if we saw any cars approaching. “Just that semi way down there.” My dad hit the gas and the van stalled. He tried to start it. No luck. He kept trying, finally it started. He pulled forward a little bit, stopped to check for cars again, and vroom! a train goes flying by just behind us. The van stalled on the train tracks and we didn’t know it. That “semi” was a train. Another twenty seconds and we would have been creamed. It was an event I never forgot.
Later, in college, a couple friends and I had been to a great halloween party. We had imbibed a few things. Walking home on the rail road tracks around 4 am, I became suddenly aware that I could see my shadow displayed prominently on the rail road tracks directly in front of me. Without delay I screamed, “TRAAIIN!!!” and jumped off the tracks with impressive haste. I turned around to see a building a ways behind us with one of those super-bright sodium lights on the side. Russ still laughs at me about that.