:dubious:
Nah, that was a fun one. The story I related later in that thread (phantom knocking at my front door*) was pretty seriously creepy, until I explicable-d it.
*Starlings cracking snail shells against the metal frame.
I don’t know if this counts…
My sister hasn’t always had the best taste in men. A former boyfriend of hers beat her and controlled her and generally scared the hell out of her for about a year…until he was caught breaking and entering and put in jail. For a couple of months. Completely bad news, and he had threatened that he would be back to beat the hell out of her when he got out.
This was not in the forefront of my mind that day. I was bopping around my parents’ house like I usually did, humming something and mindlessly carrying something to my car. My sister was upstairs on the computer.
In my old house there were three exits. The front door opened to a wide porch on the busy street, the back door opened to another wide porch in plain view of several of our neighbors (who loved to snoop and watched us closely), and then there was the side door. It was shaded and usually cold with weeds growing around it because it was in such a tiny spot it was hard to mow. You couldn’t even open the door completely because the garage was in the way. No one could see you standing there.
So there I was, bouncing around singing, going out to my car by the side door because it was closest to the garage. And then I touched the door handle and all the hairs on my neck rose at once. I suddenly knew with extreme certainty that my sister’s ex was standing in the alley waiting for that door to open. He had been the last person on my mind – hadn’t even registered on my teenaged self, not really – but suddenly I was frightened.
I locked the door and went to tell my sister not to leave the house for a while.
There are a few possibilities, of course. It could have been an overactive imagination. It’s possible, but I have also had that reaction in two other real situations where I know it wasn’t just my imagination.
Another possibility is that right before I laid my hand on the handle I saw his face out of the corner of my eye through the gap in the curtains, and it just didn’t register on my conscious mind but my subconscious said danger!
What I actually think is that I did see something suspicious, and my mind went to flight mode and superimposed that guy’s face on it, and it might have been dangerous but we’ll never know now.
Story One:
The day I learned it was not my time to die.
I went to the island of Crete ages ago with several friends. Only a couple of us stayed for a longer period of time, and one day I took a hike by myself off by the cliffs looking over the Mediterranean Sea.
I walked along the cliffs and stopped and looked down…it was way down to the sea - hundred of feet at least. I stood there for awhile, and then walked a little further and came to another ledge.
As I stood there, the very ledge where I had been standing a few minute before, just about 30 feet from where I was now standing, suddenly broke off and fell down into the sea! We are not talking a few rocks, this was the entire ledge where I had been standing! Probably 20 square feet of rock surface!
I backed slowly away from where I was standing and then backed away some more. If I had not left that other ledge, not a single person on earth would have seen me fall to my death off that cliff.
Story Two:
My godmother and her husband were newlyweds. They bought a small island in Lake of the Woods in Canada. She was out on the island, picking blueberries and lost her new wedding ring. She was not happy. Spent the entire honeymoon every day, looking for it. Never found it; not then, nor any time in all the years they went up there for vacations.
Fast forward 40 years later - she was up there on the island with her daughter, and granddaughter and one morning her granddaughter came into the cabin and said, “Grandma, look what I found while picking blueberries!”
Yes, it was the missing wedding ring.
I don’t normally talk about the Kennedys, but the week before JFK Jr’s plane crash I mentioned them to three separate people.
On Saturday, September 8, 2001 I had a conversationwhere I brought up Timothy McVeigh.
Ah, stiction. Sorry, man, but that is how you fix those things. I had a great ‘Be Healed-ah!’ routine.
I love this!
New Story.
Back in high school, some Studly Do-right that was popular for reasons I could never completely comprehend, decided from his front of the room seat, to throw his pencil at the bulletin board just before him. ( The Teacher was not facing our direction.) Studly launches the pencil, it hit rubber/eraser end on the board and bounced perfectly back into the hand he just launched it from. Those of us who saw it roared in laughter.
I can’t recall crap from any thing I actually learned in school, but that I remember.
August 2, 1998. I awoke from my sleep with Lambchop the puppet on my mind. I never really cared for the puppet or the show growing up, but thought nothing of it. About an hour later, I heard on the news that Shari Lewis, Lambchop’s creator, had passed. It was an creepy feeling. Have had that happen a couple of more times over the last few years, but none as significant. One other that does come to mind, however, is that one day I was driving to work and thought that a particular intersection was dangerous, and that I would probably have a wreck there some day. About six months later, I did.
-
About five years after I moved from Nebraska to London, a former work colleague and her husband came to London on vacation, unbeknownst to me. As they walked down Victoria Street she said to her husband, “I know [my real name] lives in London somewhere…” at which point I walk out of an office building and run right into them.
-
I used to live in graduate student accommodations, and was responsible for looking after the house cat that prowled the lobbies and quads. Said cat was telepathic.
I say this because she had a habit of putting messages into your head. I can’t think of a way to describe it in an appropriate fashion except to mention that I’m neither a superstitious person nor someone who treats cats like little people but trust me - this was weird. If she wanted a window open to go out into the quad and someone had shut it, I would have a sudden urge to open the window and there she’d be, looking at me. That sort of thing.
A year after I moved out I happened to be back and was talking to the guy who was the current cat caretaker. At one point he broke off and asked hesitantly, “Have you noticed anything…odd…about that cat?” “Oh yes,” I replied, “oh yes indeed”. And he said. “I mean, she just looks at you…and you just KNOW…”
She died a year after that, aged 14. I still miss her.
I’ve had a variety of odd coincidences happen in my life, but the only physically inexplicable thing I can think of happened a few months ago.
Our back door is a sliding glass door. It has a latch, but because the door is misaligned in its frame, latching it requires a major physical effort… basically, you have to heave the door up bodily, pull it towards you, and turn a knob to flip the latch. Even using all my strength, it usually takes me several tries.
One day I was home alone, went out to do some yard work, and when I went to go back inside… the door was latched.
Needless to say, there was no one in the house. Also, we have a dog who is very territorial and barks like crazy when someone so much as walks past on the sidewalk. She was completely calm when I got back inside.
I still have no idea how it happened.
I used to own/run an under 21 club in Tennessee. It didn’t open on week-days until after 6PM, so around 3PM I was doing the mopping, cleaning so forth. I had a killer dj booth and would play CDs while I worked. While I was mopping I started singing along with one of my favorites, Hotel California. Soon as it ended the music stopped and I went over to put in another CD. I was just a teensy taken aback when I realized the CD I took out did NOT have Hotel Califrnia on it. I played the whole thing again and Hotel C. never played again.
When I was a child, on a holiday to Teneriffe, at the beach, for some reason I thought it would be terribly clever to dig a hole, put a small toy plane inside, cover the hole and draw a line away from it and walk up the beach. A short while later, I decided to follow my line back to the hole, only to discover that some absolute spanners had brushed it all away.
I lost the toy plane. I was distraught.
When we got home, the exact same toy plane, complete with sand was sitting on our doorstep. I asked my parents how it had got there and they said it must have been there the whole time. They didn’t know I’d buried it in the sand. After I pushed the matter, elaborating in my own unique childlike way, they told me that the postman must have sent it to me.
I was satisfied with this answer, until a few years down the line when I remembered the incident and had stopped believing in things like Santa Claus.
Perplexes me to this day.
Also, when I was younger, I dreamt about having a sister. The dream involved my mothers best friend throwing her off a bridge into car park full of water (that had overflowed from the swimming pool). My mothers best friend had devil horns and glowing red eyes. The baby had red hair, and was called Lily. I didn’t tell anybody about this dream, until she was born. Red hair and all.
Apparently, according to my mum she also had some sort of inexplicably strong feeling she’d be giving birth to a redhead.
And we’re a family full of blondes. Although I believe my great great great grandmother was a redhead, so it’s the prophetic nature of the said hair that is rather inexplicable.
A lot of really, really weird things happen at my childhood home in which the 'rents still live, but this is my favorite most recent story:
Mom was in her work office on one side of the house, listening to her phone messages. She wrote a woman’s name and phone number on a piece of paper, then after listening to the rest of the messages she called the woman back to deal with whatever random business-related question she had. Once the task was completed, Mom tore the paper in half and threw it in the trash bin next to her desk.
About five minutes later, Mom hears Dad rummaging in the kitchen, then heading back to the TV room on the other side of the house. Suddenly she hears Dad yelling from the other room. When she checks on him, he’s holding a bag of chips and demanding to know “what the hell is this???”
Seems he’d gone into the kitchen and picked up a new, unopened bag of chips from the kitchen cabinet (Mom knew that part was definitely true- she’d just bought the bag herself). Settling back down in his chair, he opened the bag and found… the two halves of the paper Mom had just thrown away with the woman’s name and number on it. :eek: When she checked, the paper was gone from the trash.
Never did explain that one.
Ooooooooooh. Intriguing.
Not quite the word Mom used when she called me in an absolute panic. 
I tried everything to poke a hole in her story, but she was genuinely freaked out and isn’t that good of an actress. I remind her of it now and then just to laugh at her reaction.
And how good an actor is your dad? Did anyone actually see him open the bag and remove the papers?
This isn’t inexplicable, so I apologise, but I have had a couple of extremely unlikely gambling wins, the only two times I’ve ever gambled:
First was when I was 12 years old, on holiday in Great Yarmouth, where there’s a race course. My two friends and I pooled our funds so that we had £1 to put on every race. Legally, you’re not allowed to gamble at that age, but the bookies on the course weren’t about to refuse our money. We then chose the horses whose names we liked. We won every single time. One time was at 33-1, one was at 16-1, and the rest were all more normal odds. When I told one of my teachers this, he still didn’t believe me even after I brought the betting slips in to show him.
The other time was the one and only occasion I played a fruit machine. From a £1 initial stake, I went up to £160. That was exactly how much I needed to pay my rent for that month, and I’d been wondering how I’d pay it.
Maybe I should gamble more often!
Dad’s not a half-bad actor, but the a lot of other things are off- Mom had just come back from grocery shopping, which is why she knows the bag was new; she was in her office the whole time, from writing the note to the point where Dad yelled for her, and Dad hadn’t come in to the room (the kitchen is off the office, but the door was shut); only the two of them were in the house; the writing was definitely hers; the whole thing took less than 10 minutes from writing the info, making the call, and getting called to the other room; it’s a genuinely odd thing for my Dad to pull, considering his comic taste runs more toward Three Stooges slapstick.
It’s true that no one saw him open the bag, but even giving the possibility that the paper wasn’t in the bag, it doesn’t explain how he got it.
Wow, I could write a book about this stuff, it’s happened to me all my life, but mine usually come from thoughts. One of my earliest memories was at age 8 when my Dad and I were driving down the road and my dog was sitting in the front seat beside us. I started thinking what would happen to the dog if we had to stop in a hurry…needless to say I found out a few seconds later!
At 16 my uncle died and we were very close. When I was in the shower getting ready to go to his wake the first night I was thinking about him and could kinda see him laying in the coffin, but oddly enough he was wearing his fire department dress uniform, scared the crap out of me when I got to the funeral home and there he was in full uniform.
When I was 23 I was driving down a four lane divided road, two lanes on either side of the grassed divider, and a car was passing me on the inside. We were approaching a green light at about 70 klm/h and when we were about 200 feet from the light someone literally screached at me to stop so I piled on the brakes and stopped about 50 feet from the intersection, light still green, the car passing me on the inside was smoked by a guy that ran the red light.
Fast forward to the last six weeks… Now to set the scene, I am a pretty rugged, in decent shape, muscular, beer drinking, hockey playing, 42 year old motorcycle riding kinda tuff guy that " don’t take crap from nobody"…really nice polite guy…lol, just the kind of does not scare very easily.
I had been having a real hard time sleeping and when I went to bed I was scared to death something was going to go wrong while I was sleeping…ie the house catching fire or someone breaking in, so I was having a real hard time falling asleep. Sunday Jan 11 I finally got to sleep at about 3 am and sure enough, 5:20 am my dad was screaming to me and the dog was barking, I woke up in a panic, my dad was having a heart attack and was dead by 7 am.
That is just the tip of the iceberg of the things that have happened. I don’t claim to be any kind of psychic or anything, I don’t have a clue how it works, but I can tell you something… it can drive you crazy, cause you start to question everthing you think about and end up worrying that something is going to happen. If anyone has any ideas or has had similar stuff let me know.
When I was twelve my mum was driving my brother and I to school and we stopped to get petrol at a station that was being renovated. There was still barricades and caution tape everywhere because new concrete was being poured. While we were waiting in the car for her to pay, I started thinking about my mother falling over on her way back to the car. Of course, on her way out of the automatic doors, she didn’t see a new concrete step that was yet to have a rail put on it, and she fell straight over, leaving a massive bruise on her thigh.
I know I was thinking about her falling the whole time she was paying, because I was going through all the different scenarios that could mean I didn’t have to go to school that day, and I was pretty deep into my plans for what else I’d be doing when she did actually fall.
Unfortunately we all still went to school that day (she’s a teacher), although she was in pain for the next week.