A few weeks ago, I was walking down the street in the middle of the day to go and buy something for lunch. In front of me was a woman and three men, standing up straight and staring straight at me. They all had completely blank expressions, and were still like statues. As I got closer, I noticed that there was another person with them lying motionless on the ground. As a I passed them, they didn’t follow me with their gaze, and continued staring into the same direction that I had come from.
It was so utterly eery and unsettling that as soon as I passed them I filed it away in my “to never be thought about again” mental pigeon-hole. What I should have done was called the police (or ambulance?) or something - or even spoken to them/intervened. But the whole thing was so dream-like that all I wanted to do was get out of there and forget about it. Not my proudest moment.
Now that’s a weird story. I would have been checking all the local news stories and the local police/fire station call out page. Unless you are a New Yorker, we just call that Wednesday, and it never would have made a ripple in the news.
I’ll just use my go-to theory and guess it had to do with aliens.
Back in 1993, my roommate and I were out on our deck in CT, and a blimp went past, much lower than normal. For some reason, my roommate was really freaked out and I learned that he had a fear of things falling from the sky (I was not a sympathetic friend as I found this really amusing).
Now you reminded me, when I was a university student, the university’s football team was having a big game one weekend. The stadium was on the southern end of town.
Friday - I finished my classes on the main campus, and when I left the building I looked up to see the Goodyear blimp cruising directly overhead. I thought, how neat, they must be taking pictures of the campus as filler for the game broadcast.
Then I went back to my “dormitory”, which was on a sub-campus north of town. As I was just about to enter the dorm I looked up and saw the Goodyear blimp cruising directly overhead.
Later, I told my dorm mates that I ran into my room and hid under the bed.
I went into a local laundromat to wash some large comforters .It was really crowded but I found one of the large machines no one was using. As the wash went on I sat on a bench and looked around. There were two rows of benches at one end that were facing each other. Directly across from me was a woman staring intently at me. She never blinked, never wavered, just stared. Another woman was unbuttoning her blouse and slowly buttoning it back up. I began to realize that everyone in the place was autistic. OK, they are enjoying a trip to do some laundry. I looked around to see if someone was in charge. I spotted a guy sitting atop a washing machine.and looking back and forth at everyone. Ahh, that’s the guy. Then he got a silly grin on his face and reached up and slowly spun his hat around to face backwards. Nope, not in charge. There was a large van outside but I didn’t see a driver in it.
Saw a dead whale on the beach near Ocean Park, Washington. It was about 20 feet long and was sliced open along the side. Lots of people around taking pictures. My daughter came walking up with her French bulldog. Suddenly the dog decided he liked the smell of the whale and started rolling around in the gunk that had leaked from the whale. Took my daughter 2 hours at a car wash to get most of the smell out of the dog. Don’t know what was the weirdest, the dead whale or a dog getting bathed at a car wash.
Decades ago I took sleeping bags to a laundromat I’d never been to. A guy walked in and started his washing machine, then took off his shirt and socks, adding them to his load. He looked around (just me and him in the place) then removed his pants.
He washed and dried his stuff, redressed, then took his laundry and left.
When I recounted this to a friend later, she told me there was a group home a block away and I’d likely encountered a resident.
Across the street from the business my family owns is a residential neighborhood. One fine summer day we notice out the window a young man wandering through the neighborhood butt-ass naked. The police were called and he was taken away for psychological evaluation.
Later that summer the guy across the street was having car trouble. He called us over to ask if we had a particular tool he needed. As we got near the garage I see sitting in there Naked Guy. At least this time he had pants on. But, in his hands, I see he is holding what appears to be a Glock 9mm. The guy who called us over says," don’t worry he ok when he’s on his meds". Needless to say, my wife and I quickly but politley left.
Three decades ago, here in SE England, we had a ferociously cold winter. Overnight, fairly early in the winter, we had a foot of snow - unheard of for these parts. (It was so cold that year that the snow took six weeks to disappear). My commute was country roads - I rang in and told work, not a chance; but somehow over the next day or two we learned that actually, yes, you could manage to drive in.
This country is not equipped to clear this sort of snow. We drove across country in two ruts that braver drivers had cut into the snow. It worked! - after a day or so it felt normal. And then…
…In the wider world, if you know what a Reliant Robin is, you probably know from Only Fools And Horses:
That’s right - it has three wheels, and three wheels into two ruts does not go. I swear we followed one for five miles and the car’s front wheel flipped constantly from rut to rut and back again. rearing over the hump that divided them. It was, in a strange way, the most impressive feat of driving I ever saw.
And - well, not blimps but parachutes. Twenty years ago I was at a football (soccer) match at Adams Park, High Wycombe. The ground was new - you drove through an industrial estate to get to it, right on the edge of town surrounded by woods and a few fields.
That day they had half time entertainment - three parachutists would attempt to land on the pitch in the center circle. Well, they missed. Not the center circle, the stadium. We watched them as they drifted towards the woods. Wasn’t on the evening news, so I guess nobody died.
I was a teen when the original Amityville Horror came out, so this was probably in 1979. Our family had a double carport, with the ceiling and 2 walls painted white. One day, soon after seeing the movie, the ceiling and part of one wall were covered, and I do mean covered, with what were easily thousands of flies. Freaked my brothers and I out pretty good, but we dispersed them with a water hose. Since we live maybe a block from a small stream, we figured (after we calmed down) that it was just an unusually large hatching, and they needed to go somewhere. Never seen the like before or since.
This reminds me of a time I was installing a sound system in a very rural church. When arrived alone to start work, I noticed a very low pitched humming/clicking sound coming from the basement. I knew there was a kitchen down there so I figured the sound as coming from one of the several refrigerators. But the sound had a strange, creepy quality to it. Curiosity got me so I went downstairs to check it out.
I was freaked out to discover that the south wall of the basement was covered with Asian lady beetles, several inches thick! The mass of bugs was writhing, moving in waves on the wall. And the smell… if you’ve ever encountered Asain beetles you’ll know they make a stink when they are disturbed. The smell is something like a cross between garlic and ozone, at least to me. This was a scene straight out of a horror movie!
After the initial shock wore off, I called the church president, figured he’d want to know about this. He wasn’t surprised at all, said he’d be right over. He showed up with this large industrial shop vac, the kind with a 30 gallon garbage can sized dirt hopper. He vacuumed up the bugs, dumping the hopper twice in the woods behind the church.
This was in the early 2000’s in the middle of a huge population explosion of the local Asian beetles. Apparently they were intentionally introduced to control aphids. They are fairly benign critters although can create a nuisance in large quantities. When it’s colder they pretty much hibernate but become much more active as they warm up.
This church was built into the side a hill with the south basement wall exposed to the low angle sun during the spring season. The sun heated up the wall enough to activate all these beetles at once. The church president told me he had to vacuum the bugs several times that spring.
One time my friend moved to a different house and it was 10PM with me slowly driving through his suburban neighborhood trying to find his new house location since I had to drop something off. The problem was his street barely had any street lights so it was very hard to even see the numbers on the mailboxes.So i’m slowly driving down his empty non-lit street when all of a sudden about a dozen kids who looked like they were all about 10-12 years old just all came out of nowhere and surrounded my car all of a sudden. Then they all walked away at the same time further down the street until I couldn’t see them. I found my friends house and told him and he told me he never seen that before. So I have no idea why those kids were there nor where they were heading so quickly to in the middle of the night.
I was 15 and snuck out to meet about 10 friends, someone had a relative visiting we never met before. We would walk through the neighborhood and hide when we saw cars. Some older teenager and his friend were driving and saw us dive into the woods. He got out of his car and was furious. He grabbed a golf club and started swinging and yelling at us to get out. He was drunk, and thinking about it he was probably high and paranoid. Later we found out the kid visiting had a gun on him, lucky he didn’t go crazy and shoot the high guy.
The insect stories reminded me of this one. Back in the early 80s, I lived in a house divided into three apartments. My unit was shotgun style with no doors between the rooms. I came home from work one day and heard a loud buzzing sound when I walked in. Puzzled, I followed the sound to the back kitchen. There were hundreds of bees in both windows.
Naturally, I freaked out. I called the landlord who said it was too late to get anything done about and to leave them alone until he could take care of it the next day. I went out to get some dinner and hung out with a friend for most of the evening. When I got back home, the bees were still in the windows and I felt pretty sure they weren’t going to start flying around. Still, I nailed a blanket over the bedroom doorway to keep them out. But the sound was unnerving. I thought I would never get to sleep. They were all dead in the kitchen when I got home from work the next day. I cleaned up as best I could but found dead bees for months.
Back in my running days I would leave a semi-frozen bottle of water on the edge of my pick-up bed. I would run out a distance - say, 5 miles - then turn around and double back toward my vehicle. When passing it I would grab my water bottle for some cool hydration.
One time I grabbed for the bottle. It was wet and slippery and shot out of my grip. The bottle bounced onto the cab of the truck, then the hood, then onto the ground, then back up into the air about waist high where I snagged it, virtually without breaking stride.
This last one reminded me, I had great first-baseline seats once to a Sox-Yankees game at Fenway, and Jason Giambi hit a screamer foul ball along the line of seats. It was actually frightening to see it coming right at us, and we all ducked.
Meanwhile, a woman about half a section over and several seats back was there with her husband, and, uninterested in the game I suppose, was knitting. Her husband must have been off getting a beer or making a restroom trip, because she’d put her knitting bag in his aisle seat. The ball caromed between multiple seats and the stairs, flew up, and - ridiculously - landed in her bag.
She only looked up when the person behind her reached into the bag and plucked the ball out, but I think she had no idea what had happened, and didn’t even protest.
that I ran into my room and hid under the bed.