scratch llll, did you ever go back to see what the damage was like?
WARNING _ post contains descriptions of violence to animals
A freind and I were sitting in a isolated trailer in the country, it was late evening, not quite dark, but the day was over. Suddenly we both quit talking, and experienced, (as we later co-oberated) the knowlege of something watching us at extremely close range. We both turned to check the window, expecting to see someone, but no one was there.
We both heard loud footsteps walking away through the bush.
But no one was there.
We got out of the trailer, with 22 rifle.
We see nothing, but feel drawn to a certain point.
There is a dead kitten freshly killed, still warm, right at the spot we had been drawn to. We both just walked towards this one point, and there on the ground was a kitten with its throat cut.
about 20 yards from the trailer.
We made our way back to the trailer and were nervous about entering it - afraid what ever had snuck in while we we outside.
Nothing was there, and we didn’t sleep until morning
Other than that was a close up magician who did something impossible in clear site. He asked you to pick up a dinner plate and dropped a salt shaker through it, from my point of view I saw the shaker pass through the plate, other people at table say that the magician always had his arms positioned so they didn’t actually see the salt shaker pass through.
Probably some trick of angle and light… But from my close up straight on edge of plate view, I saw the shaker pass through the plate.
I have mentioned on the dope a few times that I saw a UFO with my Mom back in the 80s headed out of Scottsville towards Caledonia NY, and I am pretty sure it was a meteorite. Lovely green swoosh overhead from behind overhead and arcing nicely down towards the horizon. Never tried confirming it with anybody, so it could be almost anything … but I am pretty certain it was a space rock of some sort =)
I have confused a number of people in person claiming to have seen a UFO. They always ask me what kind of space ship we saw, and are absolutely puzzled when I say it was probably a meteorite and not an alien. I usually have to explain gently that anything you can’t identify is a UFO, not just space ships =)
I have a couple that are somewhat related. I’ll start with the longer one.
As a preface, let me say that I don’t particularly believe in ghosts, UFOs, the paranormal, etc. I get a kick out of spooky stories, and I’m willing to suspend my disbelief enough to take people for their word—if someone tells me something happened, I believe that they’re being honest until proven otherwise. Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m middle-of-the-road; I don’t ‘believe,’ but I don’t just call bullshit either.
So.
I’m 30 now. What I’m about to tell you about happened around my senior year of high school—I’m not sure of exact dates, but it would have been between May of ’99 and June of 2000, since that’s when my best friend went to basic training. Other than myself, there were 3 other people involved: Mo, my best friend (more a brother than a friend, really,) Montaue, a big, funny guy who could play basketball like nobody’s business, and Kevin, a tall, skinny guy. Mo and I were like brothers, and Montaue and Kevin were like brothers. The 4 of us hung out pretty much all the time. Mo and I are white, Montaue and Kevin are black (this isn’t arbitrary—it’ll come into play later.)
I grew up in rural East Texas. My father bought our little 26 acre place back in the ‘60s and built a house there. We’re the last house, so to the south of us is a lot of timberland, which isn’t ours but we had permission to use like it were (until it got sold, anyway.)
We were pretty good kids, and one of the things we found fun was playing war. Nowadays, equipment is cheap enough that lots of people do this with paintballs. I probably could have afforded all the stuff, but my buddies were all pretty poor, so instead of paintballs we just used toy guns. And we played at night, usually. It was essentially an honor system—you admitted when you’d been ‘shot.’ There weren’t many arguments.
On the particular night in question, we’d divided into 2 teams. We all joked that it was whites vs. blacks, but it was really just one set of best friends against the other set. I was close enough to Mo that we could communicate without speaking; same for Montaue and Kevin.
I grabbed a screenshot of my place from Google maps so that I can sort of explain our positions and movement. It’s here: Photo
North is straight up. The dot marked 1 is the house. The dot marked 2 is our ‘base.’ It was a white bag we found and set next to the railroad tracks so that we could see it by moonlight. If you look at the dot marked 3, you’ll see that it sits between a couple of rights-of-way. The one just to the east is a power line; the one just to the west, between 3 and the railroad track, is an old, closed, road (HW 59 replaced it.)
It was probably autumn, because lots of the trees had dropped their leaves, and we were wearing long sleeves. We’d had 2 rounds so far, and the score was tied. The way the game worked was, the 4 of us would start at ‘base,’ then we’d alternate which team would take off first. The team that left would have 5 minutes, then the other team would leave base and we’d hunt each other down.
It was about 11pm. Mo and I were the ones to leave base first. Since all night he and I had been on the move, we figured the best strategy would be to head for a deer stand my father and I had built (and Montaue and Kevin didn’t know about) and wait for them to walk by, at which point we’d snipe them. The deer stand is dot 3 on my picture. It sits about 20 yards from the old road, which is where we figured the guys would come down.
We got to the stand and climbed up. It was really only meant for one person, so Mo and I were kind of cramped up there. We scanned around us, but our main focus was on the road. After another 5 or so minutes had passed, sure enough we saw movement coming down the road from the north. The first thing we saw was a pair of legs, walking slowly. The legs were all we could see. About 10 feet behind the legs, we saw an upper body moving. At first we couldn’t figure it out, but we decided that Montaue and Kevin had switched sweatshirts—one had been wearing an all gray sweatsuit and the other had been wearing all black. Because the guys themselves were black, the only thing we could really see in the dark was the gray sweatsuit. So, we figured we were seeing one guy with gray pants (the legs) and one guy with a gray shirt (the torso.) The legs seemed to keep walking out of sight, but the torso stopped, and without movement we sort of lost it in our vision.
At this point, we decided to silently climb down, sneak up to the road, and hopefully flank Montaue and Kevin.
We crept up to the side of the old road, which was on a bit of an embankment. Mo was to my left, and we both climbed up the side of the road at the same time. I first looked to my left, down the road, and saw nothing. Then I looked to my right.
There, in the middle of the road, something was crouched down. It didn’t move, and it didn’t “shoot” us. For whatever reason, it spooked me enough (because it was so close—6 or 7 feet) that I told Mo to run. And we ran, south, down the road, to where dot 4 is—the intersection of another power line right-of-way. We crouched down in the tall grass and I asked if he’d seen the thing crouched on the road. He said he had. We sat there long enough for our heart rates to get back to normal, and kind of chided ourselves for getting spooked. It HAD to be one of the guys. Why’d we run? Since we’d essentially given away our position, we decided that the smart thing to do would be to get on the railroad tracks and walk back north, towards base. If we walked on the ties, we’d make no noise.
The railroad tracks are up on an embankment about 12 feet high. Mo was a step ahead of me, and when he got to the top, he looked down and said a train was coming. So we just kind of crouched down where we were and waited for the train to pass. About 10 cars past the locomotives, there was a loud BANG—my first thought was that Mo had thrown a rock at a boxcar, but Mo immediately looked down at me and said “did you just throw a rock?”
“No, did you?”
“Hell no.”
At this point, we were pretty freaked out. We decided to walk along the embankment instead of waiting for the whole train to pass. Eventually, once it had, we moved onto the tracks and walked the ties. It was a clear night, and we could see up and down the railroad.
You’ll notice in the picture that, walking north along the tracks, there is a slight left-hand curve before our “base.” That meant that we were out of sight from it until we were basically right up on it. Just as we got to the beginning of that curve, we both heard the rocks slide a bit—the sound it makes when you climb up the railroad embankment and knock some rocks down. Figuring we were coming up on Montaue and Kevin, Mo and I bolted into the brush to the west of the railroad. We sat down and waited for the guys to walk by so we could shoot them and get the game over with. We could hear them, just a few feet away, walking down through the brush towards us.
And then, at just about the time we were ready to jump out, we heard our names being called. It was Montaue and Kevin, and they were at the house. I looked at Mo, he looked at me, and we booked it. We ran flat out, through the brush, up the old road embankment, back down, across the pasture, to where our friends were waiting. Turns out that after the initial 5 minutes were up, they’d started to come after us but Montaue and fallen on a barbed wire fence and cut his leg. They’d gone to the house and had been yelling for us ever since. They never were in the woods.
I don’t know what was in the woods with us. Could it have been people? Yeah—we had neighbors, though I’d never seen anyone in the woods before. Could have been deer, I suppose. That was the last time we played war in the woods at night, though.
When I was 10 years old, I was sitting in our TV room with my brother and my little sister. Suddenly, we all heard a loud THUMP. We all started, and eventually just assumed a bird had hit the large window (though it didn’t SOUND like that, that was the only explanation we could think of). Moments later, we heard the sound again, only this time I saw what was causing the noise:
A picture hanging on the wall over my brother and sister’s head lifted up, as though someone were picking up the bottom of the frame, and then dropped with a slam against the wall.
I was the only one who saw it happen that time, and a few things went through my head:
[ol]
[li]What the hell did I just see?[/li][li]That was terrifying.[/li][li]My brother and sister will never, ever, believe me.[/li][/ol]
Well, the look of terror on my face seems to have sufficed because when I told them about this they did believe me. They both ran to my side of the room. We all sat on the couch and watched it, and it did it again.
The three of us tore screaming out of the TV room and ran to tell our big sisters (who were teenagers). They didn’t believe us. We accused them of playing a joke on us. They swore they hadn’t. The five of us kids went back in the TV room, took the picture off the wall, patted it down, checked for wires, checked the windows for a breeze. Nothing. It was a simple 8x10 picture frame hanging from a simple hook and eye on the wall. All of us kids sat and watched the picture (the older girls still thinking we were pulling a fast one on them.) Then it did it again. In front of 5 pairs of eyes.
“SEE? WE TOLD YOU!” we said to the older girls. Their minds were blown. We went to tell our mother, who was in an adjacent room. “Baloney,” she said. “You kids are playing a prank on me.” Pranks were not unheard of in our home. “Just come in the room,” we said. She refused. We went back in the room and watched … and it did it a fifth time.
“DID YOU HEAR THAT?” we screamed to our mother.
“Yes, I did. It was you kids.”
“WE SWEAR TO GOD IT WASN’T.”
Walk up to a picture hanging on your wall. Lift the bottom of the frame about 6 inches away from the wall, and then let go so that it slams against the wall. That’s what it was doing. All. By. Itself.
I love a good story but I am very skeptical about ghosts and such. I believe in a spirit and after life but I doubt their ability to interact with us.
I used to live in a duplex apartment, when I was around 12 I moved down into the basement to get more privacy and space. It was an unfinished basement and it was incredibly creepy, but with my newfound independence it was MY creepy basement, so I wasn’t scared at all after about the first week.
A few months into being down there, I had two friends sleeping over. We turned out the lights, and (it was their first time sleeping over) they were both a bit chatty and admitted they were scared to be in the basement in the dark. Right then my friend said “Wouldn’t it be so creepy if the light just turned on right now?”
And just then it did.
There was exactly one light fixture that could turn on the basement lights, and it was halfway up the creeky steps up to the first floor. When the lights turned on, I was in bed and my two friends were both on couches still under blankets. There was NO WAY anyone could flip the light on without being heard, and we had been settled in our beds for a while talking, so it was impossible that they had set up a prank somehow.
I still have no explanation, and I eventually went and switched the light back off, but the light turned itself on literally the moment after my friend suggested it would be creepy if it turned on then. The funny part is we were laughing hysterically, it didn’t seem creepy at all once it happened. 
The next day I was up with the sun and on my way over without a comb through my hair or coffee in hand. It had been dry for the past two months but being a dirt road the dust would carry a print and for it to circle it had to cross that road twice. I’m no Indian tracker but I figured to find a clue or two and maybe even discern the origin of direction.
Nope. The only tracks were mine coming and going except some old dog tracks and a buck made back when the road was muddy. It was grown up cutover so pushing through the brush among 15 year volunteer pines and cottonwood wasn’t easy but I never saw a fresh break in tree limb or tree top and yes I looked at the tops. That would have been freaky but at least it would have made more sense than nothing. If only I had a flashlight that night I think and then sometimes I think maybe I wouldn’t want to see because what if that was something I couldn’t accept? That’s silly… still, at least I can bury a sound in my memory most of the time.
It made me doubt my sanity because I know what I heard. Could it have been something bent back and popped against a board? Some odd gun or firecracker I’ve not heard before? A recording played through a bullhorn by a prankster? Ha damn good trick now olly oxen free let me know I’m not nuts please. I want to believe that it was something explainable. Maybe my mind exagerated or distorted the sound out of surprise or shock, who knows? I do and it didn’t sound like any of that.
Maybe the board. That’s what I’m going to make myself believe. And next time I’m going to go to where the sound will be in five minutes whether I have a light or not. It would beat not knowing even if I have to feel it with my hands.
It was Feb/ March of 1970. I had just rebuilt the engine in my truck, and gone on my very first solo vacation, I drove up the coast from LA to Eureka.
I had checked into a motel with the intent of staying the weekend and then heading home.
Saturday at 7:15 I awoke with a start and a terrible feeling of something was not right back home. I tried to go back to sleep, but I could not.
Called home, everyone was fine
Called several of my friends, everyone was fine (Remember this was 1970 these were very expensive long distance calls)
Finally by 9 I was so bugged, I checked out early and headed South. Drove through snow and rain and got back Sunday.
Called all of my high school buddies, everyone was OK. By this time the feeling of dread / something was very wrong has subsided.
Fast forward a month. I am driving near my old High School and I see the house where a girl I knew from school lived. I decided to stop in and say hi.
I go to the door and ask for her. her mother tells me she will ask if she is up to it? WTF?
She is up for a visit, and it turns out she just got out of the hospital. It seems that on that Saturday a month before she was on her way to work, driving in the rain. She lost control of the car and wrapped it around a light pole, was trapped in the car and had to be extracted by the fire department. She spent a week or so in ICU and had just been discharged 2 days before I stopped by.
When she got done telling me this I was almost shaking. I asked her this question “What time was the accident?”
Here reply still spooks me “I left the house at 7AM and it is about a 15 minute drive to where the accident happened so it would have been at 7:15”
This was not my girlfriend, we had never even dated, she was just a girl from school that I shared some classes with. A how are you, chat for a few minutes type of friend.
I still don’t get it.
In Taiwan in the mid 70’s, I went hiking in the forested mountains with my girlfriend. No mountain climbing, simply a walk in the somewhat steep woods. I didn’t know the girlfriend was petrified of climbing down anything. I had no idea. So when we started going back down we had a problem. We came to a cliff and she panicked. There was no way she could go down it. It was only about a 20 foot cliff and very easy (for me) to climb down but it was somewhat less than easy for her. So I sat on the edge of the cliff and pondered what to do.
A bird landed on what I thought was a branch which went down the cliff and started singing. I had the sudden thought: “that bird is trying to tell me something.” So I investigated the branch it was sitting on.
The branch was not a branch but a root which went down the cliff but was not attached at the bottom of the cliff. I got my girlfriend down by having her straddle the root. Then standing below her, I would pull the root out horizontally and she would scoot out horizontally on the root (this did not cause her to panic). Then I would lower the root (and GF) back against the cliff and climb down and do it again a couple of times. This got her down the cliff.
I don’t see ghosts or worry about UFOs or think that Nessie might come knocking at my front door. I am normally a very level-headed kind of guy but I did get the impression that that bird was trying to tell me something.
That’d make a great “It Happened To Me!” story over on the Fortean Times site. They have great interest in instances of “panic” in the old sense of the word, i.e., unexplainable dread or weird stuff happening when one ventures alone into the domain of Pan (that is, untamed Nature).
Early one morning I was babysitting for my sister. Since it would be a couple hours before my niece woke up, I decided to get some sleep on the couch.
I was just about to drift off to sleep when I heard the distinct sound of Oscar’s nails on the floor. This meant he’d gotten out of his kennel and I could either ignore the world’s dimmest Golden Retriever and hope he didn’t take too much out of the garbage can, or I could leave my warm blanket and haul him back to the kennel. I lay with my eyes closed as the clicking passed the front of the couch and circled around (there was no wall behind me). I decided when he came back in front I’d snag him. The clicking was just about to pull even with me when I realized two things:
- The couch was on an area rug, not a hardwood floor.
- My sister didn’t own a dog.
Oscar belonged to a family I nannied for (often overnight) and in my groggy state I heard a dog and automatically thought of him.
I jerked my head up to see what was coming at me and the noise immediately stopped. There was no animal, no sign of anything out of place.
I sat up and tried to figure out what just happened. I had been aware of other noises (traffic, the furnace, etc.) that I could still hear, so I don’t believe I was dreaming, but there was nothing to explain the noise. I stood up and put my head near the air duct, thinking something was blowing around, but there was nothing but air.
Eventually I decided to try going to sleep. For a few minutes, there was no noise, but as I was drifting off again the clicking started up. It stopped as soon as I opened my eyes. At this point I gave up on sleeping.
Something that didn’t occur to me until much later was that when my sister moved into the house, my niece announced she hated the place because she kept hearing a dog when she was trying to sleep. When she complained, I assumed she meant a dog barking and wrote it off to a neighbor’s dog. I never told my niece because she’s a bit nervous by nature and she had to keep living there.
I have a few but this is the best one. There is a cemetery that has a number of my ancestors in it, and one Christmas Day my Dad was driving me home from his place so I asked if we could visit that cemetery because I wanted to see the grave of an elderly aunt that had passed away. Her husband had passed in the 1970’s and she was 102 when she passed, and they share the same gravestone, with her name and info under his. I met my aunt a couple of times but she was quite old by then and I never met my uncle, he passed when I was about 3.
I had a cheap digital camera and took a picture of the gravestone. I stood up, backed up a little, and took another picture of the gravestone. Took a few pictures of other gravestones and we continued on home. There was nobody in the cemetery other than us and my Dad was far away from me when I took the photos.
Two weeks later I looked at the pictures on the camera’s little screen and was like, “WTF is that?” so I put the photos on the computer. The one photo of my aunt’s grave has the DISTINCT image of an older man’s face. You can see his balding head, long face, eyes, and pointed nose, as though he’s looking over the name. In the other photo you can distinctly see what looks like the image of a young woman’s forehead, eyes and nose.
I don’t show these photos to many people and I have never submitted them to a ghost website or anything, because I don’t know who they are and I feel very honoured that they “showed themselves” to me. I also don’t want anybody questioning the credibility of the photos. I took these pictures myself with my little digital camera. After taking the other photos off, I kept these two on the memory card and put the memory card in my drawer.
The Pictures:
Except I don’t get panic attacks or believe in spirits and if it feels like something is watching you in the woods it’s because it is, whether it’s a lizzard a foot away on a tree or a turtle ten feet away or a hawk a half mile away, the woods are full of eyes we never see thinking thier alien little thoughts. Uh… actually it’s likely “I hope he doesn’t eat me”. I’m still not creeped out by the woods themselves. People creep me more. That noise though. Jesus.
Tess reminded me of something folks might get a kick out of. I even posted it on TripAdvisor. In Gatlinburg there is a place we like to stay called the Riverhouse Motorlodge. It’s just off the main drag and right over the Pigeon river that you can hear gurgle past from your balcony. We were there in late October and had some great Ocoee wine late in the eve watching ducks and trout battle for the crackers and cheese we threw them. But it was chilly so we went inside to build a big fire in the large stone fireplace and one thing led to a bed as they say and we passed out tipsy and sated.
Sometime after midnight I felt her sit on the edge of the bed a moment and slip beneath the covers to spoon against my naked back. It annoyed me because she was ice cold. She could have warmed up near the fire but hey, that’s a wife for you. What the hell was she doing getting that cold, was she on the balcony this late I was thinking when I suddenly realized she was curled in FRONT OF ME AND I WAS SPOONING HER. Thaaaaat brought me full awake.
Wuhuhuha it took me a long time to shake off that dream and go back to sleep. I awoke at about 2 shivering. The covers were gone. Gone. Not on this side of the bed or the other. What the hell? I turned on the light on my side. Nothing. I got out of the bed and found them waded out of sight at the foot of the bed. S.O.B. so I remake the bed, sheets, blanket, comforter and crawl back in. Shit it’s freezing now and the fire is nearly out but I just want some sleep. I drift off.
At about 3 I awake. Teeth chattering. No cover. Same exact shit. It’s not like either of us was thrashing about because I always woke spooned against her back same as I went to sleep. This shit is spooking me but pissing me off because it’s too damn cold for this. I got up and built the fire bigger than the first time, really big because the hearth is expansive and there is little chance something will roll out that far. I think they built it so large for the laying down in front of bow chicka wow but it made me feel much better to have the room toasty. I tucked that bedcover like the meanest drill sargent on earth was going to bounce a quarter on it and crawled back in. I checked my wife was breathing because she slept through this bone chilling naked stuff without a rustle. Slept the rest of the night.
The next morning she gets a kick out of my tale of ghostly torment and calls down for breakfast. They act surprised. Nobody is registered to be in our room. Deedee deedee. We laughed about it and always try to get room 47 when we go back but it has never repeated. I don’t recall a lot of amusment on my part while it was going on that night though.
It turns out that the ghosts
WERE YOU!!!
You know, if you had decided to give up being a poster on the SDMB, this would have made an excellent final post.
scratch llll, I’m sitting here, unable to sleep, all the hairs on my back standing up because one of my very good friends, a guy who is absolutely honest and straight laced, told me a story almost identical to that.
He and his Airforce buddies were camping in the woods in Northern California near Travis Airforce base. The area where they were wasn’t a marked campsite, in fact, they were trespassing. They stumbled across an odd area, a place where others had camped judging by two rings of stone and the remains of a very old campfire in the middle. When they first heard the pops, which were louder, and further off, they thought it gun fire. Then the pops came from the other side of the camp. As you note, no other sounds were heard between the pops. I can’t remember how long he said it took between the shots, but it was a few minutes at least.
Thinking that they were in the middle of a group of crazies with guns, my friend and his buddies decided to pack up hike out of there. As they hiked they realized that the explosions seemed following them as they grew increasingly louder each time. By the time they reached their car, they were quite spooked, although they still believed it was just some jerks with guns.
Then, BAM!, from the dark of the woods, not 20 feet away, came a shot like a canon. They dove into the car and high tailed it out of there.
The rational, skeptical side of me says that there much be some scientific explanation. It still creeps the hell out me.
Not mine:
I’ve never seen anything particularly scary, but my mom lived in a row house in Baltimore for a few years that she insisted was haunted. I pffted at that, but every time I visited her, it wasn’t much fun. I’m a night owl, and to go from the kitchen back upstairs, you passed a door to the cellar and then turned a corner to go up the stairs. Every time I would turn off the downstairs lights, start walking up those stairs, and every single hair on the back of my neck would be standing up screaming THERE IS SOMETHING HORRIBLE BEHIND YOU. I would make it maybe halfway up the stairs before I couldn’t stand it any longer and would turn around to look. Nothing. And I would thrash myself for being a stupid scared weenie. Then I’d start going upstairs again, and immediately… THERE IS SOMETHING HORRIBLE BEHIND YOU. I would end up taking the rest of the stairs two or three at a time.
She said she lost a whole series of clothes and other small items in that row house, including two sweaters she folded and put up one night which were gone the next morning.
Guys growing marijuana trying to scare them off, perhaps.
Clothahump you aren’t alone. Two of my Deputy Sheriff partners, unbeknownst to each other, shared similar stories with me. Their cars were paced at night along a rural county road by a bright light in the adjacent fields for quite some distance before the light suddenly executed a 90 degree turn and zipped away at an unreal speed. From the circumstances of the telling I believe that they both saw something that wasn’t … ordinary.
I may have a UFO picture. A couple of years ago I had my young horse tied to a fence and was trying to take some conformation shots so I fired off several frames in a row to try to catch him in a good pose. The sky is blue and cloudless, not even a contrail to be seen, yet in only one of the frames is a straight line silvery blur upwards at a 45 degree angle. Creeepy.
Soylent Juicy I wish I could unsee those pictures. <shudder>
Sounds like the “flying rods” phenomenon (you can Google). If it’s similar to that, I think those are generally agreed to be bugs flying in front of the camera lens.
I have two experiences that WERE later explained that I would like to share, just because you can never truly trust your eyes:
One time I was in the observation deck of Sears tower with my mom when I was very young. I pointed out a bright light out in the sky, it seemed like it was responding to the movements of my head, and othertimes it was staying stationary and floating. It was so strange we even told the attendant about it and all of us were trying to figure it out… but eventually we realized it was a reflection on the window glass from a light behind a display glass in the room with us. Which was pretty embarassing, but until you realized that is what it was, the light was very eerie. 
Another time I was in my apartment going into the kitchen with the lights off, only some light coming in through the window at night. There was a sinister face in the shadows. I wasn’t startled because I KNEW I had to be seeing something, because there couldn’t REALLY be a demon there. Eventually when I turned the light on, I realized it was one of those valentines day style foil covered balloons still partially inflated but a bit crumpled, and the shadows made it look like a frowny face in the dark.