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The Scariest Fortean Thing Ever To Happen To You

A Real Witch?

I wonder if any one else has had the following thing happen to them.

Many years ago - when I must have been about 8 or 9 - a friend and I were playing in our local grave yard (for those interested it is in Cockfosters in North London - Barnet area). We were messying around and generally acting up like 8 or 9 year old boys do. I recall quite clearly that we were throwing flowers at each other (for some odd reason!) when suddenly we heard a womans laugh. More like a cackle. Very loud and very close. We both turned around to see (and I kid you not!) a fully fuctioning witch - sitting there by the path right behiond us and no more than a few feet away. She had a Black hat, couldron, cat - the works! In fact it was exactly as any young boy might think a witch in the flesh might look like.

Anyway - we both bolted out of that grave yeard as fast as we could and really didnt think much more about it for many years. Then a few years ago I met up with my old friend (Im 44 now - so what I am recalling happened over 30 years ago) and I mentioned what had happened. I thought that maybe it might have been me just dreaming it and over time believed it to be a true event. He went white and recalled the exact same event.

What was odd was that there is simply no way she could have crept up on us like that. It was almost as though something took the form of a witch to simply scare us in to leaving. It worked I can tell you! We never again played in the grave yard after that and never did we disrespect the graves as we had done then.
 
Wow, what a brilliant story! :D
Wonder if anyone else has ever seen weird stuff there too?
 
oooo! excellent story! what graveyard was it? i sometimes work around the Trent park area of cockfosters, so if it is near there i would love to have a look around.
 
Reminds me of a story on a thread here somewhere - two boys playing in the local woods who got warned about some paedo, who turned out to be planning their abduction, by a big cartoon-ish tabby cat.
Cartoon characters again, like all those fairy sightings. Something on the other side playing guardian to children, keeping them safe yet making them behave?
 
Dudley Earthquake

I got woken up by one once but it stopped just at the point that I properly woke up leaving me very confused and concerned that a ghost or something had been shaking my bed or that I had been having a very bizarre dream.

McAvennie reminds me of the Dudley Earthquake here in the West Midlands a good few years ago. (2002?)
I was living with my two female flat mates (the fact that they were female becomes important later; myself I am male) and we had gone to bed ready for work next day as we were all teachers.

Next thing I remember was looking at my en-suite door swing slowly open in the dark and behind it stood a gentleman dothing a tri-cornered hat at me, it then seemed to transform into someone else wearing modern clothes.

I remember kicking out at the image and then bouncing off the walls screaming my head off in fear until I ended up outside on the landing. My flatmate was calling from her room upstairs "what's happening?!" and my other flatmate came out of her room which was opposite mine.
I was asleep and the earthquake must have somehow made me see this hallucination behind the door.

We all dashed to the road side window and noticed almost everyone was out on the street chatting about what they thought it was. I phoned my dad who knew exactly what it was straight away, but I thought it was the apocalypse. Fortunately we ended up in the same bed together for the rest of the night to keep each other company.[/quote]
 
Yes, I posted something on this message board about the Dudley earthquake, just after it happened. I guessed immediately what it was -it shook the mirror off the bedroom wall etc. But I was working with teenagers at the time, and one boy had slept right through it!

I had trouble with damp in my 1920's Wolverhampton ex- council house ever after! I suspect some underground pipe must have developed a hairline crack -tho' Severn Trent came and "listened" and maintained there were no leaks to the supply pipe. I solved the problem by selling up!

( I suppose I'm going to be told off again for going "off topic"! :D )
 
Re: Dudley Earthquake

cardinaluk said:
I thought it was the apocalypse. Fortunately we ended up in the same bed together for the rest of the night to keep each other company.
Did the earth move? Again? :lol:
 
Not Fortean in explanation but certainly the scariest thing that has happened to me in a loooong time...

Currently on business in Almaty, Kazakhstan and the snow has been falling quite heavily the last few days. Had come in and just lay on the hotel room bed and fired up my laptop to do a bit of emailing/surfing, the window was to my right and the curtains were still open.

Few minutes pass and suddenly out of the corner of my eye I 100% saw a sizeable white figure glide across the balcony of my 3rd floor room and then disappear. I had one of those mini-heart attacks and my body turned to ice. Finally, yet terrifyingly, I had seen a ghost.

I lay frozen still for a few minutes eyes fixed on the window, my mind blown, until I saw the exact same figure again... only this time it was in the form of a large pile of snow falling from the roof and being blown by the wind across the front of my room... :lol:

Always an explanation... :)
 
Good call BlackRiverFalls! This phenomenon deserves more attention, it could be behind a lot of weird experiences, even a lot of 'alien' sightings.
 
McAvennie_ said:
Always an explanation... :)

Your fortean experiences sound very similar to mine. A brief moment of half glanced fortean activity....swiftly followed by a full explanation showing it to be a very normal occurrence. It's a pisser ain't it?
 
Bigfoot73 said:
Reminds me of a story on a thread here somewhere - two boys playing in the local woods who got warned about some paedo, who turned out to be planning their abduction, by a big cartoon-ish tabby cat.
Cartoon characters again, like all those fairy sightings. Something on the other side playing guardian to children, keeping them safe yet making them behave?


Pretty much what i was thinking, like "it" wants to give you a bit of a scare and plucks the image out of your mind.
 
Wish I could find that cat story - the entity did actually name the man, which implies some intelligence that isn't just tied to the specific location of the woods they were playing in.
Weirder and weirder.
 
I was lying in bed in a half sleep one day and got this feeling that someone was going to come into my room. I had not properly awoke and thought it was my dad coming up to get me up for school, because of this my head was below the blankets hoping and praying I wouldn't have to leave my bed. I felt the presence of someone approach and stand over me and it was then that I realised that I was twenty five years old and lived on my own and I froze, I can't remember how long I lay there in fear probably only a few seconds until I felt the presence go. I did not look up, I regret that.

That was probably down to my sleep or lack of. The next one wasn't.

I was about twelve years old and staying at my grans, she had just put me to bed. I had sat up a while probably reading a comic. I got the fright of my life when the window beside me started rapping, a loud insistent knock. It was too high a window to reach from the ground without a large ladder and no one would have been outside my grans yard, no way the dog would have eaten them. It's hard to say how long the knocking went on for, perhaps twenty mins, but it put a fear in me. I kept telling myself it was a branch or something but there where no trees near the window. My mind was saying if I open this curtain there's going to be a vampire outside asking if they can come in.

That's it. Funny I had not thought about the latter story for a while, but it's my grans birthday today.
 
i have posted this somewhere on here ... coming downstairs to find haunted childs fisher price tv set turning itself on repeatedly one night !

and one i havent posted i dont believe ... after a "fake" ouija board session the spirit of a young girl walked through me and stole the breath from my body for about a minute !

the tv set one was scariest but the ouija spirit one was emotionally charged
 
OneWingedBird said:
Reminds of the bit in Salems Lot with the vamp outside the window.

I always thought of lost boys. Pretty sure I hadn't seen it at that point but something must have made me think vampire.

Just thought it could have been fright night.
 
DiabolicalMasterspy said:
I have a vague feeling that I've read a few similar stories over the years, usually in those second hand 'True Ghost Stories' that all Forteans buy at the jumble sale as kids. I don't have any to hand right now, but rest assured, that you aren't alone. Also, my sister once watched a huge luminous blob traverse her bedroom one night...

This reminds me of something that happened to me but it wasn't in any way scary - just unusual. I do shifts and as a consequence my body clock is a mess so I wake up at random times in the night. In the early hours of one morning when it was still dark, I woke up and immediately turned to my left where I saw a kind of small green-luminous swirl projected onto the wall, I watched it swirl slowly for a second and then it just closed in on itself and vanished!

I live in a ground floor flat and on my right is the bedroom window, the curtains of which I always keep closed, however I didn't have time to look to the right to see who or what was projecting the image! :-O
 
ChangLallam said:
The activity of the animal beings has become acutely active everywhere on this earth. Bodies do not get time to booty a blow for a while. With the accretion use of altered gadgets of Gps Jammer, the possibilities of accepting the aboriginal of blow accept absolutely finished. The adaptable phones or the corpuscle phones are some of these accessories that accumulate the bodies consistently in blow with the alfresco world...
You are Professor Stanley Unwin, and I claim my £5! :D
 
Most frightening thing that happened to me I now think was a lot to do with 'mass hysteria', but it was terrifying at the time. (I'll try to keep this short as I can with the basic details).

I was fifteen and going to lessons with a Catholic nun (I thought at the time I might become a Catholic, but didn't). Anyhow, I had a large crucifix I wore, but also a Rosary that I used at times.

I had booked to go on a school trip to Wales - like an outward bound course, where you canoe, hike, abseil, do a bit of caving, and when I was packing took the crucifix off because doing all that activity I didn't want it catching on anything. My younger sis carefully placed my Rosary among my clothes in the case. I said I wouldn't need it, but she was insistent.

The trip was in March, and it was a cold one; we had snow, and there was ice on the canal where we canoed, but it was fun, if tiring. The group that went was drawn from all our year at school and I didn't know any-one that well; we moved in different friend-groups, but it was actually a very good bonding experience.

The girls slept in two dorms, one on one floor and one on the floor below; same with the boys, and the girls bathroom/showers/toilets were on the landing just below my dorm, next to the other girls dorm.
It was a big old house, as these places tend to be, and if there was any 'atmosphere' to be honest I was too knackered when we returned from our day's activities to notice it.

I think on the third night, some-one told me that the girls from the other dorm were doing a Ouija board, had been every night. At that time I didn't really know what that was except vaguely, and didn't take much notice. At about 8.p.m. and I decided to go and have a shower. The bathroom was empty for a time, before the door crashed open and some girls came in dragging another. I thought she was ill or having a fit. I'd never seen any-one look quite so white.

Through the babble of semi-hysterical explanations - given more to the male teacher outside the door than me - it transpired that they'd been doing this Ouija board trying to contact the dead mother of one of the boys -- whose father was remarrying.
The girl they brought in had started crying, and saying, 'Don't let it get me,' then the glass they were using flew across the room. The girl had got up, run to the door, couldn't open it - neither could any-one else for a while - and collapsed.

They asked me to hit her, to snap her out of her hysteria, so I did, and she fell down again. I rode horses then and had quite a good arm, but then she got up and started screaming 'Don't let it get me.' It didn't look as if she could see us at all.

There was an incredibly horrible atmosphere in the bathroom; it was freezing, and I got the impression of things banging on my brain, as if they wanted to get in. That feeling was so strong I don't like thinking of it even now. I was absolutely certain that if those 'things' got into my head, I would be lost, that to outward appearances I would be irretrievably mad, and in a mental health facility for the rest of my life. I felt I was fighting to keep them out.

At bottom, I am quite pragmatic, and more likely to attribute creaky floors to settling wood than ghostly footsteps, but apart from the hysteria, something was not right. I thought then, 'Oh, Rosary.' I was really thinking of vampires and crosses, relict of many Hammer Horror films! but I ran out to get it from my case and put it on the girl, who grabbed it and fell down again, crying, then gradually calmed down.

The teacher in the meantime, understandably furious, had gone to break the glass and find his female colleague to deal with the girls.

It was not a good night, Every-one went around in 'clumps' which is funny to look back on, but no-one wanted to be alone. It was a wild night, too blizzards over the mountains, and no-one could sleep. Then at 12.00 all our alarm clocks went off (we all had one, as we had to be up for breakfast by 7. a.m.) That helped no-one.

The next day we went out in the vans and passed military vehicles, and saw soldiers walking back to them; they'd lost a young soldier in the mountains in the blizzard, and his body had been found. Very sad; that didn't improve the mood of doom either. It was probably a good thing that our daily activities were so physical that they wore us out, so that we could sleep the remaining nights and not turn into nervous wrecks. The use of Ouija boards as a recreational activity was obviously banned!

When we got back to school the story went round, and people started coming up to me and telling me I had banished a demon O_O. They thought it was really exciting. It wasn't. Mass hysteria or no, it was the most petrified I have ever been, because of the strangeness of the fear; there was nothing visible to cause it. It was like being attacked by invisible assailants. I've never felt like that before or since.

A week later the man who was getting remarried hung himself, and his son, who'd been on the trip, found him in the garage :(. That, naturally, began rumours of a curse on those who meddled with such things as Ouijas.

Whatever happened, I still wouldn't touch them myself. Yes, mass hysteria and teenagers, but I do maintain something was extremely wrong for a while, and give those things a wide berth.
 
Fanari_LLoyd you are the first I've seen on here who had that experience of something trying to get into your mind like I had.
I can't remember where I posted it but it was terrifying and I was trying to get rid of it but times tables didn't work. Nothing else did until I told it to get out in the name of Jesus Christ which I'd read somewhere was part of the exorcism ceremony.
 
What a horrendous experience.

We have whole threads on Ouija boards and the consensus is that they're not a good thing whether people believe in them or not, especially where teenagers're involved.
 
Oh, I thought most people would poo-poo what I experienced. There was hysteria involved, but I was not hysterical, probably because I had not been involved with the actual Ouija. I was very worried about the girl, and I do realise she could have been acting, but I've seen people genuinely white since then, and I am not sure it's possible to act yourself that colour. So, I was concerned, (and genuinely bewildered at first) but not in hysterics.

Isis177 - You, too? I had a mental image of the bathroom where I was not existing and it was just me in some dark void with hideous things clamoring and laughing beating at my mind. I suppose that is real terror of the unknown, because I have since been made very afraid by people, but they were a known quantity, this was not. It was horribly, sickeningly alien.

I am pretty sure I was silently screaming 'God help me,' or something, but it was then I remembered the Rosary. By that point it was a case of 'This is like a horror film, so I will treat it like a horror film.' Lol, I am sure there was a part of me saying, 'This is completely insane.' It certainly felt it. Far outside the boundaries of anything I had experienced then, and I've never (thank goodness) experienced that since.

It's still taken me years to write it down, and I am in my 40's now. I would always mentally back away from it because I just didn't like remembering.

We have whole threads on Ouija boards and the consensus is that they're not a good thing whether people believe in them or not, especially where teenagers're involved.

I have seen threads, here and elsewhere, Escargot, and to be honest they stir memories too much for me to read them. But yes, I would say 'Keep away from that stuff' if any-one asked me. Perhaps there are very experienced practitioners who are fine with them, but definitely not teens who do it for s__t and giggles.

I know teens like the 'thrill' factor, which may account for many tales of things 'going wrong', but there seems to be too many stories by adults to completely discount there is something dangerous about them.
 
Fanari_Lloyd said:
I know teens like the 'thrill' factor, which may account for many tales of things 'going wrong', but there seems to be too many stories by adults to completely discount there is something dangerous about them.

My feeling has always been that the Ouija board allows its user access to the part of the human subconscious humans usually do not find. If I recall correctly, Carl Jung found this space once while dreaming and had to confront a worm (of the Lovecraftian variety). Yes, here we go: http://www.worlddreambank.org/M/MANEATER.HTM

In semi-Jungian terms, if human beings are temples of the divine, they are also temples of the demonic.

In our Western culture, we spent a lot of time looking at or for the divine, the Light; forgetting that light casts a shadow. The Ouija board, I think, turns its user towards the shadow, where the demons live.

That's really hard to take, especially if you realize that the shadow is as much a part of yourself and has a much "right" to exist as does the light. What you think of as demons trying to take over your mind are really always there. Of course, if they do take over, you will land in prison or the mental ward.

If the light takes over, I'm not sure what happens, but such an act would be as unbalanced as the shadow taking over.

We humans really do exist in a middle way. We perform a balancing act everyday.

Now, as to the practical business concerning why the Ouija board (which is technically a game) should have this effect on people is a good question, and should be investigated and compared to anything else we can find that has this effect.
 
Fanari_Lloyd my experience was not from using ouja. I had gone to visit a friend and there was a woman there I had never met. She suddenly announced she was going into a trance and called on a 'gatekeeper'.
She started talking in this guttural voice saying I was not using my gifts and I could see these shapes around her.Then the horrible feeling of something attacking me psychically. I kept shaking my head to try and throw it off and my friend got her rosary out.
As I said it was difficult to get rid of whatever it was and I always avoided that woman after that.
 
Isis177 said:
Fanari_LLoyd you are the first I've seen on here who had that experience of something trying to get into your mind like I had.
I can't remember where I posted it but it was terrifying and I was trying to get rid of it but times tables didn't work. Nothing else did until I told it to get out in the name of Jesus Christ which I'd read somewhere was part of the exorcism ceremony.

Something like this has happened to me.

At age 19 or so, I was on the subway in Toronto, going out to meet friends at a nightclub if I recall. At one point while riding, I suddenly began to feel a heavy pressure closing in on my mind, hard to explain really, not a physical pressure but a strange mental heaviness like something closing out my thoughts. There was a physical component, however, as the feeling eventually brought on a physical sensation of acute malaise and nausea.

It came on so suddenly that I didn't know quite what was going on and my first thought was perhaps it was an event like a seizure or something, though now I know that's not what seizures are like. It was then that I noticed a man standing in front of me, staring at me quite intently. He just looked like an ordinary man, maybe mid-30's, jeans and a jacket, sandy brown hair and a mustache. Nothing at all odd about him. But I had the strong impression that he was trying to "break into" my mind. In fact the sight of him began to cause me to feel an intense revulsion, and I remember making quite a face at him, and he just stood in front of me, staring, with no expression.

At this point I was so ill and so disoriented that my only thought was to get off the train and escape, so I quickly ran off the train at the next stop, which was several stations before mine. The relief was near instant and I broke down in tears. Even now recalling the sensation makes me feel depressed and anxious. Never happened before nor since. The whole incident had lasted only a handful of minutes.

I've thought about this incident a lot over the years but I can't come to a decent explanation for it. I don't believe in demons or psychic vampires and am not religious in the slightest. Perhaps it was just some kind of mental illness. It could be that I suffered a panic attack or something like that and somehow fixated on the man in question. Though I have no idea what would prompt such a thing, it seemed to come out of nowhere and like I said, it was a one-off experience. Anyway, not exactly like what others have posted, but I think it's in a similar vein.
 
This woman had looked quite ordinary as well, rather like the pictures of Anne Boleyn. As well as being terrified I too felt anger and when she said I wasn't using my gifts i don't know if I said it aloud but certainly thought that I would rather not if I was going to be taken over.
When my friend questioned her later she said she hadn't done anything and that it was just me. I had gone by this time.
 
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