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Mind if I make a comment ? I 've just drunk a bottle of IKEA cough syrup and everything is coming up synchronous. I've planned a trip to Avebury for Thursday, not having visited since I was a teenager and my mate was being 'asked' to move on from outside the Pub by the local Constabulary (he said he was waiting for the bus, they said it wasn't a Bus Stop, he said it was where the bus stopped (correct, but the stones weren't the only ones in a mood ).
Walking through St Mary's Churchyard near Thame last year I spotted the words "How deep is your love" on the back of a large ornate tombstone. 'About 6 feet' I thought unkindly, I mean, what chav commissions such a large monolith and carves a Bee Gees' lyric on it ? ('Stayin' Alive - Not !' ) Saw on the front it was Robin Gibb. Ah, sorry mate.
Aww love this! RIP Robin Gibb.

Obviously something is trying to tell us of an Avebury/Bee Gees connection. Perhaps you could try and hold a seance when you visit and try and speak to one of the Gibbs? Or maybe sing How Deep is Your Love inside the Kennet Barrow, see if it opens up a portal?
 
Mind if I make a comment ? I 've just drunk a bottle of IKEA cough syrup and everything is coming up synchronous. I've planned a trip to Avebury for Thursday, not having visited since I was a teenager and my mate was being 'asked' to move on from outside the Pub by the local Constabulary (he said he was waiting for the bus, they said it wasn't a Bus Stop, he said it was where the bus stopped (correct, but the stones weren't the only ones in a mood ).
Walking through St Mary's Churchyard near Thame last year I spotted the words "How deep is your love" on the back of a large ornate tombstone. 'About 6 feet' I thought unkindly, I mean, what chav commissions such a large monolith and carves a Bee Gees' lyric on it ? ('Stayin' Alive - Not !' ) Saw on the front it was Robin Gibb. Ah, sorry mate.
Aww love this! RIP Robin Gibb.

Obviously something is trying to tell us of an Avebury/Bee Gees connection. Perhaps you could try and hold a seance when you visit and try and speak to one of the Gibbs? Or maybe sing How Deep is Your Love inside the Kennet Barrow, see if it opens up a portal?
 
Or maybe sing How Deep is Your Love inside the Kennet Barrow, see if it opens up a portal?

More likely I'd get a request to move on by the local Constabulary - they hate Outsiders conjuring up incongruous anomalies
 
Good question. Gibbet Street in Halifax is apparently where the last guillotine to operate in England was situated. Hence "From Hell [obvious], Hull [press gangs] and Halifax [close shaves], may the good Lord preserve us!" I don't know that the body was then left on display, though.

Isn't a gallows specifically for hanging people from the neck until dead?


There's a pub in Pellon Lane in Halifax called The Running Man, the story is that if you could get your head out of the way of the blade when the pin was pulled and run over the town boundary situated at Hebble brook you were then free.
 
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Apparently these couples had to have neighbours willing to back up that they hadn't been shouting at each other! ..

Some of my best arguments with my ex husband were held in that kind of 'don't let the neighbours know' passive-aggressive hiss. Everyone around would probably have sworn we never argued at all!

We rarely did, actually. He just told me what to do, and I did it.

So we would have been eating bacon sandwiches forever, eyeballing one another evily and silently annexing the brown sauce.
 
We rarely did, actually. He just told me what to do, and I did it.

No offense to you (or him) but it sounds like a good thing he's your ex .. the Mrs is very stubborn and so am I (we're both Taurus if you believe in that sort of thing) but neither of us dominate each other on a daily basis .. we both know that when either of us finally puts our foot down, we'll both submit and do what the other one wants (with a bit of grumbling). Two bulls facing off to each other would get way too nasty otherwise.
 
There's a pub in Pellon Lane in Halifax called The Running Man, the story is that if you could get your head out of the way of the blade when the pin was pulled and run over the town boundary situated at Hebble brook you were then free.
I can't tell you how much I love that explanation, thank you. Much better than my baffled Stephen King tie-ins. Got to confess I always managed to resist the temptation to call in for a pint - is it even still a going concern (the pub, I mean, not the gibbet)?
 
There's a pub in Pellon Lane in Halifax called The Running Man, the story is that if you could get your head out of the way of the blade when the pin was pulled and run over the town boundary situated at Hebble brook you were then free.

There’s a pub in Lincoln named the Strugglers after those who didn’t escape, and experienced a rather less than “Dream Topping”.

maximus otter
 
I can't tell you how much I love that explanation, thank you. Much better than my baffled Stephen King tie-ins. Got to confess I always managed to resist the temptation to call in for a pint - is it even still a going concern (the pub, I mean, not the gibbet)?


The clientele are, well, characters!!!! It fits nicely with this thread, I once drove past it at 1:30 on a Tuesday afternoon and they were fighting in the road!!!!
 
Somewhere I wrote about playing a game of cricket in a tiny remote village in Norfolk that had pretty much the same vibe to it.... north and West Norfolk are regions that have the same sense of remoteness to them that you're describing in Scotland, one of the few areas of England where you're on the margins, at the edge, with small population centres bypassed by everywhere else, a land which time forgot. Is this a manifestation of the same phenomenon? I want to find those original postings now; I recall the place wasn't an impossible distance away from the Royal weekend cottage at Sandringham and speculated about it having a royal warrant to provide village idiots to the Crown...

True about Norfolk. I was there for a few months and got to know a farmer who had built his own hardcore road across a large field so he could drink in the bar of the local hotel and drive home.
 
No offense to you (or him) but it sounds like a good thing he's your ex .. the Mrs is very stubborn and so am I (we're both Taurus if you believe in that sort of thing) but neither of us dominate each other on a daily basis .. we both know that when either of us finally puts our foot down, we'll both submit and do what the other one wants (with a bit of grumbling). Two bulls facing off to each other would get way too nasty otherwise.

Thanks Swifty. That was the ex that I kicked out, leaving me to bring up five kids alone. It was still better than being belittled and patronised on a daily basis!
 

Now I have guilt over possible disrespect shown to Mr Gibb, his family and his fans and the good people of Thame welcoming their local lad home. Still don't like the stone but everyone deals with grief differently. My parents' headstone simply has their name and year of birth and death - below my father's is the legend 'Farmer' and below my mother's is 'Farmer's Wife'.
 
Oh dear! No idea which bit of Merthyr you were in, and yes, as a local I will admit that it’s a bit hairy in parts, but there are some halfway decent bits on the outskirts! If you should ever end up stuck there again give me a shout and I’ll point you in the direction of the better areas.
(Actually, I have my suspicions about where you were, but can’t place the pub.... any place names you can recall?)


Actually after having a look on google maps I may have done Merthyr a disservice. It seems to be just up the hill from Merthyr - Dowlais i think? In my defence it's a 10 minute walk from Merthyr by the looks of it so civilisation was probably quite near - I just didn't know what direction!. The pub that wasn't a pub was called the Tredegar Arms i think
 
Mind if I make a comment ? I 've just drunk a bottle of IKEA cough syrup and everything is coming up synchronous.
You've just given me the motivation to go to Ikea.

Walking through St Mary's Churchyard near Thame last year I spotted the words "How deep is your love" on the back of a large ornate tombstone. 'About 6 feet' I thought unkindly, I mean, what chav commissions such a large monolith and carves a Bee Gees' lyric on it ? ('Stayin' Alive - Not !' )
Your humor has resurrected my spirits.

This kind of thing never happens in America. Nearly everyone here is stuck in a car, so the overbearing presense of cars makes it extremely difficult to get pedestrian access to places such as cemeteries and creepy villages, and go traipsing around in them. We just have creepy strip malls, big box stores, parking lots and 6 lane roads. Oh, and luxury residential developments. There is so little "atmosphere" here. So depressing!
 
This kind of thing never happens in America. Nearly everyone here is stuck in a car, so the overbearing presense of cars makes it extremely difficult to get pedestrian access to places such as cemeteries and creepy villages, and go traipsing around in them. We just have creepy strip malls, big box stores, parking lots and 6 lane roads...There is so little "atmosphere" here. So depressing!

That is depressing, I love wandering through old graveyards and I have to say that most of the churches and villages in my part of the country are centuries old. But I'm sure there are many places in the vast American outdoors that have 'atmosphere' - we gave you most of our misfits and a good chunk of our religious nutters in the early years, they must have made an impact.
 
Twenty years ago and more a few of us used to watch PNE away. On the outskirts of where we were playing we would stop in a village nad have some dinner and a couple of pints before heading for the ground.

I recall heading for Mansfield one time and pulling into what I assumed was an old mining village where no one had a job anymore. We didn't even get out of the car, just reversed and moved on. We all felt really uncomfortable, and could sense eyes peering at us through net curtains like something out of Lovecraft novel.

Unfortunatley I never took a note of what the place was called.
Pity you cant remember the name, I am about a mile away from Mansfield, I could have popped down there
 
This incident is in no way supernatural, but it was so odd that it has stayed with me since it happened in, I think, 1989. Unfortunately, it being quite a long time ago, I cannot quite recall the name of the village, but it was Corsby or Corbslie or something very like that, and if you're driving along the A68 between Lauder and Earlston, it's about halfway along that bit of road and a mile or two to the east. It's so tiny that it's a hamlet rather than a village - really just a farm and a row of cottages, and Google Maps don't seem to recognise it as a place in its own right. I don't live in that area any more, but perhaps somebody who does will confirm that it actually exists (if it doesn't, this story gets a lot more Fortean).

Anyway, I was out walking on a Summer day, and I chanced to pass through this place. Suddenly, out of each cottage rushed an almost identical alsatian, all wearing those scary collars with spikes, and formed a circle around me, growling menacingly. Then out of each cottage came an almost identical man. They were really big burly blokes who looked a bit like Rod Steiger, only more so. They called the dogs off, smiled in what they presumably thought was a reassuring fashion, and said something along the lines of "It's all right, the dogs won't hurt you", but I could barely understand a word they said. The normal Scottish Borders accent isn't very broad - far less so than what you'll hear in Glasgow or Yorkshire. But these guys were just: "Fargly arfgle gargly gargle gahurr!"

And then their wives came out, and guess what - they were clones too, but looked nothing like the men - they were all skinny blonde waifs a bit like Sissy Spacek, only more so. So I said something politely meaningless, and left at a fast walk. It was about a quarter of a mile to the next bend in the road, and the whole time, they all stood motionless in the middle of the road watching me leave! Though possibly that was because their entertainment for the week was seeing me attempting to ignore the alsatian puppy (also with spiky collar) that followed me all the way, barking its little head off and trying ineffectually to eat my ankle. I'm afraid that once I was out of sight, I kicked the little brute. I don't normally kick dogs, but this one didn't respond to being shouted at, and it might very well have followed me forever being horrible (until it met my cat Demon).

I tell you, if somebody had started playing the banjo, I would have had a trouser accident while praying for a miraculous manifestation of Burt Reynolds with a bow! Or at least Ned Beatty to distract them while I ran away.
You had me unrtil you claimed to have kicked the dog.
 
It is no good if i do not know the location, Mansfield is a big place
 
I know of Dowlais in Merthyr. It is slightly outside the town and yes a bit odd I suppose. However Merthyr itself used to have a great nightlife many years back. I don;t know what it is like nowadays though and I should imagine like most towns in the valleys has been hit hard economically. Always found the people very friendly compared to other places. One place however I would recommend for total craziness and surrealism is the Wyndham Arms in the town itself. Used to be full of characters.
 
Hi all,

I'm trying to think if I've posted about this before. It comes secondhand, from younger brother (3 years difference), up in Nottinghamshire. In their mid 20s a group of him and his friends from back in Warwickshire all decided to move up to Nottingham, seeking a city to live in, but still with a bit of a provincial vibe to it. They rented all together in houses in Sherwood, Mapley and other places in and around Nottingham.

(The Mapley house was a bit bizarre (owned by a man living in Switzerland, with a jacuzzi, gym, questionable decor and trailing wiring which might have suggested that video cameras were once fitted in some of the bedrooms) but that's a story for a different thread.)

At weekends they'd often meet up and drive out around the surrounding smaller towns and villages, looking for Country pubs and the like to have a pint or two or a Sunday lunch.

One weekend in the mid-noughties they stopped by in one such small village, but were struck at quite how quiet it was. No sign of people around on what was quite a warm day (in April but still) struck them as being a little odd. But they had spotted a village pub that they decided to get a pint in. The pub itself appeared to be empty, beyond the bar staff. They ordered drinks and sat down. As the only customers.

I think it was my Brother's mate Chris who picked up on it first, but eventually, they all began to realise what they could hear in the background. It was an audio recording in German. A speech being given.

And it wasn't hard to work out which Austrian gentleman was delivering it.

They sat there, mostly in silence, sipping their pints to the soundtrack of what certainly appeared to be a certain Nuremberg Rally. They all felt rather uncomfortable, drank rather quickly, and decided to leave.

As they did one of them did decide to google the date of Hitler's birthday, and found that worryingly it tallied. They were all of the opinion that it couldn't be a coincidence, and that whoever the landlord was they were clearly trying to mark the birthday of the fallen dictator.

The went home rather quickly after that.

Unfortunately, I cannot remember the name of the village.
 
Hi all,

I'm trying to think if I've posted about this before. It comes secondhand, from younger brother (3 years difference), up in Nottinghamshire. In their mid 20s a group of him and his friends from back in Warwickshire all decided to move up to Nottingham, seeking a city to live in, but still with a bit of a provincial vibe to it. They rented all together in houses in Sherwood, Mapley and other places in and around Nottingham.

(The Mapley house was a bit bizarre (owned by a man living in Switzerland, with a jacuzzi, gym, questionable decor and trailing wiring which might have suggested that video cameras were once fitted in some of the bedrooms) but that's a story for a different thread.)

At weekends they'd often meet up and drive out around the surrounding smaller towns and villages, looking for Country pubs and the like to have a pint or two or a Sunday lunch.

One weekend in the mid-noughties they stopped by in one such small village, but were struck at quite how quiet it was. No sign of people around on what was quite a warm day (in April but still) struck them as being a little odd. But they had spotted a village pub that they decided to get a pint in. The pub itself appeared to be empty, beyond the bar staff. They ordered drinks and sat down. As the only customers.

I think it was my Brother's mate Chris who picked up on it first, but eventually, they all began to realise what they could hear in the background. It was an audio recording in German. A speech being given.

And it wasn't hard to work out which Austrian gentleman was delivering it.

They sat there, mostly in silence, sipping their pints to the soundtrack of what certainly appeared to be a certain Nuremberg Rally. They all felt rather uncomfortable, drank rather quickly, and decided to leave.

As they did one of them did decide to google the date of Hitler's birthday, and found that worryingly it tallied. They were all of the opinion that it couldn't be a coincidence, and that whoever the landlord was they were clearly trying to mark the birthday of the fallen dictator.

The went home rather quickly after that.

Unfortunately, I cannot remember the name of the village.

Put me in mind of South Oxhey.

Tell us more about the CCTV house!
 
Put me in mind of South Oxhey.

Checked with my brother. It was a village called Plumtree. Though this was well over a decade ago now.


Tell us more about the CCTV house!

That was a bit odd. It wasn't the first place they had rented in and around Nottingham. 3 of them had been in a much smaller place in Sherwood when they first moved to the area, but when they found this house in Mapperley they thought they'd hit the jackpot.

It was a large 5 bed detached place, somewhat hidden back from the road by trees and bushes, with plenty space to park 3 cars, and if they could get another 2 people to chip in with them it was affordable.

Luckily they had a mate who had just returned from a year abroad after University, he was willing. And a girl they'd been at school with (let's just initial her H) had just started a nursing training residency in Nottingham, and was also looking for somewhere. And she was willing to live in a houseshare with 4 blokes on the proviso that she got the largest room. A deal was struck. All was well.

And this place was huge. Large living room. Huge conservatory at the back, running the width of the house (which itself was pretty large). It had a two-car-sized garage, which had been converted into a gym. It even had a jacuzzi (though I don't think it got much in the way of use). It was a proper Party House to 5 early twenty-somethings. I can remember that my brother got a bit pissy with me, because this was his first proper house and first opportunity to throw a proper House Warming and despite inviting me I missed it. I did go up on a good number of occasions over the next 3 years or so, however. For the football, birthdays, Bank Holidays BBQs etc.

But there was still something a little odd about the place. It seemed so incongruous to have a house like this in the street it was in. The decor was modern, but it had a major nouveau riche vibe to it. Looked like it was dolled up for MTV cribs from the front of the house and reception areas. Other parts though were a little more dilapidated, with a very late 70s / early 80s vibe to them. A wood-panelled bar towards the rear of the house, for example. Tiny thing. Some booze left behind. Hard to say whose, past tenants or landlords.

And the guy who actually owned it wasn't living in the UK. He was in Switzerland. Zurich. Which made getting repairs done a little more difficult. It could take days, even weeks, to get messages relayed between the letting agents and landlord.

Of particular note, the bedroom decor was a little... garish. On one occasion I stayed in the master bedroom -normally belonging to H, who allowed me to kip there in her absence, while she was away on holiday. And beyond her better attempts to make the space her own, you couldn't get past the paint and papering job. Which had a very distinctive vibe of boudoir red and pink, and heart motifs to it. It had a... vibe to it. You know?

I also noted that there was a fair amount of distinctive AV cabling sticking through a point in the ceiling. Right in the corner of the room above the doorway, adjoining with an alcove wall for the en suite bathroom.

With fitted wardrobes taking up the entirety of the rest of that wall, it wasn't like there was anywhere that a TV or Audio unit could have been placed. The cables absolutely wouldn't have stretched from the corner anyway. The only thing I could think of was that there may have formerly been a CCTV camera mounted there. But if there had been, it would have been pointing directly at the bed. I can't 100% remember now, but I have a vague recollection of there being similarly abandoned wires in the en suite.

I mentioned this to my brother's mate Chris the following morning. He was like 'Yeahhhh. We did notice that when we were looking around the place. But we didn't want to mention it to H, in case it spooked her'.

There were similar cables in some of the other bedrooms, and when they moved in they went to considerable lengths searching for cameras and spyholes, out of paranoia. They never found anything, thankfully.

But it did raise certain questions about the place. I had suggested to them that they enquired with some of their neighbours. Try to find out about the owner. But I don't think they ever did. At least one of them had some suspicions that the place may have been used as a quiet suburban brothel, or something. But mostly they kept such thoughts to themselves while H was living with them. And it just remained this odd Party House they all lived in for a few years, until they either moved for Work or moved out with significant others.
 
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