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Minor Strangeness (IHTM)

I am sitting here at my desk this morning, checking emails, Twitter, Instagram, this forum, drinking a cup of coffee and eating some raisin/fruit toast when I feel that my right palm is damp.
Looking down, my palm is all bloodied from two small gashes, the larger one approximately 1 cm in length still bleeding.
All I've done this morning it get up, have a shower, make breakfast for my wife and I and sit down here. I've touched nothing sharper than a butter knife.
No idea what I could have done.
Minorly strange, but then it's Easter, so perhaps it's stigmata. o_O
Did you open any bottles? I have just cut myself opening a bottle of syrup to add to my coffee, on the little metal ring that the lids are attached to to keep the bottle sealed. I did notice it at the time but it might not be very noticeable if you are gripping the lid tightly as it is a bit painful on its own.
 
Can't find a thread devoted to "orbs" caught on camera?

this minor strangeness happened yesterday: copied from an Facebook Fortean disccussion thread.

The orb thing. You'd expect if they were dancing motes of dust in the air, or speckles on a not-cleaned-as-often-as-it-could-be camera lens, you'd get them on ALL your photos. but yesterday, on the officially permitted trip from "house arrest" into the Exercise Yard, I took a lot of pics with the same camera. Light conditions: cloudless blue sky, very warm and sunny throughout. so if orbs were dust particles, ideal for strong ambient light to catch them? Yet they only appeared on ONE photograph.

Place; Wellington Road, Stockport. turned in one direction for a clear shot of the "Wedding Cake"- Stockport Town Hall (to take advantage of the A6, normally nose-to-tail traffic, being completely empty - no vehicles in shot). No orbs. Turned to the building immediately behind me and took a few shots. bloody orbs EVERYWHERE. the possible Fortean significance of this is that until it was decommissioned and sold on by the NHS, this was Stockport Infirmary, the town's principal hospital for about 150 years (now "private apartments")

The only other place I ever got orbs on camera was when taking a few record shots of my grandparents' old home, where my father was brought up.
1587117986431.jpeg

The "Wedding Cake" - taken 16/04/20 at 4:00pm by the TH clock - thought it was earlier, 3:30-ish, but evidently wrong there!
Then turn over the road:
1587118007432.jpeg

Stockport Infirmary as was with lots and lots of bloody orbs - taken about a minute later

Photos were "shrunk" from their originals to fit uploading requirements for this site

Camera is a Canon SX610. (I think - model no is fading on the case, could read "SK510")
 
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The only other set of shots out of thousands where I got orbs on camera - my grandparents' home as was, Margate Road, Stockport
1587118822923.jpeg
 
...turned in one direction for a clear shot of the "Wedding Cake". No orbs. Turned to the building immediately behind me and took a few shots. bloody orbs EVERYWHERE.

Direction of the sunlight, i.e. dust motes silhouetted from one direction, then reflecting light when you turned 180°?

maximus otter
 
Could be - the direction sunlight is coming from could play a part. I can go with that as I'm not married to the idea that orbs have a psychic or a paranormal relevance (and the paranormal could just be a part of the "normal" spectrum that we haven't figured out yet). But strange that in the five or six years I've owned this camera and taken thousands of pictures with it, the orb phenomena has only happened to me twice, once at a place of personal emotional significance - remembering, with warmth and appreciation, some happy afternoons with my grandparents when I was five or six. I'd have loved there to be more, but first my grandmother died, my grandfather went into himself a bit afterwards and died a few years later. I was on Margate road three years ago for other things, the memories flooded back, took a few photos and... orbs. Therefore I could be personally biased towards there being more to it than merely light refracting around airborne dust or - at this time of year - pollen grains. (Got to watch that, a tendency towards bias confirmation!) Yesterday, though, a former hospital with 150 years of the usual sort of history of high human emotion - orbs. If I hadn't known this was a hospital I might have thought - one of those things...
 
You wandered downstairs at Emley Moor? The verb hardly seems to do the endeavour justice...
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I don't actually work up the top of the tower. It's not normally manned at all unless a fault condition summons a field engineer or rigger up the lift.

I work in the main building in the compound at the bottom of the tower. It is only two stories high but that's enough for a set of stairs. The national TV transmission control room is upstairs.
 
@AgProv your two pics of different Sides of the building do look like the lighting changed. If you look at the first, the sky is a bright blue and the second pic, rhe sky seems to show as grey. I too wondered if the lighting did affect something.
 
A rock has appeared in my front garden.

The garden is chippings (I know, horrible, but I can't do anything about it at present) with a membrane underneath to stop weeds. The chippings are all grey and evenly sized. Yesterday I noticed a rock about half the size of my fist had appeared among them. Not in the middle or where anyone could have thrown it to clear a path - it's up near the house, right by the cat's bowl.
 
A rock has appeared in my front garden.

The garden is chippings (I know, horrible, but I can't do anything about it at present) with a membrane underneath to stop weeds. The chippings are all grey and evenly sized. Yesterday I noticed a rock about half the size of my fist had appeared among them. Not in the middle or where anyone could have thrown it to clear a path - it's up near the house, right by the cat's bowl.

Someone doesn’t like cats?

maximus otter
 
Re-upping this old post because this happened again tonight, except this time, instead of a gunshot, it was a very loud popping sound, much like someone stomping on a Capri Sun pouch. Again, we all thought it had come from a different direction. We went around checking for anything thing that might have fallen or burst (like a lightbulb) and checked the electrical boxes in case anything seemed awry, but found nothing.

To add to the weirdness, the only person who didn't hear it tonight was my husband, who was asleep at the time. He was woken by all the kerfuffle in the house, though, so I asked if he'd heard the noise. He said no, but he'd heard it last night (Thursday). This was news to me, so I questioned him. He'd been out on the front porch when he'd heard the pop from inside. He'd gone in and asked the boys what it was, and they'd said they hadn't heard anything. He must have failed to mention it to me, as I'd been here and heard nothing then either.

I sent OH back to bed and asked the kids about what their dad had reported the night before. They all said that they can't recall either a noise or their dad asking them about it on Thursday night!

I'll quiz him again when he wakes up. In the meantime I'll be keeping an ear our for any further strangeness.

It wasn't a lemonade or other fizzy drink bottle, was it?

I have a bottle of lemonade in the kitchen, open and half used and sort of 'squeezed' in the middle. It expanded last night (or contracted, not sure) and the plastic let out the loudest 'crack' noise. Luckily I was in the room and worked out what it was, if I'd been elsewhere in the house I would have heard a loud 'bang' and not had the faintest idea where it came from!
 
A rock has appeared in my front garden.

The garden is chippings (I know, horrible, but I can't do anything about it at present) with a membrane underneath to stop weeds. The chippings are all grey and evenly sized. Yesterday I noticed a rock about half the size of my fist had appeared among them. Not in the middle or where anyone could have thrown it to clear a path - it's up near the house, right by the cat's bowl.
Ha, that's freaky! I have seen some dogs that like to carry rocks around for some reason. Even to the point of cutting their mouths. Perhaps foxes do the same? Or you could have had a dog come into your garden. Wet the rock then feel it. If it is slimey, that is probably saliva. Eww.
 
My front garden is enclosed, so unlikely to be a wandering dog, and a fox wouldn't last two minutes outside my house without my own dog raising the roof. I'll try to get a picture later.

Am just hoping that it's not something that's fallen off the house itself, although it doesn't look as though it has. It's just a rock. Bigger than the chippings, smaller than...well...a bigger rock.
 
My front garden is enclosed, so unlikely to be a wandering dog, and a fox wouldn't last two minutes outside my house without my own dog raising the roof. I'll try to get a picture later.

Am just hoping that it's not something that's fallen off the house itself, although it doesn't look as though it has. It's just a rock. Bigger than the chippings, smaller than...well...a bigger rock.
My garage has a large flat roof and when I first moved in, I noticed that large stones kept appearing on the roof. Took me a while to realise that large birds were dropping them. I have seen magpies using stones to break open the shells of snails, but I wonder whether birds do mistake stones for something edible and just drop them when they realise they are inedible.
Last year I found a rusty, earth covered exhaust U clamp next to my back door. I thought someone had tried to use it to smash a window to break in, but it was amongst what was clearly nesting material and I assume that a bird had dug it up mistaking it for a worm. Annoyingly it had been dropped from some height and when I checked it had dented the rear wing of my car. Stupid bird.
 
Just for fun, to demonstrate how weird night sounds can be.

As an experiment I laid my recorder on the balcony during the night. I was curious if I could "hear" more because of the silence of the lockdown. It's a 1,5 Gb MP3 file so I'm still discovering how to analyze it. These are four sounds edited from 15 minutes in the most silent part of the night. I have no idea what they are.

I suspect the fourth sound, a click, might just be a recording glitch or an error on the SD card.

I find the first sound most interesting. Is it a dog? But would a dog bark just once and then stay silent for 15 minutes?
 

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Just for fun, to demonstrate how weird night sounds can be.

As an experiment I laid my recorder on the balcony during the night. I was curious if I could "hear" more because of the silence of the lockdown. It's a 1,5 Gb MP3 file so I'm still discovering how to analyze it. These are four sounds edited from 15 minutes in the most silent part of the night. I have no idea what they are.

I suspect the fourth sound, a click, might just be a recording glitch or an error on the SD card.

I find the first sound most interesting. Is it a dog? But would a dog bark just once and then stay silent for 15 minutes?

Perhaps the first noise, and what you think may be a dog barking, is a 12 year old girl from Enfield trying to say Maurice. :D
 
Thanks Uair01! The birds in the second clip were lovely!
Do you know what the metallic sounds were in the last part of the clip?
 
Those are roadworks in our neighbourhood. I'm repeating the experiment. It should be more silent this weekend.
 
During the week I was woken up about 1.00 am by a loud shrieking noise coming from inside the house. So loud and weird that the old ticker was pounding. Ran downstairs and found our little cat jumping down from the window cill. What she had seen or heard I don't know, probably another cat, but I've never heard her make such a noise before. Could have been an urban fox I suppose. Only did it once and she was clearly unconcerned afterwards. Just weird, and exacerbated by the otherwise total silence at night during the current situation.
 
Yeah foxes are noisy buggers and it can scare the bejesus outta you if you've not heard it before.
 
Possums can sound like a person screaming. The first time I heard that in my backyard in the middle of the night, I didn’t know what was happening. But since I could see there was no one in my yard, I eventually figured it out.

@uair01 the first recording that you ask if it’s a dog bark, I hear it as a more metallic sound such as a chair scraping a floor. It could be my tablet speakers than might make it sound like that.
 
Possums can sound like a person screaming. The first time I heard that in my backyard in the middle of the night, I didn’t know what was happening. But since I could see there was no one in my yard, I eventually figured it out.

@uair01 the first recording that you ask if it’s a dog bark, I hear it as a more metallic sound such as a chair scraping a floor. It could be my tablet speakers than might make it sound like that.
Possums - horrible creatures and that weird coughing growling gives fornicating foxes a run for their money.
 
Last week I became Facebook friends with the actress Kristen Stewart (Twilight) for a little over 24 hours.
As anyone who has Facebook knows, on occasions it suggests possible people for you to be friends with.
Reading through some posts last week, some suggested 'friends' were offered to me, and amongst the usual friends of friends and relatives was for some reason, Ms Kristen Stewart.
I looked at her page and it was the actress herself, not a fan page, nor someone with the same name.
I thought ''What the hell'' and clicked the friend request button.
To my surprise, the next morning she had accepted me as a friend and so I spent the next 10 minutes looking through her recent birthday pictures with her girlfriend, also the actress Emma Roberts and some guy.
The next day she'd obviously realized the error of her ways and unfriended me.
 
Last week I became Facebook friends with the actress Kristen Stewart (Twilight) for a little over 24 hours.
As anyone who has Facebook knows, on occasions it suggests possible people for you to be friends with.
Reading through some posts last week, some suggested 'friends' were offered to me, and amongst the usual friends of friends and relatives was for some reason, Ms Kristen Stewart.
I looked at her page and it was the actress herself, not a fan page, nor someone with the same name.
I thought ''What the hell'' and clicked the friend request button.
To my surprise, the next morning she had accepted me as a friend and so I spent the next 10 minutes looking through her recent birthday pictures with her girlfriend, also the actress Emma Roberts and some guy.
The next day she'd obviously realized the error of her ways and unfriended me.

Well you are quite famous even if you've avoided the press in the last 4 decades.
 
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