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Sorry to keep this thread off topic, but this put me in mind of the late, great Professor Stanley Unwin: But back to ghosts on the Tube....

Hmmmm. There could be ways round all of that. Perhaps he was some sort of street magician - and magicians pride themselves in achieving the seemingly impossible through sheer ingenuity. The newspaper might have acted as a sort of shield hiding what he was up to. As regards to him having `three...

For me the salient points are: *You had a suspicion at the time that the man reading the paper had something to do with it (and the phenomenon finished after he had hastily left). Our first hunches are often correct. * The `foot` was not behaving like an ordinary foot - but wriggling about...

I quite liked the second presenter's manner of presentation in that it was simple but quite cogent (although the `between 2000 and 2002` thing began to grate with me). Let's dive straight into mundane possibilities first. So the area had a golf course. Could it also have - or have had -a...

Yes, I have always framed Punch as an upmarket version of Private Eye. Indeed, I have tended to regard it as a bit out of my league in class terms, unlike Eye. It was the reading matter of barristers and...dentists. Back in the day, the word on the street was that you didn't ever have to buy...

Who - and where - are all these people who `believe in the Loch Ness Monster`? Are they all Japanese perhaps? It seems to me that any mention of the topic in the UK is like;ly to elicit a fond smirk and one which is quickly followed by a predictable remark about Whisky consumption. I'm a...

As for IHTM tales my clear favourite - and I've name checked this before on some other thread, so apologies for the dejavu - is the one from a one-off poster who related a tale of when he and a few recently graduated friends were touring the South West of England. They were all staying in a...

Men's sartorial choices have widened quite considerably over the past few decades, at least in America and Western Europe. Men can (without ridicule) wear a wider variety of colours now than in the recent past. The wearing of shorts has become commonplace - and is even allowable in some work...

This is a fascinating article - but just how true is its central contention viz that interest in ghosts is very much the thing nowadays? That the word on the street and the tittle-tattle in the workplaces is all of things spectral? She is writing from Sydney, Australia so possibly her comments...

This puts me in mind of a slightly mysterious phenomenon that has taken place in the last - fifteen? twenty? - years, and that is the decolourisation of the automobile. I'm not sure when this happened exactly but I can well recall that well into the early Noughties people's cars came in a range...

DASTUR (Tradition) (Kazakhstan, 2023). With a lurid promotional poster and provocative title, this film has been released in the winter/New Year holiday period in Kazakhstan - when the usual home grown fare consists of anodyne `family comedies`. It was bound to cause a stir - and so it has. By...

With respect, sir, this very request highlights the problem that we are discussing here! A typically misanthropic, cynical - but insightful bit of grumpery,. The trouble is, I can remember the world of zines*. In those there were often some pretty nasty swipes at people. There was just less of...

This is a great story - the little mysteries are so often the most interesting! The desire to eat and drink is much more dependent on our state of mind than we generally realise. I normally have quite a strong appetitie for both food and drink and I rarely need much inducement to do either...

There is a fascinating new article by a Ross Barkan - an award winning `investigative journalist` based in New York - published in The Guardian. He claims that a new era of Romanticism is afoot and that it will be a response to the failed promises of the software age and the failures of medical...

I haven't been watching Doctor Who since nigh on 15 years. There are two reasons for this. Firstly I have been living abroad for most of that time and secondly, from at least Tennant onwards I no longer feel that the show is at all aimed at my demographic and am okay about that and happy to cut...

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959) I am a latecomer to this one and I know that, for example Stephen King waxes lyrical about it and it has become commonplace to describe it in terms of being `the best ghost story ever wtritten` and so on (a label I'd reserve for Henry...

Good for him! I did the same thing about fifteen years back. It was a combination of finding myself in a country where it was hard to find decent coffee but was great as far as tea was concerned and also reading a piece about Toyah Wilcox having given up coffee (not in favour of tea, admittedly)...

Wells, H.G and Welles, Orson: join the dots. Well it did in fact happen. Weirdly, Wells was in Saint Antonio in the States to address the US Brewers Association and Radio KTSA used the occaision to - rather fawningly - get him to meet up with his namesake who had not so long ago caused a...

De Alfonce Tennis: The Superlative Game of Eccentric Champions: it's History, Accoutrements, Rules, Conduct and Regimen by J.P Donleavy. This Donleavy romp pretty much defies description. It presents itself as a study of an elaborate game derived from tennis which Donleavy would have us believe...

If you are drawn to the ghost tale - cum-murder mystery crossover then you need look no further than The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice by Wilkie Collins (1878). Collins is best known for The Moonstone and The Woman in White and this one has been somewhat overshadowed and...

I've forgotten his name but the husband of Catherine - whom she cuckolds in favour of Heathcluiff - comes across as a reasonable and decent enough guy. He is, however, badly treated by all of the other characters and the narrative itself - for being so sane! There are times when Heathcliff...

I normally stear well clear of conspiracy theories and would include the idea that Putin has already died in that box -however, this is contemporary Russia were talking about and the stage managed nature of much of their statecraft is undeniable. And then Konstantin of the vlog `Inside Russia`...

Yes, I am also someone who suffers from this nagging sense that in my youth I was advised to spell `dilemma` with a silent /n/ after the first `m`. Of all the so called Mandela Effects (and I notice that they are diminishing in volume since the first flush of them six or so years back) this one...

Tor (Kazakhstan, 2023). As this film is quintessential `psychological horror` - albeit with the accent on the first word, I think it just about belongs here. A youngi man named Arman finds himself to be in a maximum detention centre somewhere in present day Kazakhstan with no idea of how he...

Er, hello..!? Is nobody going to review Hammer Horror's Doctor Jekyll for me? It's in cinemas! @ramonmercado ? Or am I going to have to track it down in some obscure far flung cinema here and watch it dubbed into Russian with Kazakh subtitles in the middle of the night? Come on guys, pull...

My first proper teaching abroad job was in the early noughties and iinvolved me working in a moderrn, smallish gas and oil city* in West Siberia in the Russian Federation. All the foreign teachers were allocated their own flats - and these were of the late Soviet variety and situated in blocks...

When learning a language, the real spoken language as practsed by real people - with all their sloppiness and colloquialisms - and without context or lips to read is the hardest thing of all to catch. I picked up some of what Krepestnoi mentioned but otherwise couldn't make much sense of it...

I find myself growing more sceptical of everything by the month these days. Nevertheless, I'll throw alleged `abnominable snowman` footprints in the snow of the kind usually shot by mountaineers in the Himalayas and the mountains of Nepal and such relatively remote areas. Even David...

With the greatest of respect - for this is an excellent bit of detective work - but, really,I think you are in danger of falling down your own rationalist rabbit hole here. Here are the problems I have with your hypothesis: * As you say, the release of the film `That'll Be The Day` was several...

I don't know whether to laugh or cry! So that lamented British institution - Hammer Horror Films-rides out again and they've produced a reboot of my all time favourite horror legend - Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I ought to be biggly excited, and I sort of am, but for the wrong reasons. It...

This post absolutely nails the whole thing as far as I'm concerned! The woman's proportions only seem odd if you imagine (as most of us have been doing) that everyone in the picture is sat around the same table. Look again, however and consider the possibility that most of the women on the...

The version I saw at the cinema was in Russian, but it had Kazakh subtitles. Being a post-Soviet country, Russian is still a commom language in Kazakhstan, but they have their own Turkic language too which they are trying to sustain and promote. However. the fact that the trailer has English...

Bruce Lee was a Chinese American and quite possibly some of the people around him at the promotional end of things were too. There are certain grammatical oversights that even naturalised and advanced non-native speakers of English almost invariably make.. These include: not knowing when and...

Some psychology researchers have won the Ignoble Prize for Literature for their attempt to study the phenomenon of Jamais Vu - as detailed here: https://theconversation.com/jamais-vu-the-science-behind-eerie-opposite-of-deja-vu-213596 Jamais Vu is said to be the reverse of the better known...

Just out from Kazakhstan comes Vzaperti (Locked In) ( not to be confused with an American film of the same name from 2020.) In this psychological chiller, a man (in present day Kazakhstan) named Max drives to a city to meet his mates Dan who is involveD IN family party at a flat. He arrives...

Blimey! This is a blast from the past! Since writing the O.P seven years ago, things have moved on a bit (indeed, I like to think that I was anticipating the changes). For one thing The Creature Feature, the loss of which I lamented, is back with a vengeance in the form of the hugely successful...

There's a bit of an `either/or` presumptrion in a lot of the posts here. Either Brand is being taken down by media bigshots because he is troublesome to them OR he is a bad apple who is facing long overdue pushback from years of bad behaviour. It is possible for both takes to be simultaneously...

For me, the most significant feature of this case is the noise that the incident is associated with. It gets described variously as like a helicopter and a vacuum cleaner. It was loud - and penetrating enough - to be heard by the adults in the same environs, one of whom was hard of hearing. Now...

Being both someone who lives abroad for much of the time as well as something of a techorefusenik, I am somewhat starved of printed Fortean matter (ditto science fiction and horror novels - although to a lesser extent). I can access bookshops which sell some English language books, but almost...

Golden-oldie time. If you think of Hammer Horror, you think of Dracula, Frankenstein Must Die (et al) and, maybe The Hound of the Baskervilles but The Two Faces of Doctor Jekyll from 1960 gets oddly left out of this roll call. As far as I know this was Hammer's only attempt to make an...

It's the Willie Rushton detail that interests me most about this. It's interesting that the dreaming mind borrows actors and celebrities to act out parts in our dreams if that role cannot be played by anybody that we know. They don't need to be paid - and the slight snagette that they might be...

Yes, I agree with Fanari and James in that Astral Projection (essentially a self-induced Out -Of-Body-Experience, for the unititated) is the best familiar fit as to what all this `Reality Shifting` malarkey that the Young Generation have now, is all about. I was first introduced to the idea of...

I've noticed that my phone (also a Samsung, but a different model) will sometimes spontaneously light up in the night - as though someone has pressed the activate buitton or touched the screen - even though I'm nowhere near it.

Roland Watson's is usually worth listening to, and here's his take on all this: http://lochnessmystery.blogspot.com/2023/08/some-noteable-photographs-from-loch-ness.html Apparently there is a sequence of fifteen - 15! -pictures. Also, many of the uncropped ones do indeed show the Loch Ness...

Our family had a similar torch - or lamp really - when I was growing up in the sevenIties, but of a slightly different design - circular rather than box-like. The top part of the torch could definitely be made to flash on and off as, like you, we kids had endless fun putting it on on the dark...

Empire V (Russia, 2022). This urban fantasy extravaganza is the brainchild of the Russian director Victor Ginzburg, (who now resides in the States) and is based on the famous novel by the Russian author Voctor Pelevin. Ginzburg already has form in this area, having produced the well regarded...

Yithian posted about this this bit of local folklore a few months ago. (I've forgotten the title of the post) It just so happens that I hail from the Merseyside area and I do recall this as a bit of regional hearsay. It was my dad (who was not at all interested in `Fortean` type stuff - quite...

Damn, you're right Simon! Mea culpa! That'll learn me not to open my metaphorical gob before re-reading the O.P thoroughly! So the mystery remains....

Sorry to be pessimistic, but I feel that the waters have been well and truly muddied with this case. There have been so many proposed sources of the photo, so many subsequent mock ups of it, so much speculatiion and such a wide signal to noise ratio:...and now someone is proposing that the...

A fascinating story! There is a possible mundane explanation. Perhaps the lecturer was a fellow schoolmate. I am assuming that neither of you is all that young and that your overall looks follow on from that fact (sorry, but your brief descriptions in your post do suggest as much). So I imagine...