Search results

Illegitimacy was quite common in much of England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and there was often little stigma attached, although there was always friction relating to the possible extra burden on the poor rates. Anyone who’s interested can look out my book ‘Courtship...

Sorry - I hit the post button by accident! The thing is, the story reminded me of a strange though unspectacular thing that happened to me when I was younger. I had had a sister called Margaret, born 15 years before me, who had died shortly after her first birthday. I was only vaguely aware of...

That's a really interesting story. The phrase you used, "Anna kept entering my consciousness" struck a strong chord withme

I thought the story with Julius Caesar and pirates was that his captors were going to ask for 20 talents of silver to release him, and he said ask for 50 talents as my family is very rich.It doesn't matter anyway as I'll get all the money back afterwards when I hunt you all down and crucify you...

I think I vaguely remember in the book Will Storr vs the Supernatural, when the author was out doing his various ghosthunting jaunts, often although he didn't experience anything very unusual he later found that at that precise time his girlfriend at their house did report paranormal activity...

Ar 22.22 and 22 seconds on 22/2/22 I raised a glass at home and cheered. I'd been waiting all day for that and still nearly missed it when something distracted me a minute earlier. I was wearing my stepcounter and had planned to have walked exactly 22,222 steps in the day but ran out of milk so...

Our junior purrer Splodge is a translocating cat. Yesterday morning I unlocked the cat flap and she jumped through, less than a second later I glanced out the window above (which has a full view of the ground and all the road) and she had instantly vanished. Even running at full speed there was...

I was reminded of the description by Casanova in his autobiography one January visiting the River Neva in North-West Russia. A hole was cut in the thick ice over the river, and the priest was baptising newly-born children by immersion. Apparently with his hands getting wet, one unfortunate...

I think there is some truth in the change in the workplace. I have worked for many years for a certain well-known High Street bookseller - let's call them Stoneswater - and the deterioration in how employees are treated has been astonishing. Now there is an entrenched culture of bullying which...

Some people have a SmartPhone. I seem to have a SmartArse. It instinctively knows - without any input from me - where it is safe to let off (at home, in bed, in front of the cats) and where it isn't (in public, at work). My conscious mind and body has no involvement in this. I remember when I...

I heard about something similar during my time in Cambridge. A long-standing fellow of one of the older colleges told me that during building works the coffin of a Fellow or Master from the distant past was unexpectedly uncovered. There was a hasty consultation, and they decided not to inform...

Could tardigrades live in the atmosphere of Jupiter? I mean, if they got there by a crashed spacecraft (like what happened on the moon). I'm not suggesting that as a feasible possibility, just wondering if they could cope with the radiation.

Sorry - my apologies.

It’s the ‘pale’ part of the saying that makes me a bit uncomfortable. Making a derogatory reference to the colour of someone’s skin … shouldn’t we have moved beyond that by now?

I had two small strange things happen to me very recently. Not earth-shattering, but still ... I checked my e-mail this morning and saw I had one from local government saying I owed council tax (I don't) so I dashed off a quick and pithy reply. I say 'quick' but one of our cats was pestering me...

I think Gertrude the pig should take over the company and sack Elon Musk.

Something I read today just triggered a memory of a strange event that happened to me many years ago. In 1986 I lived in Cambridge and I was rooting around for funding to start my PhD and doing some preliminary reading and research towards it. I was supporting myself by signing on, what they...

Just a tiny thing, but a few miutes ago Mrs Asparagus knocked one of our wine glasses onto the kitchen floor. It is a quite delilcate glass and it fell from over three feet onto a hard floor but when we picked it up it was undamaged. We thought it would be shattered but there wasn't even a crack...

Very minor strangeness really but it has us puzzled ... In the bookshop where I work our current best-selling book is "The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse" by Charlie Mackesy. By the late afternoon there was only one copy left on the main single title table but our computer system said two...

A curious but very small thing just happened this afternoon. Yesterday a small ornament, a candle holder made of thin porcelain, was knocked behind the piano during cleaning and broke. Today I got all the pieces together and tied them up in a plastic bag and put it on top of the piano. A couple...

In the Tamar valley where I grew up in the 1970s there was a local antiques dealer called Robin Bastard. He was quite a celebrated character at the time and even got a mention on That's Life because of his name. But as it happened my parents knew him socially and the name was an invention - his...

Good for you, escargot. I'm really sorry about your cat. This guy had five dogs on leads coming down our street and made little attempt to pull his dog off Bubble. He ran a dog charity in town and was very blase and unapologetic afterwards. The Police visited him and told him he'd have to muzzle...

Hello Ibis, my avatar is a picture of our much-loved cross-eyed tabby cat Bubble. He used to love to cling to the roof of the MG that parks across from our house. He died a few years ago aged 13, set on by a pack of dogs outside our front door. We still miss him. Your cat sounds lovely. I...

Looking back at the original post, it reminded me a bit of a much less spectacular experience Mrs Asparagus and I had a few years ago while on holiday in the Scottish Highlands. We were staying near Plockton and one morning took a walk to the top of a hill which overlooked a small watery inlet...

There is a roof-level cafe there which is next to an old palace where storks congregate. They all steal sticks from each others nests and are very funny to watch! Not fortean as such but very entertaining.

How awful, recycled, I really feel for you. Our cat squeak had to be put down six years ago and I still feel it as though I was cut with a knife. She went downhill after our tabby Bubble (see my avatar) who was her brother had been killed by a dog outside our front door. She just coudln't cope...

Clearly he was targeting the Regional GHQ.

When I was about 10 I had a friend on our street called Clive, he was 2 years older so I thought he knew everything. One day I was starting a diary and I had to write personal information on a form in the front. I put my name address and phone number and so on, but it asked my blood group so I...

Yes, I was thinking mainly about haunted castle-type ghosts. And it is interesting if you follow the logic of 'seeing' ghosts in the brain with the idea that the brain conjures up a standard average image, neither tall short or fat. I do like the idea that the mind perceives a ghostly signal of...

I have read a load of accounts of ghostly experiences but it occurred to me today that I have never come across a description of a fat ghost, or if you prefer the ghost of a fat person. I'm not saying there are absolutely no examples - though I'd like to hear some - but certainly nowhere near...

I came across something the other day which struck me as ironic. There was a lady from Norfolk who died just before the first world war whose initials were M.A.P. (I won't give her full name for reasons that will become obvious). She wrote in her will "my sole wish is that my name shall be...

When Kafka died he left all his unpublished works as well as letters etc, to his friend Max Brod with clear instructions that they should be destroyed unread. But Brod decided to ignore the instructions and published everything over the next ten years. Aren't we glad he did?

There is a well-known Fortean story associated with the Pink and White Terraces of course ... https://teara.govt.nz/en/1966/tarawera-phantom-canoe explains it quite well. It is an unusually well-documented case. A couple of years ago I took a boat trip on the lake and we went over the areas...

It isn't quite on the same scale, but Terry Wogan did something quite similar in the Song for Europe broadcast in 2007. Announcing the winner of the sing-off simultaneously with Fearne Cotton, they said the names of different acts. Apparently in the noise of the studio he misheard the name in...

Nothing very weird really, but two years ago our tabby cat Squeak was 13 years old and going downhill fast after her brother Bubble died. My wife and I were taking her to the vet often and had an appointment the next day. Squeak spent the day going round each of her favourite outdoor places...

This thread took me back to when my Dad died thirteen years ago at Derriford Hospital. He had been unwell for several weeks and had a big heart attack on the wards during the night so my wife and brother and I rushed there in the morning. His heart had stopped for 15-20 minutes before they...

At one time or another (usually at an airport, for some reason) I have ended up having to run up a 'down' escalator to get where I needed to be. But last year, for the first time, I got stuck somewhere and the only way out was to run down an 'up' escalator. And this was ten times harder! Why...

We sold the house in late 2013 and moved to Junee. I still sometimes wonder whether the present owners have experiences like we did or whether the presences in the house have moved on. Amazing story, _crypto. With regard to your last comment, I presume you haven't had any similar experiences...

Something a bit strange happened to me in a public toilet in my home town recently. On my way to the station quite early in the morning, I stopped for a call of nature in the loos and went into the cleanest cubicle, locking the door behind me. After a couple of minutes, someone else came into...

About fifteen years ago, my wife-to-be and I were in a small town in Ontario, on Canadian Thanksgiving day, waiting for a greyhound at the bus station. We were desperate to get to Brantford that night and public transport was very thin on the ground. There was a youngish guy at the bus station...

Yes, Sedlec is an amazing place. It's a suburb of Kutna Hora, a gorgeous medieval silver-mining town in Bohemia. As I understand it, in 1870 a local craftsman called Frantisek Rint was paid to arrange the bones in order. I was there in January 20 years ago and had the ossuary at Sedlec to...

Resurrecting an old thread here, it reminded me of an interesting (although quite mundane) thing that happened to me and my wife when we were on holiday in the West Highlands of Scotland a few years ago. We had gone for a walk and were looking across a small sea inlet from the top of a hill. It...

This thread reminds me of the time some years ago when I was working at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine in Banbury Road, Oxford. I had a big travelbag of dirty washing stolen from the doorstep there and my friend Madeleine, a very dyed-in-the-wool pro-Latin Mass Catholic lady...

They are truly amazing creatures, can deal with a temperature range of 750 degrees Fahrenheit, and nothing fazes them. I might go and look for one in a pond, they would make good low-maintenance pets. If I find one I'll call him Tommy, or Teresa if it is a girl (can you tell?).

Many years ago, I visited Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh. Although nothing seemed to happen at the time, when I dropped in on a friend later that day the first thing she said was "Rick, what have you done to your face?" Looking in the mirror, there were clear and fresh scratches over my...

Hope it is OK to resurrect this old thread ... Reading this reminded me of the time I was in Dubrovnik a few years ago. I wanted to visit the cathedral treasury but it was closed, however there was a display of their collection of relics on a series of boards outside. Most of the relics were...

As I understand it (which is not well at all), when these were first detected Roger Penrose believed they were evidence for his theory of a recycled universe, essentially the residue of collisions between black holes before the Big Bang. Although more recent research point does not particularly...

As a resident of nearby Dawlish, I'm interested to read about Hawthorn Cottage, Teignmouth - which I'd never heard of before. Just up from Dawlish in the Haldon Hills, Lidwell Chapel is worth looking out with its notorious legend of the mad monk. There is a persistent story that someone in the...

It's not proper experimental travel, but one thing I've done on and off for many years is a random A to Z of places in the United Kingdom. I pick one place beginning with a, b, etc. by a random process involving a pack of cards and a gazeteer, and then visit them in turn. There's 25 in a full...

I'm pretty sure I remember reading in a book on the troubles in Northern Ireland, that back in the early eighties when the Sinn Fein prisoners were on hunger strike in the H-Block areas in the Maze prison, the IRA leadership hired an attorney in New York to act for them (as some of the prisoners...