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Any ideas?

E

EssexSpook

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Sep 13, 2005
Messages
38
Hi, I've been into all things paranormal since I can remember, but a few days ago my mum saw something that is, well, weird, and I wondered if anyone can give me any suggestions or anything (sorry for the boring details, just thought I'd tell it all).

She had just come back from shopping with my dad, and they both walked in the front door. My dad went into the toilet that was next to the front door as my mum put the bags down on the hall floor. She turned around to see just outside our front door a man. Our house has the front door on the side of the house and this man was right up close to the fence that separates our house with next door. Apparently he seemed to be 'rolling' along (by this my mum seems to mean he was moving along sideways, whilst his body was turning, or shimmying. Kind of like his shoulders would move to the left, then to the right). He was making a conscious effort to avoid his face being seen. She let out a slight shout of shock, which my dad heard in the toilet. After a few seconds the apparition disappeared.

A final few weird points on it, was that my mum said that he a) had no visible feet and b) bore a very similar resemblance to my father (clothes and build were similar). I've heard of people seeing their relatives at their moment of death, but this seems odd. My mum is neither old nor delusional by the way!

Sorry if this seems a bit dull, but I'd love to hear anyone's take on it.
 
Wasn't dull at all, quite spooky in fact!

Did your parents not go outside to see if there was anyone there?
 
Not as such. As soon as my Dad came out of the toilet my Mum looked at him then back to the door and it was gone. It's really strange.
 
Possible doopelganger maybe, since you said he looked simular to your dad?
 
Yea could be. It's just weird, because normally they don't seem spectral in appearance. It's really got me baffled and worried a bit.
 
No-one else got any ideas, or have heard of anything similar? :?
 
1) Thief casing the joint - and his clocking your ma looking at him made him turn away to hide his face. Perception does the rest
2) Man on one of those articulated skateboard things or a blader.

as regards to similarity to the daddy - is your dad of average size and fashion for the area? Further, people project similarity onto things they don't understand or wish to suppress somehow.
 
Forgive my ignorance, but what is a vardoger? And no, it definately wasn't a human person - he never faced my ma, just always had his back to her but moved along sideways. It's just odd thats all. Not a typical ghost sighting AT ALL.
 
With no disrespect...but you don't know that it was a human or non human person your mother saw. Only after an oft repeated story subject to all the errors that nearly all human memory is subject to, and a spin of supernatural to cover a quick glimpse of something that at the time didn't make sense, does the story then posit 'definetly not human'. For example, if it wasn't human, why does the story then suggest 'he'?

Vardoger is a scandinavian version of a fetch or doppleganger - I think it may even be a precurser to a death (but someone may want to correct that for me). As a Norwegian ( :oops: ) - half anyway - I can't remember all the law re: this one. Thopugh my knowledge is usually quite good re: mystical and viking god stories.
 
This reminds me of a sighting of something odd my parents once did see on the way to picking me up one evening from work. Years ago they were driving along a country road to pick me up from a pub one evening, about 8 o'clock. As the came down a small hill they noticed two ' figures ' crouched up with their faces covered crouched on a grass verge near a hedge. They were totaly white apparently. Note the word ' figure ' as they wern't really sure what they were, apart from resembling some kind of small person ( but not child like ). Only about 5 mins later we pass the same spot again only to see nothing there. There was no car or truck around so they must have walked from wence they came. It was there whiteness and lack of detail on them that caught my parents eye, they really stood out against the greenery.
 
"Vardoger"(Norwegian; literally 'forerunner')--the apparition of a
living person

i think this is the apparition where people report seeing a person doing something, eg walking into the workplace, only later for the person to do exactly the same thing again but when questioned about this they say that they were not there at the time they were first seen, so i i'm not actually sure this would apply to this case.

try thinking of the 'future echoes' episode in Red Dwarf, it's kind of like that. vardogers are not death omens tho. i know what you mean when you say that it did not have a human quality to it tho not knowing why, sometimes it's hard to try and explian something like that especially when someone is looking at you with a :sceptic: expression.


ed for typo
 
I understand your point MDY, but if you look at my earlier post, you will note that I suggested that Essex spook didn't see the apparition, only his mother. It is amazing how often the growth of single witness stories end up with the idea that the main point is somehow true because a number of people repeat it. Chinese Whispers. Am also pretty sure this argument could be extended to any religious tract, indeed, if one also allows for the concept of an agenda, then the gospels are explained too.
 
er, yes i realise that it was the poster's mum who witnessed this, i was just trying to put into words the 'quality' of the incident, but i guess i did not work out quite as i hoped. sorry for any confusion!

didn't get my latte this morning. this does not bode well for the rest of the day. :evil:
 
Fully understand, in a similar state meself. However, I would draw your attention to the work of Loftus and eyewitness memory - fascinating, sad and scarey.
 
Thanks everybody for all your posts, the Vardoger one was very interesting. Gadaffi – I know how it sounds, “my mum’s sister’s daughter’s friend saw something”, but I suppose only I know that my mum is certain it definitely was NOT just a person walking down our path. My mum is only 42 and of very sound mind and has lived in the same house for 16 years and never once had anything like it. People come to the door and up the path all the time and this was not one of them. Thanks for all your help though, and any more ideas would be most welcome.
 
While I understand her, and your, point of view I do wonder whether or not the retelling makes the story more spooky as time goes by. Memory is reconstructed and not set in stone (as it were) - there was a wonderful experiment by Elizabeth Loftus in the early 70's where they showed participants a film of a car going down a 'highway'. Questions were asked about a white barn (which didn't exist) - some knew this and some didn't. However, a week later, when asked about the white barn, many participants answered that there had been one. What I'm trying to say is that it only takes a few questions and some time before memories become contaminated - add an emotional or mystery content and I would imagine that the effects are multiplied.
 
It's my understanding that the story passed from the poster's mother to the poster. We tend to know our mothers reasonably well; know if they do or do not have the habit of exaggeration. We are usually very familiar with their facial expressions and with their way of reasoning; with their powers of observation, etc.

The poster has explained that her mother is used to people approaching the house and/or passing between the side-set front door and common fence. If the mother had ever claimed to have seen foot-less, rolling men/women with averted faces before; regularly or infrequently, I believe the poster would have included this within her post and would be less inclined to publish her mother's recent experience here.

No doubt the poster's mother has, over the years, detailed many experiences to her daughter; the commonplace and the extraordinary. The mother is 42 years old; neither in her dotage nor inexperienced. The daughter would have a reasonably accurate measure of the reliableness of information imparted by her mother. The poster has not said her mother tends to see things that are not there.

The mother was in a familiar setting when the experience took place; it's fair to say the mother knew every inch of the location. She had not just awoken from a nap; she was alert and occupied when the experience took place. The poster did not say someone had suggested to her mother that she *would* see a foot-less, face-averted rolling man. The experience was of such unusualness that the mother recounted it to her daughter.

Yes, some people are highly suggestible and some may agree if someone suggests to them (within an experiment) that a white building existed within a location. Not all people possess the same degree of confidence and self-assurance. Some may agree because they're embarrassed to admit their powers of observation are not as keen as those of another. Some may agree that they saw a white house because they are not sure, so agree to be on the safe side. Some agree because out of a sense of politeness and timidity about contradicting others. There are many reasons people agree about something they're not quite sure of.

However, not ALL people can be persuaded to agree they saw something they did not. So what does the experiment prove, other than some people are highly suggestible and some are not? Those who are not are just as relevant to the argument as those who are.

If the poster's mother had witnessed a traffic accident prior to returning home with her husband, would the police have discounted her observations? Most probably they would not. The poster's mother is 42 years of age and the poster has not described her mother as unreliable, prone to confusion, lacking in observational powers, commonly under the influence of substances.

If the poster's mother had informed her daughter she'd seen a pink dog fly past the front door, or had witnessed a naked repairman jumping out of a van, there could be reasonable explanations for these uncommon sightings; the dog's owner could have been playing around with hair-dye and the serviceman may have been victim of, or playing, a practical joke. Witnessing pink dogs and naked repairmen is not something that happens every day, in which case the mother may very well recount them to her family. And her accounts of these incidents would be factual, no matter how fantastic. And her daughter's familiarity with the mother would enable her to tell almost immediately if her mother were confabulating or not.

In this instance, the mother told the daughter what she'd seen, and what she believed she saw was a strangely rolling figure with averted face and no apparent feet as it passed between her front door and her fence. The sight was sufficient to alarm the mother to the point she called out to her husband. Most of us do not call members of our family from the toilet. They're there because they need to be, particularly if they've just arrived home.

Where is the Chinese Whisper effect? The mother told her daughter, who posted the experience here. In other words, the story is only one step -- a trusted step -- from the experience itself.

I have twice seen 'people' who had no feet to support them; both in locations where their appearance was, logically speaking, impossible. No-one suggested to me beforehand that I would see people who lacked feet. I'd never heard of others seeing the same thing. I'm sane and rational. I knew that what I'd seen would be considered unbelievable, yet accounts I give of many other things is accepted without question. I doubt anyone could have convinced me, prior to the fact, that people lacking feet could or would appear before me. Yet after I saw them, strongly motivated though I was to deny my experience, I could not convince myself I had not seen them, any more than I could convince myself of other things I'd seen.

People see things that are out of the ordinary. Rather than deny them credibility or dismiss their claims, perhaps we should simply accept that things occur to some of us for which non of us has an ironclad explanation?
 
There are a number of other factors involved:

1. I don't know the poster, his mother, etc. How do we know they're all telling the truth? (I'm sure they are, btw - I'm just saying that from our perspective, they're just someone on the internet). People have been known to hoax other people now and again.

2. Human perception and memory aren't all that great. That was the point of the above-mentioned experiment. Any neurologist can tell you - the human brain is not a computer that records perfect, infallible data and can retrieve it on command.

3. Humans hallucinate. It's not that uncommon, and you don't have to be crazy, drunk, or highly-stressed. Sometimes it just happens.

4. People also misinterpret - their senses show them one thing, but their brain interprets it incorrectly. We make patterns, we connect the dots - even when there's no pattern there.

I'm not saying the poster/his mother are lying, delusional, ignorant or anything like that. I'm just saying, there are other things to consider than 'it either happened or it didn't'.
 
That's interesting, what did the people with no feet look like? Where they in old clothes or fairly modern? (By the way I'm a bloke, not a girl!)
 
you say that the toilet is next to the front door, does that mean there is a window with the same aspect as the front door?
could it possibly have been a reflection of dad in the toilet and maybe if dad opened the window the reflection would move along as if it was gliding.
this might also explain why the feet could not be seen as they would be below window height.
 
It's a good attempt to try to make sense of it, but alas no. The window does face the same way as the front door but is a few meters to the side and I can't see how it could be refected in a wooden fence.
 
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