I've been looking for those stories on here off and on for the past few days, with no luck yet. I'll keep at it, but in the meanwhile, I found a site which details a few road ghost/timeslip cases that might be of interest:
http://uforeview.tripod.com/timeslips.html (Why this should be on what sounds like a UFO site I don't know, but it was all I could find that wasn't solely about the Versailles Incident or the Dieppe Raid.)
Regarding the actual topic of the thread, however, I thought I ought to contribute a secondhand story of my own. Let me make it clear that this did not happen to me personally: it's a story related to me by someone who claimed it happened to them. I wasn't present for the incidents, I just heard the tales much later on.
(I've got a lot of stories like this, since the topic interests me and I've been known to simply ask people "Ever seen anything weird?" to start a conversation. Works out pretty well sometimes if you don't mind the occasional ranting loon. :lol: )
Onward to the weird: I used to know a girl whose mother was adamant that "a banshee" lived in their upstairs sitting room. Why she called it this is a bit mysterious, since it certainly didn't foretell deaths, and the family had no connection to Ireland or Irish folklore. It didn't even scream or cry but instead made a sort of low-pitched stuttery noise that's impossible to describe in writing, but several members of the family imitated it for me in person: they all made this sound like holding your breath and then making a "hmm, hmm" sound through your nose like you're trying to clear your throat without being too loud. It was actually the least scary-sounding noise imaginable, and you'd think they were just winding you up, except that it all clearly upset them and they had to really be coaxed into discussing it. They heard it mostly in the afternoons, and always coming from the sitting room.
They had all heard this thing for years apparently, and in fact no one went into that sitting room if they could help it: I went in once and sat for about a quarter of an hour, after more or less begging for the chance to "see if I feel spooked too", after hearing these stories. Could be nothing more than overactive imagination and being primed with weird tales, but it did seem to have what you'd have to call "an oppressive atmosphere": it was a dark, stuffy, little room with too much old, oversized furniture crammed into it, and the windows at the back of it had that sort of unfortunate placement that makes you feel more like being watched than doing the watching when you looked out of them. I didn't see or hear anything odd, though.
The story came out in bits and pieces over the time I knew the family, and while they all claimed to have experienced strange things, if you could get the mother talking about it, she'd eventually get to the time she saw it- the banshee, that is. One afternoon she was passing the door to the sitting room when she happened to look in- she admitted that she glanced in in a fearful way, since she'd already formed a bad impression of the room- and saw a human figure sat on the sofa in there staring back at her. She said she only saw it for a second before she ran, but described it as human-shaped and wearing some kind of yellowish robe or blanket. She said it did have a face, but couldn't really describe it: "old and ugly" was all she'd say, which while descriptive, doesn't actually tell you much. She also got the impression that it was reacting to her looking in and was about to move towards her when she screamed and ran back down the stairs in a state of near-hysteria. The children remembered very well when this happened, since their father spent hours trying to calm their mother down, and they were made to stay outside for the majority of the day. The door was supposed to be shut at all times after that, but I saw it open more often than not when I was there- which they said "the banshee" did on its own, pushing the door open so you'd hear it move even from downstairs, and I admit that I did more than once hear a door creak and swing from upstairs, and I did hear a sort of rustling noise like someone walking quietly. But whether it had anything to do with their ghost- if that's what it was- I have no idea, since there were other people in the house at the times I heard this and it could very well have been them just going about their business.
All very standard haunting so far, with only minor details standing out. Such as, it liked spoons: they often had spoons- and only spoons, never other silverware- go missing, sometimes right off the table when their backs were turned, they said. Once they found two spoons lying in a patch of dirt by the side of the garage, but usually the spoons just vanished. They blamed the banshee.
There were other incidents, all sort of disjointed and vague, in the way of a lot of ghost stories. That noise, of course, the spoons, and then occasional footsteps, or other small items being lost, that kind of thing. I seem to remember something about a piano bench that moved or something, but I can't bring it to mind. It seemed to actually focus more on the parents than the children, which I suppose is unusual in these sorts of stories. The one episode that really put the wind up me is when the father said that one day, while in the kitchen, he had heard what sounded like his wife calling him from- you guessed it- the sitting room, and knew very well that his wife would never have been in that room on her own, let alone for the several minutes the sound seemed to be coming from up there. He said it sounded just like her voice, with nothing unusual or suspicious about it save the apparent source and his knowledge that she was actually in the garage at the time. (She did not hear the voice.) He said he spent those minutes sort of sweating it out, being really disturbed by this counterfeit of his wife's voice, and then sort of doubting himself and thinking maybe it really was her and he ought to go check. Then it stopped just as sudenly as it started. It scared me because the idea of something uncanny imitating a loved one's voice for unknown reasons that seem to imply a kind of luring is really not anything I want to contemplate on a dark night. It only happened the once, and no harm done, but still- disturbing.
And that's all I know, really. I knew the family for a few years, and during all that time, except for right after hearing the story for the first time, I never doubted that they experienced something which upset them. Whether it was supernatural or not, I can make no claims, but they were obviously afraid while discussing it. Eventually I moved, we lost touch, and while I've even passed the house only a year or so ago, I don't know if they live there anymore. I've always wondered what was really in that house, and I still wonder often, when I'm just passing through random residential streets, how many completely mundane-looking houses are actually harboring some strange story like that.
