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A litre plastic jug with a broken handle that has only ever contained water is hardly likely to stimulate as much excitement in a Springer as a cooling rack full of sausage rolls.
In fairness, I once lived with a Springer that used to get excited about busting into my room to eat the used tissues out of my wastepaper basket...
 
My big dog, (Dylan, RIP gorgeous boy), when young, would reach up onto worksurfaces and chew through devices plugged in to charge. Never stole food, just chewed wires. Ex's Labrador, on the other hand, would shamelessly steal absolutely anything vaguely edible. A friend told me how she'd carelessly left a chair, just a little too close to a table whilst defrosting a duck in the sink, and their beagle had basically used it as steps...

Never underestimate a dog. Have you tried sitting him down with a lamp in his eyes and grilling him about the missing jug?
 
My big dog, (Dylan, RIP gorgeous boy), when young, would reach up onto worksurfaces and chew through devices plugged in to charge. Never stole food, just chewed wires. Ex's Labrador, on the other hand, would shamelessly steal absolutely anything vaguely edible. A friend told me how she'd carelessly left a chair, just a little too close to a table whilst defrosting a duck in the sink, and their beagle had basically used it as steps...

Never underestimate a dog. Have you tried sitting him down with a lamp in his eyes and grilling him about the missing jug?
If you know dogs and you know labradors in particular, you know that you can catch them “bang-to-rights” and they will maintain that picture of innocence. The canine equivalent of Bart Simpson…”I didn’t do it!”
 
This was bought for us about a year ago by a friend who knows us and our dogs. It is supposed to sit above our front door. I may put it up next week.

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My big dog, (Dylan, RIP gorgeous boy), when young, would reach up onto worksurfaces and chew through devices plugged in to charge. Never stole food, just chewed wires. Ex's Labrador, on the other hand, would shamelessly steal absolutely anything vaguely edible. A friend told me how she'd carelessly left a chair, just a little too close to a table whilst defrosting a duck in the sink, and their beagle had basically used it as steps...

Never underestimate a dog. Have you tried sitting him down with a lamp in his eyes and grilling him about the missing jug?
Meet the gang! Do you honestly believe one of these angelic little chaps would steal their water jug…look at those innocent faces.

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Aww! That liver and white Springer looks a lot like my old Glen.

Now that I have a house of my own a Springer to share it with is definately on the cards.

I'll see if I can find a photo to share later.
 
My hairdresser told me this one on Friday afternoon while she was giving me a fresh short back n sides. I can’t remember why the topic of Ghosts came up, but it’s probably because she noticed so many paranormal books in my bookcase – she is a mobile hairdresser.

I asked her if she had ever experienced anything, and she told me the below.

Around 15 years ago her and her ex-husband were getting ready to leave their local pub one evening. The husband is just saying goodbye to a few of the regulars, so she makes her way to the door, however standing in her way was a very old man, stooped with age. The old man is not doing anything, not talking to anyone, nor did he have a drink in his hand, he was just sort of standing there in the way.

My hairdresser says excuse me to the man a couple of times, but he didn’t respond. She looked over her shoulder very briefly to see if her husband was coming, and when she faced her front again there was no sign of the old man anywhere, with nowhere he could have gone to in such a small moment of time of turning her head. She sceptical by nature, but even she said there was no explanation for it at all.

The pub converted to an Indian restaurant a few years ago, but if you know the area, then it’s located in the small Essex village of black Notley on the main road between the towns of Braintree and Witham.
 
My hairdresser told me this one on Friday afternoon while she was giving me a fresh short back n sides. I can’t remember why the topic of Ghosts came up, but it’s probably because she noticed so many paranormal books in my bookcase – she is a mobile hairdresser.

I asked her if she had ever experienced anything, and she told me the below.

Around 15 years ago her and her ex-husband were getting ready to leave their local pub one evening. The husband is just saying goodbye to a few of the regulars, so she makes her way to the door, however standing in her way was a very old man, stooped with age. The old man is not doing anything, not talking to anyone, nor did he have a drink in his hand, he was just sort of standing there in the way.

My hairdresser says excuse me to the man a couple of times, but he didn’t respond. She looked over her shoulder very briefly to see if her husband was coming, and when she faced her front again there was no sign of the old man anywhere, with nowhere he could have gone to in such a small moment of time of turning her head. She sceptical by nature, but even she said there was no explanation for it at all.

The pub converted to an Indian restaurant a few years ago, but if you know the area, then it’s located in the small Essex village of black Notley on the main road between the towns of Braintree and Witham.
Never drank in there when it was a pub but have had a few meals in there since it became the Raj Garden.
 
Never drank in there when it was a pub but have had a few meals in there since it became the Raj Garden.

Any good tempest..?

Have often driven past but never actually ventured inside. My usual go to is the riverside spice in Earls Colne, which should be renamed riverside no spice IMO, since you have to order at least a vindaloo to get any sort of spice at all lol
 
Any good tempest..?

Have often driven past but never actually ventured inside. My usual go to is the riverside spice in Earls Colne, which should be renamed riverside no spice IMO, since you have to order at least a vindaloo to get any sort of spice at all lol
It was very very good when it first opened then descended into mediocrity and went up and down over the years. A friend who lives up near Fennes told me recently he has had some good meals out of there. We haven’t been there in three or four years.
We might make a trip out there from Witham in the not too distant future
 
Any good tempest..?

Have often driven past but never actually ventured inside. My usual go to is the riverside spice in Earls Colne, which should be renamed riverside no spice IMO, since you have to order at least a vindaloo to get any sort of spice at all lol
We’ve been to the Riverside Spice at Earls Colne on a few occasions and we enjoyed each visit.
We have Ifraz in Witham which advertises as fine dining. They do a good takeaway but has attracted mixed reactions from those that have sat in the restaurant
 
Aww! That liver and white Springer looks a lot like my old Glen.

Now that I have a house of my own a Springer to share it with is definately on the cards.

I'll see if I can find a photo to share later.
Did you find that photo to post or have I missed it?
 
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Did you find that photo to post or have I missed it?
Sorry, I've just moved into my new house and I've no idea where anything is at the moment.

I'll definitely find the family photo albums in one of the many boxes (sometime - if I'm not crushed to death first in a freak hoarder-like accident when one of the teetering piles of crates falls on me). :chuckle:
 
I was working from home yesterday so thought I’d treat myself to lunch at my local pub, and it being quiet on Monday's I finally got round to asking the barmaid of her ghostly encounters in there.

She’s totally sceptical, but she said she couldn’t deny her two experiences.

First experience happened about 5 years ago - She got into work one morning at around 10am and was standing alone behind the bar slicing lemons ready for the 12pm opening time. She told me she saw this as clear as day. A large man dressed in denim jeans and a denim jacket, walk out of what the pub calls the parlour room and walk into the lounge bar. Thinking that she may have left the back door unlocked she called out to the man that the pub is closed and to come back at midday. She walked into the lounge bar to find it completely empty with nowhere the man could have got to.

Her second experience occurred in the summer of 2019. She closed up the pub at 3pm and was collecting the empty glasses in the beer garden, when she heard clapping and cheering coming from the direction the function room. Perplexed, she walked up the steps that lead to the room and looked through the windows to see it was empty, but she could still hear cheering. As soon as she put her hand on the door handle to open it up the noise immediately stopped.

Interesting to note that function room was used as a political meeting room in years gone by, with speeches given by senior politicians including Benjamin Disraeli.
 
I had written this story before and found a few photos I took at the time, so here goes:
Some years back I had a bookkeeping position at a small construction company, the former bookkeeper was retiring after many years there and stayed on for a week to get me started. When she left, as she walked out the door she told me, "You'll notice some strange things happening here, it's just an old building."
Well, I had no idea what she meant. I started early in the morning, 6:00 a.m., and left early in the afternoon. When I got there the guys were leaving to go out on jobs and I was alone in the office, a small 2 story building, with a door leading to the warehouse out back with all their supplies and equipment. The other woman came in at 8:30 a.m. and she worked upstairs. And the owners were out most of the time attending meetings and checking job sites, they were very busy.
When the guys left early in the morning, they always locked the front door behind them, as I was alone in the office. But I repeatedly saw men out in the lobby through the sliding glass window there, and just thought they had returned to pick up more supplies. There seemed to be one man always hanging around inside and outside, I saw him clearly many times. He was always wearing the same thing - denim jacket with brown leather collar, jeans, and boots. And he had short brown hair. Imagine my surprise when the owner told me that the workers were on a job in another state, and hadn't returned to the office at all. Which happened frequently.
One afternoon the woman upstairs told me she was going out for lunch, but shortly afterward I heard a horrendous racket coming from upstairs, as if all the furniture was being moved and re-arranged. I couldn't wait until she returned, we ran upstairs and nothing had moved, all the furniture was in the same location as before, I couldn't believe it.
Thankfully the owners left their dogs with me during the daytime, one big Lab and one little poodle, who often growled and barked at the warehouse door, but helped me feel safer. The little poodle was barking non-stop one morning, so I took her outside, thinking she had to tinkle - well she ran to the closed warehouse door growling like never before - but I knew for a fact that no one else was in the building, all the doors were locked. Just then I could hear the flush of the toilet in the warehouse, just beyond the closed door. I grabbed the dog and ran for the office, locking the door behind me, never been so frightened in my life.
After that I asked the owner what was going on in that building - he laughed and told me that one night he had to sleep on the office sofa on the first floor because a foot of snow had fallen and he couldn't get home. He woke up late at night to a party going on on the second floor, so he grabbed a baseball bat and ran upstairs, thinking someone had broken into the building. No one was there, no lights were on, he was stunned. So he believed me, and told me that many peculiar things had happened there over the years.
Well, one day the town fire department official came to do their annual inspection, and we got to talking about this old building - he said that back in the 1940's, it had been a 'bordello' - LOL! I assumed the man I saw constantly outside / inside must have been a customer!
Anyway, that business eventually closed down, and I believe the owner was happy to be out of that building. On my last day, as I pulled out of the parking lot, in my side view mirror I saw that same man standing there behind my car. I quickly got out to speak with him - but there was no one there.
I did take 2 photos inside that building, the first shows the lobby through the sliding glass window and the warehouse door at the end, which I kept locked. The 2nd photo shows the same scene with the flash which went off. I was using a Canon A490 digital camera.
It's probably just the camera flash in the glass window making that photo look weird, but I wish I had taken more photos of the whole building, upstairs and downstairs, because something was definitely living there!

IMG_5989 (2).JPG
IMG_5989 (3).JPG
 
I was working from home yesterday so thought I’d treat myself to lunch at my local pub, and it being quiet on Monday's I finally got round to asking the barmaid of her ghostly encounters in there.

She’s totally sceptical, but she said she couldn’t deny her two experiences.

First experience happened about 5 years ago - She got into work one morning at around 10am and was standing alone behind the bar slicing lemons ready for the 12pm opening time. She told me she saw this as clear as day. A large man dressed in denim jeans and a denim jacket, walk out of what the pub calls the parlour room and walk into the lounge bar. Thinking that she may have left the back door unlocked she called out to the man that the pub is closed and to come back at midday. She walked into the lounge bar to find it completely empty with nowhere the man could have got to.

Her second experience occurred in the summer of 2019. She closed up the pub at 3pm and was collecting the empty glasses in the beer garden, when she heard clapping and cheering coming from the direction the function room. Perplexed, she walked up the steps that lead to the room and looked through the windows to see it was empty, but she could still hear cheering. As soon as she put her hand on the door handle to open it up the noise immediately stopped.

Interesting to note that function room was used as a political meeting room in years gone by, with speeches given by senior politicians including Benjamin Disraeli.
Really intriguing.

Cheering and clapping from a locked and empty room was the main paranormal experience of my Dartington years. It happened twice in the early hours as we were finishing up for the night. The buildings had all been checked and locked and on both occasions it was myself and several other staff and we all clearly heard cheering and clapping from the Great Hall. This then faded away before we could double-check the Hall was indeed locked and empty.

The second time it happened was the most memorable as one of the witnesses was a barman who had poured scorn on the earlier occurrence several weeks earlier. He went a ghostly white :) I was never able to explain what we heard. (have previously posted this in greater detail)
 
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There is something I love about this twitter thread, the story is not amazingly spooky but some slightly strange things happen in a completely normal housing estate with some incredibly nostalgic photos if you're a 70s kid. I even had a second hand little red bike like one of the kids. The dad reminds me a bit of my dad.
 
Sometimes I'll collect stories over the years and some detail will suddenly "click" into place. AtomicBadger's story made me realize that I've read several accounts over the years that included a voice that imitated someone the witness knew -- yet who could not have possibly been there. Further, that seemed intent in summoning the witness to it -- whatever "it" was.

The only one I could find on the spur of the moment in my mountain of books (and it doesn't help that I've shifted them all around and don't know where anything is) is in FT's "bookazine" IT HAPPENED TO ME Volume 2. Basically, a young man named Tim Marczenko of Ontario, Canada, was shooting basketball hoops one summer evening in 2001 when his father emerged from the house walking their golden retriever. Tim watched his father walk the dog down the road into the distance . . . then a "digital beeping sound" came from the woods by their house in the opposite direction from where the father went.

A voice called from the trees, "Tim! Come here for a second, I've found something," and Tim assumed it was his father, and that he'd found a beeper or cell phone. Yet the voice was very evasive when he asked what was going on, just saying things like, "Just come here, hurry up, I found something. Follow my voice," and "Tim come into the woods, I've got to show you something."

The beeping and the voice's demands continued, and Tim wandered over to the trees -- only to decide not to go in. Then, of course, the noises stopped and Dad came back up the road with the dog, And, of course, he hadn't found any beeping thing or in fact gone into the woods.

"What would have happened to me if I had followed the voice into the forest?" Tim ends. What, indeed? :shock: I'm going to watch for this motif as I review all my fortean literature.
I do find the concept of hearing your name being called and by a voice that you recognise, only for the person you think is calling your name to be in a different location, truly disturbing.

As kids many years ago a group of us used to muck around in a derelict pub. One day after school one of our group received a detention so got out of school later than usual, and headed off to the pub assuming the rest of us would be hanging out in there (we wasn’t, we were playing football in a local park)

He slipped through a gap in the corrugated iron fence and climbed through a broken sash window, and was standing in what would have been the bar area. He said that he heard us mucking around upstairs with one of our group calling his name, telling him that we are up here and to come up. He duly did but found the first floor to be completely empty.

He then said he heard his name being called from the floor above (somewhere we normally didn’t go as we thought it too unsafe) so he climbed the rickety old stairs to the next level and found that floor to be empty. Wondering how we could have slipped past him without him noticing, he then said he heard his name being called from the attic. There was no access to attic however, as the stairs to the attic had given way at some point which made access impossible. It was then that he decided that something was very very wrong and that he needed to get out of that building asap.

As he was running down the two flights of stairs to get out, he said there was a voice just behind him telling him not to run and to come back – which he didn’t of course.

He eventually found us at the park and had sprinted all the way from the old pub, arriving red faced, out of breath and a little tearful. He told us his story, but I don’t think the rest of lads believed him as I could see them pulling faces and raising their eyebrows. Many years later (we must have been in our mid-twenties) I asked him about the incident, and he told me the exact same story word for word.

I don’t know if his story was true or not, but I do know the concept of his story is bloody scary, and I can feel the goosebumps on my arms as I’m typing this LOL
 
I do find the concept of hearing your name being called and by a voice that you recognise, only for the person you think is calling your name to be in a different location, truly disturbing.
Right Dick, I said to myself that I would never mention this one on here, but what the heck- just between you and me;


Late 2000's I was in a hotel room in Cairo. MrsF was in England. Around 7-8am (5-6am UK) all of a sudden and as clear as anything, I heard her shout ''Oh my God Floyd, I'm coming''. I instinctively looked at my phone (an old, cheap non-smart phone, that I'd taken just for texting) that was on the bedside table.

Later that day I texted her and asked if that morning she had been, er, a bit horny to which she replied yes she had. I asked if she said the words that I had clearly heard and again she said she had.

2,300 miles apart..........
 
Right Dick, I said to myself that I would never mention this one on here, but what the heck- just between you and me;


Late 2000's I was in a hotel room in Cairo. MrsF was in England. Around 7-8am (5-6am UK) all of a sudden and as clear as anything, I heard her shout ''Oh my God Floyd, I'm coming''. I instinctively looked at my phone (an old, cheap non-smart phone, that I'd taken just for texting) that was on the bedside table.

Later that day I texted her and asked if that morning she had been, er, a bit horny to which she replied yes she had. I asked if she said the words that I had clearly heard and again she said she had.

2,300 miles apart..........
Blimey Floyd how strange. Was Mrs F in the habit of…..ahem well you know, at any particular time of day…?
 
As kids many years ago a group of us used to muck around in a derelict pub.

As he was running down the two flights of stairs to get out, he said there was a voice just behind him telling him not to run and to come back – which he didn’t of course.

I don’t know if his story was true or not, but I do know the concept of his story is bloody scary, and I can feel the goosebumps on my arms as I’m typing this LOL

I have posted this on another thread, but in our faith, it is believed that a certain type of demon inhabits derelict buildings.
In spite of the adventure that might be had exploring, we are advised to stay away from these buildings.
 
I have posted this on another thread, but in our faith, it is believed that a certain type of demon inhabits derelict buildings.
Similar.y I believe I have posted this story on another thread.
But back in the 1970’s myself and my little brother used to knock about with two brothers of the same age as ourselves.
We used to play in a derelict church. The massive front doors had warped slightly but there was a gap big enough for us to squeeze through.
As you entered the church the font was directly in front and there was a big hole in the roof, hence a zillion nesting pigeons in the church.
On that particular day, which I remember as hot and sunny, we all squeezed through the gap and as we went to walk up the aisle a baby started screaming, right in front of the font. Nobody there, big empty church, crying baby.
We rushed back out through that little gap and into what is now Burgess Park. After getting our breath back we did as boys tend to do, and started to dare each other to go back.
After the initial teasing and name calling we went back and all squeezed through the gap one by one.
The church was silent!
I believe it was me that pointed out that there was not one single pigeon to be seen in there.
We walked through to the back of the church but there was no other way out as part of the rear had collapsed inwards and no other exit could be reached. There wasn’t a single person in that church!
I think we threw a few old hymn books about as a bit of bravado before we quickly scuttled back out.
The church was later converted into flats and I still wonder if the residents ever hear the sound of a spectral baby crying.
 
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