• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

"Meeting Nicola"

PeteS said:
Now that had to be the strangest thread on the forum, for all the wrong reasons.
Click to expand...
Yeah, why brag about having photographed Nessie and then refuse to post the photo? :wacky:
 
Damien said:
Certainly not feeding anyone a false story or trying to deceive anyone, quite offended to be called a liar to be honest. I myself am just like anyone else on the forum, the experience didn't happen to me so I can only speculate to what had happened that day. Regarding "Only posting 1 post" well I have only been here for a week, I have been looking at other cases on here, and in time hope to contribute more. Seems like the atmosphere here has become rather unfriendly and all-thought reasonable questioning of facts and suspicion should always be applied to any case posted, to be personally suggested to be a deceiver is quite unsettling . The fuller details I supplied are only what I have been given by frank, I'am in no way creating or furthering a narrative for attention purposes (as it as been suggested on here) . My own interest like I have mentioned is just to get a wide feedback on this event.
Click to expand...
It's not unfriendly here, it's all a part of the process of understanding what we're being told and by whom.
Some people have been here for many years, they've seen all sorts of people telling fantastic tales, and they've learned to know what to ask in order to assess the situation. It's part interrogation, part initiation.

Some people come here for a bit of fun, they start telling a 'story', they think they've hoodwinked everyone with a totally original approach, and they are often not prepared for the level of questioning; then we find that promised evidence never materialises, posts get further apart, and one day they vanish.

I'm sceptical of everything in life, that's because I want to find the evidence that cracks something amazing wide open but I don't want to fool myself in the process. I've studied far and wide but never found anything of any real substance.
I've experienced some unexplainable things myself but I'm unwilling to believe they don't have a mundane explanation until I can prove otherwise.
Take illusions for example, I've seen some that have baffled me, and it's almost been a disappointment when I've found out how obvious they are. Despite all of this, I still hope that I'll find some anomaly that has an 'supernatural' explanation.

Mysteries are fun, we love to solve puzzles, the questions will only get harder. :)
 
dream_decoder said:
It's not unfriendly here, it's all a part of the process of understanding what we're being told and by whom.
Some people have been here for many years, they've seen all sorts of people telling fantastic tales, and they've learned to know what to ask in order to assess the situation. It's part interrogation, part initiation.

Some people come here for a bit of fun, they start telling a 'story', they think they've hoodwinked everyone with a totally original approach, and they are often not prepared for the level of questioning; then we find that promised evidence never materialises, posts get further apart, and one day they vanish.

I'm sceptical of everything in life, that's because I want to find the evidence that cracks something amazing wide open but I don't want to fool myself in the process. I've studied far and wide but never found anything of any real substance.
I've experienced some unexplainable things myself but I'm unwilling to believe they don't have a mundane explanation until I can prove otherwise.
Take illusions for example, I've seen some that have baffled me, and it's almost been a disappointment when I've found out how obvious they are. Despite all of this, I still hope that I'll find some anomaly that has an 'supernatural' explanation.

Mysteries are fun, we love to solve puzzles, the questions will only get harder. :)
Click to expand...
I understand the questioning, it's the fine art of what I mentioned above, Skepticism without the cynicism. I'm sure there are folks out there entertaining themselves and trying to put themselves at the center of a mystery, this is not my intention, I just wanted to get others opinions on a case. I didn't have the experience so I'm the same as yourselves albeit I have questioned frank and got more information from him, that's why I can supply what seems like "additional random information" not to mislead but to inform. Thank you for writing back to me and explaining your position.
 
AgProv said:
He met a Rusalka, or British version of? (Nikola - Russian girl's name?)
Click to expand...
Funny how these things work out. FT402 (Jan 2021) had just arrived on the day I wrote this post; I'd only just read the letters pages and at most skimmed the rest, saving it for detailed perusal later. ( I posted here on the rusalka thing on another thread; found a very fortean video about a guy chasing a girl who turns out to be a rusalka, as a music video from a Russian folk-rock band)

Looking more closely at 402 and reading the actual editorial content, what do I find..... a half-page article on mermaid folklore in the British Isles, noting that agianst all expectation, the vast majority of mermaid-related places are inland, on fresh water. So Britain has its own rusalkas!
 
AgProv said:
Funny how these things work out. FT402 (Jan 2021) had just arrived on the day I wrote this post; I'd only just read the letters pages and at most skimmed the rest, saving it for detailed perusal later. ( I posted here on the rusalka thing on another thread; found a very fortean video about a guy chasing a girl who turns out to be a rusalka, as a music video from a Russian folk-rock band)

Looking more closely at 402 and reading the actual editorial content, what do I find..... a half-page article on mermaid folklore in the British Isles, noting that agianst all expectation, the vast majority of mermaid-related places are inland, on fresh water. So Britain has its own rusalkas!
Click to expand...
Do you have a link to the Russian folk rock video? sounds interesting in itself.
 
Sure thing. I'm wondering if under House Rules this classes as spamming (ie, posting the same video in more than one thread) so if you bear with me i'll see if I can navigate back to where I posted it and just put a link here.

The back-story: very entertaining and original folk-rock band from Leningrad, as was, called Otava Yo - well worth checking out. (Hey, it was Mavhester's twin city - never got the hang of calling the place St Petersburg, sorry, Russia).

Synopsis: young man boards bus. A gorgeously attractive girl gets on. He is instantly smitten, but every time he tries to draw closer to her, progressively weirder and possibly Fortean things start to intrude (when you look closely, weird and incongruous things happen right from the start), and at every turn something prevents him. The Girl seems perfectly aware, and smiles knowingly at him as if wanting him to try that bit harder. He gets trapped in what look like nested dream sequences, and the final scene happens at a lakeside, in the cold grey light of early morning....

going link-hunting.
 
This is it. Actually I didn't post it direct on the other thread - I just posted a link there to where it could be found online. So here it is, posted direct with a clear conscience and after exercising due diligence. Otava Yo's video to their song Что за песни

 
AgProv said:
This is it. Actually I didn't post it direct on the other thread - I just posted a link there to where it could be found online. So here it is, posted direct with a clear conscience and after exercising due diligence. Otava Yo's video to their song Что за песни
Click to expand...
Interesting to say the least :p
Thanks for the link.
 
It's the haunting dream-like quality, the way the unfolding events draw you in, the sense that the guy in the video is being led, and all the greater and lesser strangenesses. The Girl exerts a power that draws. And then.. at the end....
 
I think this is a genuine experience, not in any way a wind up.
@Damien is here in good faith.

The Nicola story has four main aspects of discussion.

These first two can be fairly simply explained.

The dog does not feature on the walk, only in the river - it could be that Nicola forgot the dog.

Nicola became instantly very angry - Frank looks a genuine hard nut, with experience of killers, but even so his guard seems to have been down and he was not expecting such a reaction from a young woman. The solstice question could be entirely incidental, it was just that Nicola had tired of Frank.

This next one can not be easily explained, but an explanations is possible.

Frank did not hear the approach of a large man on a large motorbike - Frank was so engrossed in discussion, dizzy on lust, that he did not expect a bike to approach so did not hear it.

This one is hardest to explain, but again, possible.

The biker and Nicola's vanishing - Nicola and the biker somehow had an exit path through trees or bushes into a field, or down a lane Frank was not aware of.
 
So, I just caught up with this thread. I don't know what I think. I do know that you can become distracted for a minute and something/someone "disappears" because you don't realize that you were distracted and for how long. I have lost time, quite often recently, of up to half hour that I can't figure out how something took me that long to do (work related, so some of it is just due to the repetitiveness of the days now). So part of what I think is that Frank was more involved in his thoughts and perceptions of what was going on, rather than what his surroundings were. It is quite possible (to me) that he did not hear a motorcycle.

His sense of menace (sorry, I don't really remember how it was described) surrounding the dog and suddenly the girl, may have also stemmed from fleeting thoughts that he was not really aware of at the time, and not the actual situation. This idea comes from learning how to handle anxiety. Cognitive behavioural therapy recognizes that random thoughts often trigger emotion before a person is aware of the thoughts. The thought may have nothing to do with the situation that the person is actually in, but the person experiences the emotion (foreboding for example) and attributes it to something in the environment (example dog or girl).

And again, I am going into psychological and psychiatric areas here, but the girl suddenly changing her features and attitude when he asks about the solstice is not unreasonable. People who have experienced traumas can have triggers.

I do have a friend who is diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. I'd first met her when she was reintegrating her personalities. She told me of a couple of her alters and said that one in particular I would not want to meet. I did see her switch two or three times and the first time that it happened, it was just in the middle of a conversation that we were having. I realized she switched because she suddenly appeared to not know who I was. I simply introduced myself and her alter introduced herself and she switched back. Another time, she was quite sick with an infection and had a fever. I was visiting at her home and suddenly she switched and became a small child. She was not afraid of me, but began running away from her partner and was clearly frightened of him. Anything can trigger someone with DID into switching alters. DID is associated with past trauma. I am only using this one as an example of why someone may suddenly change their manner, seemingly with no obvious cause.

And referring back to @Krepostnoi's post 145 where he puts the photo of Frank's daughter against the sketch, I did briefly entertain (until you @Damien just said the sketch was done recently) that Frank had met up with his future daughter because the photo and sketch look surprisingly alike.
 
brownmane said:
I did briefly entertain (until you @Damien just said the sketch was done recently) that Frank had met up with his future daughter because the photo and sketch look surprisingly alike.
Click to expand...
That's an intriguing notion. If Frank is right (and I'm not saying I disbelieve him, just that his memory might not be as infallible as he would probably like to think), and he hasn't conflated his recollection of "Nicola" over time with other, more familiar, faces, then maybe it's worth considering some kind of time slip. It certainly is a striking resemblance.

@Damien, is the summer solstice a significant date for Frank or his family? A birthday, maybe?
 
brownmane said:
So, I just caught up with this thread. I don't know what I think. I do know that you can become distracted for a minute and something/someone "disappears" because you don't realize that you were distracted and for how long. I have lost time, quite often recently, of up to half hour that I can't figure out how something took me that long to do (work related, so some of it is just due to the repetitiveness of the days now). So part of what I think is that Frank was more involved in his thoughts and perceptions of what was going on, rather than what his surroundings were. It is quite possible (to me) that he did not hear a motorcycle.

His sense of menace (sorry, I don't really remember how it was described) surrounding the dog and suddenly the girl, may have also stemmed from fleeting thoughts that he was not really aware of at the time, and not the actual situation. This idea comes from learning how to handle anxiety. Cognitive behavioural therapy recognizes that random thoughts often trigger emotion before a person is aware of the thoughts. The thought may have nothing to do with the situation that the person is actually in, but the person experiences the emotion (foreboding for example) and attributes it to something in the environment (example dog or girl).

And again, I am going into psychological and psychiatric areas here, but the girl suddenly changing her features and attitude when he asks about the solstice is not unreasonable. People who have experienced traumas can have triggers.

I do have a friend who is diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. I'd first met her when she was reintegrating her personalities. She told me of a couple of her alters and said that one in particular I would not want to meet. I did see her switch two or three times and the first time that it happened, it was just in the middle of a conversation that we were having. I realized she switched because she suddenly appeared to not know who I was. I simply introduced myself and her alter introduced herself and she switched back. Another time, she was quite sick with an infection and had a fever. I was visiting at her home and suddenly she switched and became a small child. She was not afraid of me, but began running away from her partner and was clearly frightened of him. Anything can trigger someone with DID into switching alters. DID is associated with past trauma. I am only using this one as an example of why someone may suddenly change their manner, seemingly with no obvious cause.

And referring back to @Krepostnoi's post 145 where he puts the photo of Frank's daughter against the sketch, I did briefly entertain (until you @Damien just said the sketch was done recently) that Frank had met up with his future daughter because the photo and sketch look surprisingly alike.
Click to expand...


Not having a go BM

Is that still a thing? I'm guessing she is American? Culturally America seems to be one of the few places this takes place. Personally, I feel Sybil was a load of old fabricated crap but its legacy was enormous.

When do you hear of MPD these days which has now been classed as a dissociative disorder as the US seriously had to backtrack when they found out Sybil was faked.

I get Dissociative disorder I don't get people with several personalities inhabiting the same body. Never seen it, never met anyone apart from a Christian fundamentalist, (in the US), who has.
 
Last edited:
brownmane said:
So, I just caught up with this thread. I don't know what I think. I do know that you can become distracted for a minute and something/someone "disappears" because you don't realize that you were distracted and for how long. I have lost time, quite often recently, of up to half hour that I can't figure out how something took me that long to do (work related, so some of it is just due to the repetitiveness of the days now). So part of what I think is that Frank was more involved in his thoughts and perceptions of what was going on, rather than what his surroundings were. It is quite possible (to me) that he did not hear a motorcycle.

His sense of menace (sorry, I don't really remember how it was described) surrounding the dog and suddenly the girl, may have also stemmed from fleeting thoughts that he was not really aware of at the time, and not the actual situation. This idea comes from learning how to handle anxiety. Cognitive behavioural therapy recognizes that random thoughts often trigger emotion before a person is aware of the thoughts. The thought may have nothing to do with the situation that the person is actually in, but the person experiences the emotion (foreboding for example) and attributes it to something in the environment (example dog or girl).

And again, I am going into psychological and psychiatric areas here, but the girl suddenly changing her features and attitude when he asks about the solstice is not unreasonable. People who have experienced traumas can have triggers.

I do have a friend who is diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder. I'd first met her when she was reintegrating her personalities. She told me of a couple of her alters and said that one in particular I would not want to meet. I did see her switch two or three times and the first time that it happened, it was just in the middle of a conversation that we were having. I realized she switched because she suddenly appeared to not know who I was. I simply introduced myself and her alter introduced herself and she switched back. Another time, she was quite sick with an infection and had a fever. I was visiting at her home and suddenly she switched and became a small child. She was not afraid of me, but began running away from her partner and was clearly frightened of him. Anything can trigger someone with DID into switching alters. DID is associated with past trauma. I am only using this one as an example of why someone may suddenly change their manner, seemingly with no obvious cause.

And referring back to @Krepostnoi's post 145 where he puts the photo of Frank's daughter against the sketch, I did briefly entertain (until you @Damien just said the sketch was done recently) that Frank had met up with his future daughter because the photo and sketch look surprisingly alike.
Click to expand...
I'm just getting ready for work, I will answer in more detail this evening, regarding the drawing, The only thing it has in common with his daughter that I see is that they both have black hair (Nicolas is more straighter), I see 2 different people, both then again you can only see the one photo of his daughter to compare. I believe in all honesty that the drawing represents a true image of what Nicola looked like, this is why I have always thought it might be interesting to put it on a Streatham community message board and see if anyone remembers a Nicola from the early 80's that lived there, I know it's a long shot, and also don't know if I would come across as too creepy in doing this (even though it is for pure fortean reasons ) :/ Thanks for the post.
 
Krepostnoi said:
That's an intriguing notion. If Frank is right (and I'm not saying I disbelieve him, just that his memory might not be as infallible as he would probably like to think), and he hasn't conflated his recollection of "Nicola" over time with other, more familiar, faces, then maybe it's worth considering some kind of time slip. It certainly is a striking resemblance.

@Damien, is the summer solstice a significant date for Frank or his family? A birthday, maybe?
Click to expand...
The solstice doesn't have any significance to Frank or his family to what I understand, I can ask him, or if he decides he might come on here and answer himself, would be great if he did this. The only resemblance I see to his daughter and the drawing is that they both have black hair, then being fair you have only seen one photo of his daughter to make a comparison.
 
Damien said:
being fair you have only seen one photo of his daughter to make a comparison.
Click to expand...
That's very true.

Funnily enough, given the mention upthread of Eastern Europe, I spent a fairly Fortean midsummer solstice in Latvia, in 1992, which also included an encounter with a very attractive dark-haired girl that was sadly (from my perspective, at least) cut short. I wrote a little about it in this post. I'd already spent a week with that crowd, but never seen the girl before (nor, unfortunately, after). I never thought to enquire who she was. I do remember that we were about the same age, and that she was very much my type. But other than the fact she had dark hair, I can't picture her with any clarity. So the fact that Frank says he can remember Nicola well enough to sketch her even after all this time suggests she really must have made an impression.
 
Krepostnoi said:
That's very true.

Funnily enough, given the mention upthread of Eastern Europe, I spent a fairly Fortean midsummer solstice in Latvia, in 1992, which also included an encounter with a very attractive dark-haired girl that was sadly (from my perspective, at least) cut short. I wrote a little about it in this post. I'd already spent a week with that crowd, but never seen the girl before (nor, unfortunately, after). I never thought to enquire who she was. I do remember that we were about the same age, and that she was very much my type. But other than the fact she had dark hair, I can't picture her with any clarity. So the fact that Frank says he can remember Nicola well enough to sketch her even after all this time suggests she really must have made an impression.
Click to expand...
We all like to think we can remember things, people, events that made a big impression on us, with utter clarity.

It is rarely the case. Constantly 'rehearsing' a memory, going over and over it - whether, as in Frank's case, to wonder what the hell happened, or because it was so wonderful or so traumatic or whatever - can lead us to think that we remember every little detail with complete accuracy. We don't realise how our brains are taking little aspects of other things and grafting them on, changing the order of events, in an attempt to make a narrative.

The human memory is a fascinating, and endlessly malleable, thing. Which is why I queried Damien's sweeping use of the fact that 'we all remember faces rather than clothing or surroundings'. Some people just cannot remember faces and have to identify people by their hairstyle, usual clothing, car, etc etc. It's not as easy as saying 'everyone remembers faces'. And also, how well do we remember someone we met once? We like to think we do, but ...
 
Damien said:
I have always thought it might be interesting to put it on a Streatham community message board and see if anyone remembers a Nicola from the early 80's that lived there...
Click to expand...
Personally, that's what I would also have contemplated and I have considerable experience in taking research queries to other online sources.

You add, "also don't know if I would come across as too creepy in doing this".

There's the dilemma in this case and I can't see a solution. It's not a situation where you are trying to contact a lost acquaintance.

Even if someone therein did believe they knew who the girl might be, would they reveal this under our circumstances - it could come across as someone who is 'stalking' her...!
 
Damien said:
The lane is such, that you would even hear a pushbike riding over the rutted lane, it's very quite and there was NO sound of any tires even, the biker appearing and dissapearing to me is the strangest part of all this, when considering there was no place for him to come from (property's on left are sealed off from the lane) and the river with steep side and bushes on the other side, also it's an open field so you would be able to see something. The description of the bike does sound to me like a Harley Fatboy or something similar.
Click to expand...
Succubus?
images (4).jpeg
 
TheLeeds said:
I suppose it depends on which way you look at it, or in what context. My take on it is this. I’d better set the scene. I don’t believe in ghosts, per se, and by that I mean when people see them, it’s not actually a ghost of a once living person, it’s a demon appearing in physical form, trying to perpetuate the lie that we can be in touch with “the other side.”. An explanation for this can be found in Luke 16:28. I’d have to check it again to be sure who was saying what, but basically once a person dies, they cannot come back. Someone who had died asked if they or someone else could be sent back to warn his brothers. He was told no, because "between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us."

This being the case, who are these ghosts or spirits of your dear departed uncle Bill or whoever ? Because if it’s not him, the main culprit is the devil, who wants to trick as many people as possible so they go to hell instead of knowing the truth.
Under a spirit of deception, Frank met ‘Nicola’ who the devil had sent to lure him to his death. It almost worked, but just before the point of no return, Frank’s gut instinct told him something was very wrong, he felt uneasy and this translated into a physical feeling as well . At this point, his rational mind became strong enough to override the demonic deception he’d been under, and he vocalised it by saying the first logical thing which came into his head. This was effectively the spellbreaker, and it angered ‘Nicola’ or whoever she / it really was. The dog / biker was one and the same, another physical embodiment of a demonic spirit, and both of them left Frank alone once they knew their attempt to lure him to an untimely death had failed.

People can, in certain states of consciousness, be very suggestible. In some types of counselling therapy, a way to bring a person back to the here and now, if they are delving deep into something which is troubling them, is to ask them a question. A good one is, “What was the original transaction ?” People can use the same thing on themselves if they are getting too deep into something and aren’t comfortable with it. It can also be used to bring people back to reality if they are hallucinating. One of the ‘text book’ ways to do this is to talk to yourself and ask a rational question, or focus on a physical object near to you. In the case of Frank, Nicola and the large, menacing and black dog / biker, Frank used it to his advantage, either knowingly or not, by asking a question which clearly demonstrated he was in the here and now, and no longer in a suggestible state or under the deception the demons had originally been using to take advantage of him. I suppose to some extent, the actual question isn’t actually important, as long as it demonstrates that the person asking it is in their adult ego state, ie in the here and now, and not in a suggestible state where they can be led and manipulated.

Oppressive people and /or spirits often react angrily if denied their wishes, so it’s hardly surprising to read that Nicola reacted as she did once she / it realized Frank wasn’t going to hell that day.
Click to expand...
^^^Sorry that post was meant for you^^^
 
catseye said:
I absolutely don't disbelieve that Frank had an experience that he felt to be 'otherworldly'. It clearly left him with a vivid impression.

However, all the dwelling on how gorgeous and attractive and lovely Nicola was does make me wonder if his hormones had a very large part to play in the unforgettable nature of the event and perhaps led to him thinking over and (possibly, without intending to) embellishing the meeting in his head. If his attention was totally focussed on trying to get in with this gorgeous woman, then perhaps he just wasn't paying attention to other external cues, like the arrival of the biker and Nicola's wanting to get away.

I have had events which have seemed to be impossible at the time, but, on reflection, it's been my own mental state that has made them seem so. To anyone else they would just be 'shrug and forget it' moments.
Click to expand...
Maybe he was unfer the influence of a 'glamour' which was broken by his out of the blue question, which pissed her off
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top