This has been bugging me for nearly two years now ..
The man everyone swears I must have known
Two years ago, I hooked up with the end of the pier fishermen, loveable rogues etc. and spent the whole Summer socialising with them.
One day, I got there and everyone was upset. It turned out that a man in his 30's had been found dead in his flat in Cabbal Road so I offered my sympathies obviously. I didn't know who they were on about so asked as gently as you can to be met with a wall of shocked faces.
Everyone there kept saying "You knew him?" , "Of course you knew him?!" .. loads of variants of that with added descriptions of everything about him including his catch phrase, his hat, everything but I was still drawing a blanc. My mates were all looking at each other strangely then looking back at me but I honestly had no idea who they were on about. I decided to write it all off as just 'it's a small town but our paths never crossed' thing.
I'm told they all used to play a game which was to smile at a tourist waking past and if they didn't smile back, he'd murmur "You've been pied" ..
Later on, a different friend reported the same news to me. This man had lived in the basement flat under her flat. He'd died of sepsis in his leg after ignoring his mate's advice to get it checked out. Apparently he was a well loved and larger than life character who knocked around with a lot of people I also knock around with including non pier party people. It got to the stage where I was starting to feel embarrassed and insensitive somehow for not knowing who this man was with so many people looking at me strangely when I told them I didn't know who they were talking about sorry.
Some of my friends who knew him stated they'd done some sort of ghost session not long after he'd died, they weren't trying to contact him but they got the message 'you've been pied'
I decided they must be right and I must be wrong then, even stranger, every time anyone decided to show me a picture of this man on their phone, they either didn't have one (which surprised them) or they had had a picture of him but had lost it somehow. This happened about 5 times with different people. I've been told his name and his nickname a lot of times but I can't ever seem to remember it for some reason.
If this is all just a prank being played on me, it would have to a very elaborate one and I'm not going to flatter myself that people would go to that much trouble to bother plus it would be in very bad taste.
Again, everyone swears I knew this man so I'm going to be a bit creeped out if and when I ever do get to see a picture of him .. then not recognise him.
*links to 'Nowhere Man' by The Beatles*