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Misperceptions

rynner2

rynner2

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Aug 7, 2001
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A thread for stories where you thought you experienced something weird or ghostly or odd, but then realised it was after all something mundane that you had temporarily misperceived. (Such stories often crop up in passing on other threads, but there seems to be no thread dedicated to them - if there is, I'm sure the Mods will do the necessary!)

I'll start the ball rolling with this little one (literally):

Running a bath the other day, I was startled to see a tiny pink worm wiggling about in the tub.
Where had it come from? How could it live in such hot water? I was able to discount the idea that it had come from my body (Eeeww! :shock: ), as I hadn't got into the bath yet!

But closer examination revealed it to be a small red carpet fibre (probably from the bath mat) which was tumbling in the turbulent water, giving the impression that it was alive and wiggling.

Drat! I thought I'd discovered a new extremophile!
 
My big dog once sat whimpering on the stairs all night. I was sure that this was a supernatural portent, you know, like a doggy banshee phenomenon...
....till he chucked up a load of tree-bark in the morning, having been chewing a stick all the previous afternoon. :roll:

Our next-door neighbour once asked me who the men were who'd been running up and down my stairs and round my house shouting while I'd been at work. I lived alone at the time. :shock:

Turns out that he'd had finally had a hearing aid fitted and couldn't distinguish where the sounds were coming from - probably the TV or across the road. :lol:

Scariest was when we started noticing a really foul stench in the house. Demonic possession! Poltergeist! Amityville!
No, I'd started feeding the dogs on high-fat butcher scraps, which played havoc with their digestion. :?

We did have a 'things that aren't Fortean but still weird' thread but perhaps that's gone now.
 
Couple of months back stripping wallpaper in the back bedroom with my wife, was deep in concentration with my tool (like you do) when suddenly it felt like she sharply prodded me twice in my rear waist, (exactly like someone might do if they were creeping up on you and playfully trying to make you jump). It was mildly painful and tickled, and I reflexively snapped around to irritably tell her off for being silly-but to my horror she was way over the other side of the room completely minding her own business!

I was left reeling, and very spooked out for a few minutes. Eventually realised that it must have been a case of a rather strong, isolated muscle twitch/tetanus. I had the day before been to the gym & started some new lower back exercises. Never had anything like that before though, was a really strange feeling-it felt exactly like a prod. Sadly not a mischievous ghost though IMO, perhaps more like my aging muscles beginning to protest!

:roll:
 
Reminds me of the time when I was repeatedly prodded in the back of the head on a long walk home late on a winter's night. Half a dozen times I spun round to confront my tormentor, to find nobody there. A long bendy twig had of course fallen into my coat hood. :roll:
 
Walking to work, taking my usual route, I was surprised, nay astounded, to see a largish derelict 2-storey building that I'd never seen before.

I was even more surprised when I mentioned this oddity to Mother and she said that it was an old factory which had been there for decades and that she had herself worked there in the late 1950's.

I've walked that path hundreds of times over the years, so why had I never noticed this building before? All I had ever seen was a grove of large fir trees... I think you all know the punch line :D

Jane.
 
The trees had been cut down?

Was once over at a friend's house one evening...both the friend and her house were minefields of Fortean weirdness so to speak. Suddenly I heard a persistent rattling sound and nearly launched myself into her lap. (It was the boarder putting his keys in the door) Earlier that evening the toilet had flushed on its own so I was in a bit of a mood wrt such things.
 
Two misperceptions come to mind, both of them viewed from the windows at night.

One was the sparkly ghost-thing at the end of the road. It glittered like a shower of electric sparks, random but never moving far from the corner. In the cold light of day, it was one of those feral cassette tapes which someone had draped over a fence.

At the back of house, I saw refuse being hungrily devoured by swarms of rats. I could see their long snouts and tails; I could see them climbing over each other to gain the tastiest morsels. I almost saw them multiplying as I watched. In the grey light of dawn, the whole unsavoury pantomime proved to be a misinterpretation of the ragged top of a black bin-liner blown by gusts of air. :?
 
This is more of an aural misperception but the first track on the Julian Cope album Saint Julian is Trampoline and there's a guitar effect which always sounded like my sister calling my brother's name!

Everytime I played the sodding album I'd open my bedroom door and tell him that he was being called, to which he'd either not be in or look at me blankly and then tell me to shut up!
 
Many moons ago, I was staying at my then girlfriend's flat one summer evening when a huge beetle came flying in through the window. It buzzed around the room ina clumsy confused way and then veered into one wall and fell to the ground. We had a look at it and saw that it had damaged one of it's wings and couldn't fly any more. It was such a large scarab-like beetle that we were convinced it was some rare exotic species, perhaps even some sort of African variety that had escaped from someone's collection. So we placed it carefully in a bowl - my girlfriend even put some salad leaves for it as 'food' (even tho' we didn't have a clue what beetles ate). After about half an hour, there was a beeping sound coming from the direction of the beetle. It would give a sharp beep every 5 seconds or so, or so it seemed. This made it seem even more weird, and we wondered how it made such a sound. So this beeping went on regularly for the whole night, and neither of us got any sleep.

Anyway, the next morning her flatmate come home and said 'Are you two deaf? The smoke alarm's battery is running low. Didn't you hear it beeping? And why have you got a dead stag beetle and some salad leaves in a bowl...?'
 
I once spent hours lying terrified in my bed as there was a white glowing enitity sat at the bottom of it. I lay under my duvet sweating and too scared to come out. Eventually I plucked up the courage to turn on my bedside light and saw..........................my washing hanging on my clothes drier :roll:
 
I turned around in my back garden several years back (at about dusk) and got hit in the face with an empty black bin-liner blowing on the wind.

For a second or two I was convinced I was under attack by a giant bat or something.

I don't think I made terribly manly noises. :oops:
 
Elffriend said:
I once spent hours lying terrified in my bed as there was a white glowing enitity sat at the bottom of it. I lay under my duvet sweating and too scared to come out. Eventually I plucked up the courage to turn on my bedside light and saw..........................my washing hanging on my clothes drier :roll:
Click to expand...

ha ha this happened to me last night...except I thought it was a spectre of Michael Jackson... but it was just my partner's black coat and some white shirts draped on the clotheshanger...
 
Twenty-five years ago I came to the county where I still live... for the first weeks I lived in a refitted bus with bunks, refirgerator, shower, etc. parked on a tract on the foothill slopes of the Northern Rio Grande Valley. Its a huge, broad glacial valley-- you can see a very long way across it to the west. There are several volcanic mountains including Ute, which is said to be the largest freestanding peak in North America, and San Antonio...

One August evening as full darkness fell I was looking across the valley between Ute and Antonio and saw lights in the sky on the far side-- a file of perhaps ten or fifteen lights with one bright one at the head and three or four outliers. The file would stand still for a while and then move very slowly north for a very short distance; the outliers didn't appear to move except for one which moved pretty constantly in ovals. Something about the whole thing had a kind of eerie familiarity even though I'd never seen anything like it in my life...

I watched it for about half an hour, when the file started moving maybe twice as fast as before, and steadly, while the moving outlier stopped still. The sense of familiarity became irritating-- I could almost resolve what I was seeing into a comprehensible image, but not quite. Then for some reason I was inspired to bend over and look at it "upside down."

It was instantly, obviously, a railroad train.

When they say many UFOs are actually inversion layers, I believe 'em. There's a cement plant served by rail over in the direction I was looking, and a big bucket loader with a bright light on it which fills hopper cars... and three or four yard lights... and the hopper cars have their own lighting; I've seen the yard close up since. When the train moved out of the yard, it distinguished itself as a separate component, and I relised that I should recognise it-- it was appearing upside down is all.
 
a few years ago i was in my first apartment. after living with my parents my entire life, i had a hard time sleeping if i knew that my roommate was away and i was "alone" at night.

i was awoken one night to a loud ripping or tearing sound, i awoke with a start and saw several glowing bands of light undulating wildly at the foot of my bed. in my half-asleep state i first thought "ghosts" then "aliens". terrified, i screamed and turned on the light beside my bed

it was my mirror, a cheap thin mirror that hung on my closet door with adhesive. it was hot that night and the foam tape had loosened, the ripping sound was it tearing off the door. the "light" was a result of the top of the mirror bending and warping back and forth as the bottom had caught itself on some objects; and reflecting the street lights from outside. it took me a loooong time to get back to sleep that night
 
About ten years ago, on a nice spring or early summer evening, I was watching TV at home, alone, (it might have been The X-Files :lol: ) and had all the windows open and was just enjoying the program. And then I heard, what sounded like incredibly loud breathing (!) of some kind... long, drawn out inhales-exhales from the outdoors. And it was getting closer. And as it was getting closer I realized the sound was coming from the sky. :eek!!!!: :eek!!!!:

Freaking out only a little (it's also possible I was high at the time :roll: ) I went out on the front porch and looked up to see the umm, well, the low-flying hot air balloon that was going over the house because someone was offering rides that day.

:blush:
 
Some years ago one of the neighbours who worked in the office of a funeral business kept hearing heavy breathing when she was home alone. She was positive that one of the spirits of the deceased had followed her home and wondered if she should give up her job. It turned out to be one of the local possums that had got into her roof.
 
I posted this on another thread, but I'll echo it here:

Today I thought I'd found a photographic anomaly.

I'd scanned a slide of a woman and and a young girl on a beach. At first it looked OK, the people were standing upright at the water's edge.

But then I saw the sea horizon was wonky. It seemed to me that if I rotated the pic to level the horizon, the people would appear to be leaning sideways.

But when I did this rotation (by 3 degrees), the people still seemed upright!

Which goes to show that the human eye is good at distinguishing off-kilter things when they are straight or regular (like a sea horizon), but not when the image is irregular and asymmetrical, as in most human photos.

My experience of scanning photos shows me that the eye can detect horizon errors of about half a degree, smaller than my software can correct!
 
I was out shooting one morning and while strolling along a ridge I turned around to see a big silver sphere gliding silently along level with me.

Made me jump out my skin. Thought I was be be gonna be probed (and they hadn't even brought me dinner first ;) )

Yes it really really was a weather baloon! made out of that thin shiny mylar stuff. They are quite big close up and you tend to ignore the little payload underneath.
 
The other day I heard a strange rapping whilst sitting at my desk.. rap rap rap....pause...rap rap rap...

When I got up to investigate I discovered it was a bird on the fibreglass porch roof, pecking at seeds...
 
When I was about 8 my bedroom had a delightful dark brown carpet. My Mum had obviously thought long and hard about the layout of the room aswell as the decor, and had made sure that my bed was as far away from the light switch as possible. One night I made the usual sprint from the switch to my bed, and I threw my dark purple dressing gown (she was classy my mum) onto the floor as I leapt into bed. As I turned onto my side I froze with horror as I witnessed said dressing gown rising slowly up from the floor, revealing a pair of angry green eyes which were looking straight at me. Just as I was about to scream, the cat raced out from underneath the gown and out through my bedroom door. The cat had been curled up asleep on the floor and being a dark brown herself had simply blended into the carpet and escaped my notice.
 
light said:
The other day I heard a strange rapping whilst sitting at my desk.. rap rap rap....pause...rap rap rap...

When I got up to investigate I discovered it was a bird on the fibreglass porch roof, pecking at seeds...
Click to expand...
Was it a raven, perchance?
 
Magies are Fortean.

Saluting or waving to a lone Magpie to ward off bad luck.

One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a wedding, four for a birth, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret, never to be told.... (with numerous variants).

Various folk stories and ULs about things stolen by magpies
 
I stand corrected!

So what does it mean that I have one pecking on my roof?

:lol:
 
Doom! Doom! We're all doomed! :shock:
 
weird muscle spasm

Not a ghost story but maybe an explanation.

Was watching a show on TV last night about various haunted houses. In one story, a painter claimed that an invisible hand had tugged at his shoulder while he was working on a ladder. Bloke fled the house.

This story immediately made me think of a rather unique muscle spasm that I experience from time to time. It is precisely the feeling of somebody pulling urgently on my right shoulder. My first conscious experience of this spasm occurred a couple of years ago. I was alone in the house reading a book. Suddenly, "something" tugged at my shoulder- like a string pulling right at my shoulder blade. The sensation was so powerful that I immediately looked over my shoulder. I was somewhat unnerved until the spasm returned and i was able to analyze the sensation.

anybody else experience anything like this? I don't neccessarily a visual or aural misperception, but a "somatic" misperception?
 
Lately as I've been lying in bed reading, I get a feeling like something lightly brushes the top of my head. I'm certain it's nothing spooky, as after the first time it happened it only happened again when I thought about it. I think it must be my scalp twitching or something.

Is that the sort of thing you mean?
 
Timble said:
Magies are Fortean.

Saluting or waving to a lone Magpie to ward off bad luck.

One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a wedding, four for a birth, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret, never to be told.... (with numerous variants).

Various folk stories and ULs about things stolen by magpies
Click to expand...

I second that notion! The unique warbling sounds made by Magpies are ethereal and familiar. When different groups are calling to each other at two o''clock in the morning all is right with the world... :D
 
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