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More Tales From My Guests

gattino

Justified & Ancient
Joined
Jul 30, 2003
Messages
2,516
As frequently referenced i pay my bills and stave off the bailiffs by being a full time Airbnb host, and so over the last almost 2 years many many strangers have passed through my doors, and most make conversation.

In the past ive noted here what i termed a collective conspiracy of silence wherein if you touch on the subject of the spooky stuff with almost anyone they will regale you with tales of their own...suggesting the whole world is walking constantly through the twilight zone, yet each individual presumes they're doing so alone. I've recounted a few of my guests accounts here and there on these boards. I've another chap here at the moment with whom the conversation turned to the Fortean and he had a tale or two to impart. He started it. But first a neat little background detail.

I noted last week that on my late mother's birthday a guest with the same first name came to stay. So its doubly unusual that she is followed this week by a young man with my deceased brother's name. An additional flourish..when i later told him my long sagas of post mortem coincidences and came to the part where the homeless man gave my birthday, January 11th, as his own, my guest interjected "That's my birthday!"

Anyhow, a number of tales but ill get to the meatiest as best i remember him telling me an hour or so ago. When he was about 4 years old his parents moved to a house in Bolton. His account are the memories of his mother rather than his own, but strange things happened. Noises in the night and in particular a roof or loft hatch repeatedly opened by itself, with no wind present. The father attached two hooks to keep it in place. And yet, still, they wake to find the hooks have been unlatched and the hatch opened and turned. The mother replaces the hooks into their place and puts tape over them...noises in the night...next morning the tape is lying on the floor and the hatch is again open.

Finally dad has enough and gets the screwdriver and screws the hatch door firmly in place so it can not be opened at all. Things go quiet for a week or two..until the mother walking on the landing i assume stands painfully on a screw. Looking up she finds one of the screws dad had embedded deeply into the wood work has been unthreaded with exact precision, leaving no damage or disturbance as might be expected in most circumstances.

I can't recall is he mentioned a timeline in relation to the above but the second part of the tale was that his mum heard his 4 year old self talking to someone. When she entered the room he was gabbing away in full conversation with thin air. Who are you talking to, mum asked. "The little boy" he replied. "Which little boy?" "He's called Tom".

And here's the bit i omitted for the best ending. It was only a day earlier that the mum had found out the full story of the tragedy that had occurred there before they moved in. The previous owner's 10 year old son had fallen out of a window (or was it the hatch? ill have to check) to his death. His name was Tom.

Interstingly, charmingly, my guest emphasised "its my mum's story not mine" as he has no memory of it, but reports the look of sincerity and genuine fear in her face when she recounts it even now.
 
Ok this is getting silly. Having told people last night about the guests with my mother's and then brother's names, and joking that if the next one is called Tiddles then I'm calling an exorcist.,..this morning I woke to find a new booking had been made in the early hours. By a man called...well...he has MY name.

(I ought to emphasise while none of the three names are outlandish they're relatively unpopular enough that I've never had anyone else staying with any of them. In fact I don't think I've ever addressed another person using my own name before. )
 
Ok this is getting silly. Having told people last night about the guests with my mother's and then brother's names, and joking that if the next one is called Tiddles then I'm calling an exorcist.,..this morning I woke to find a new booking had been made in the early hours. By a man called...well...he has MY name.

(I ought to emphasise while none of the three names are outlandish they're relatively unpopular enough that I've never had anyone else staying with any of them. In fact I don't think I've ever addressed another person using my own name before. )
Better watch out. Might be your doppelgänger.
 
I'll fill in some of the other things he told me.

It started with him talking about his fascination with dreams.

Then he told me , his father having died a couple of months ago, that he himself had been to/received reiki and during it...well...he struggled to describe it, but it appeared to me he appeared to be talking about the effects witnessed in so called IADC...that's to say he had a mental vision of his father and his grief and pain vanished completely from that point. The reiki practicioner seemed to have a knowledge of what had just happened with some curious comments she made.

Then he told me the story about the house and the ghost child.

When telling him what a previous guest had told me about his dying wife's room filling with light, he had an emotional response as it reminded him of a furhter incident. That two days after his father's death he was standing in the garden having a smoke when an extraordinary bright blue shooting star of some kind crossed the sky..again he struggled to convey how of the ordinary and visually strking it was. The significance of it to him being that his father had repeated the same phrase to him often (perhaps he said when he was dying?) to "Fly High". He hadn't quite known what he meant by it, and then when he saw this after the death it was filled with significance.

Naturally in between this i was telling him all my various tales. And of course we noted the whole odd coincidence of the names.

Next day...yesterday...he came in from work and said "something weird happened today". He's a surveyor or some such for a housing trust so basically goes into countless strangers (in every sense!) houses. First one he went into the morning after our conversation the woman starts telling him about the aura around him, that she hadn't seen one like that in a long time, that he had lost someone recently...and gave him a small heart shaped stone she insist he keep with him as protection.

Apart from the new age weirdness of the unsolicited conversation, the timing of it within hours of our paranormal chat was equally striking.

******************
Addendum: he was here for 3 nights (he'll be back over several weeks) but the first night he was here he'd asked for a second room for his friend and workmate, Ben. After the latter had left, the next day - in fact it was the trigger for our initial conversation about dream stuff - he said Ben had had a sleep paralysis episode that night in my house. Not too much detail was offered and non asked, except that it involved the belief there was a snake in the bed. Very freudian. But what i didn't tell him as i didn't want to creep him out, is that my own very few sleep paralysis experiences in the past had happened in that same bed, the one clearly remembered being when i thought myself awake, with something tail like and furry in my hand (steady!), which i was then shocked to realise was physically growing out of my chest...before a voice said "the eyes..the eyes follow you round the room" and i woke up a second time with a jolt. The similarity between a perceived cat's tail and a snake may be of note. Who knows.
 
He was back this week so i had a chance to flesh out the reiki incident a bit.

He went along shortly after his father's death, with unresolved tensions, emotions, grief etc. His understanding was that it would release these bottled up feelings. It involved him laying down and being covered up and the practicioner passed her hands over him...without (as he understands it) ever coming into contact. An important point as the first uncanny thing was that he felt the sensation of touch throughout the experience.

His eyes were closed. He prefers the word vision rather than dream as it had a separate quality..its general vividness and the fact he remembered it on "waking" with the clarity of a real experience rather than the usuaul fading whispiness of a dream. And essentially he "saw" hs father...and his equally deceased grandmother. The activities in the "vision" were of no great import - or at least i can't recall them now in retelling his account - it was more that he was seeing them right therein front of him. There was no conversation or interaction except right at the end when his father turned around and looked back at him and said something to the effect of it "its going to be ok. Fly high."

He was woken from his reverie by the reiki practicioner at that moment. For him it had lasted a couple of minutes, but in fact she informed him he'd been there for 45.

Next oddity is that the reiki lady rather than trying to sell him more informed him she wouldn't see him for a long time, years perhaps, but he'll know when the time is right.

Finally his mum who had also had a session - before or after he did i'm not sure - reported the exact same vision of the same two people.
 
Love this thread! It's absolutely fascinating; am looking forward to reading more!
 
Well this afternoon i've googled the subject of visions during reiki and interestingly find a number of people, who have clearly had such an experience themselves, asking how normal this is. The answer seems to be its not standard but is far from uncommon. Which is fascinating.

As for its - to me - obvious similarities to Dr Alan Botkin's so named "Induced After Death Communication" process*, I showed my guest a chapter in a book describing it. He read it and said it wasn't the same in his eyes, though the reasons he gave seemed to be entirely functional..thzat IADC was deliberately induced whereas his was spontaneous. He also emphasised a lack of conversation between him and the deceased, which again parted from much of the IADC accounts. But these seem to me to be minor matters. The subject matter and vivid nature of the visions, plus their grief healing outcome, seem to me to be too similar to be unconnected.

*for the unfamiliar Botkin discovered quite by chance a process whereby finger/eye movements suggested to patients while reliving their core sadness stemming from whatever grief or trauma caused them to have spontaneous extraordinary and healing visions/interactions with the deceased. The process has been and is replicated many times...and, if the account in his own book is to be credited, it goes way beyond mere visual imagery. In some cases he reports other people in the room also experience what the patient is seeing.

http://www.induced-adc.com/experiences/
 
Great posts, and relevant to my own experience working in hotels from the age of 17 until my late-30s. Much of that time was spent in rural locations and it seems there is nothing like a few drinks and a crackling log fire on a dark winter’s night to bring out the paranormal experiences of guests. In fact, it was this aspect of hotel life that kept my childhood fascination with the paranormal alive during my rather hectic late-teens and early-20s...!

Of course there were sceptics, but it never ceased to amaze me how many guests would report haunting, ghosts, ufo encounters etc and consider themselves somewhat unique. Furthermore, the places I worked in had their own ghosts, including:
  • Housekeepers reporting poltergerist activity in the newly-renovated annexe of a hotel in Barnstaple
  • Hampshire: A grey lady ghost who had been immortalised in an oil painting by a guests who witnessed her in the 1950s (painting hung in back of reception). A member of staff had seen her in the 1980s, too.
  • Dartington Hall, Devon: a plethora of well documented hauntings, although during my nine years it was the sighting of a glowing figure in a cloak by a waiter and poltergeist activity in the kitchens that stood out.
  • Somerset: before I joined the Globe Inn at Milverton as a relief manager, the building had been extensively renovated and had subsequently been plagued by a very malevolent poltergeist. The owner had the building exorcised and a light installed in a certain corner to appease the spirit. This was non-nonsense stuff and it had clearly been an unpleasant episode.
 
Great posts, and relevant to my own experience working in hotels from the age of 17 until my late-30s. Much of that time was spent in rural locations and it seems there is nothing like a few drinks and a crackling log fire on a dark winter’s night to bring out the paranormal experiences of guests. In fact, it was this aspect of hotel life that kept my childhood fascination with the paranormal alive during my rather hectic late-teens and early-20s...!

Of course there were sceptics, but it never ceased to amaze me how many guests would report haunting, ghosts, ufo encounters etc and consider themselves somewhat unique. Furthermore, the places I worked in had their own ghosts, including:
  • Housekeepers reporting poltergerist activity in the newly-renovated annexe of a hotel in Barnstaple
  • Hampshire: A grey lady ghost who had been immortalised in an oil painting by a guests who witnessed her in the 1950s (painting hung in back of reception). A member of staff had seen her in the 1980s, too.
  • Dartington Hall, Devon: a plethora of well documented hauntings, although during my nine years it was the sighting of a glowing figure in a cloak by a waiter and poltergeist activity in the kitchens that stood out.
  • Somerset: before I joined the Globe Inn at Milverton as a relief manager, the building had been extensively renovated and had subsequently been plagued by a very malevolent poltergeist. The owner had the building exorcised and a light installed in a certain corner to appease the spirit. This was non-nonsense stuff and it had clearly been an unpleasant episode.
Absolutely fascinating! Did you find out anything else about the poltergeist in Somerset episode?
 
Well this afternoon i've googled the subject of visions during reiki and interestingly find a number of people, who have clearly had such an experience themselves, asking how normal this is. The answer seems to be its not standard but is far from uncommon. Which is fascinating.

As for its - to me - obvious similarities to Dr Alan Botkin's so named "Induced After Death Communication" process*, I showed my guest a chapter in a book describing it. He read it and said it wasn't the same in his eyes, though the reasons he gave seemed to be entirely functional..thzat IADC was deliberately induced whereas his was spontaneous. He also emphasised a lack of conversation between him and the deceased, which again parted from much of the IADC accounts. But these seem to me to be minor matters. The subject matter and vivid nature of the visions, plus their grief healing outcome, seem to me to be too similar to be unconnected.

*for the unfamiliar Botkin discovered quite by chance a process whereby finger/eye movements suggested to patients while reliving their core sadness stemming from whatever grief or trauma caused them to have spontaneous extraordinary and healing visions/interactions with the deceased. The process has been and is replicated many times...and, if the account in his own book is to be credited, it goes way beyond mere visual imagery. In some cases he reports other people in the room also experience what the patient is seeing.

http://www.induced-adc.com/experiences/
A friend of mine had some reiki sessions following the deaths of her parents fairly close together. She has described to me seeing and speaking with both parents over several sessions, until her father told her that she’d be fine now, and he wouldn’t be seeing her again for a long time. Sure enough, next reiki session, all she had was a feeling of complete calm.
Me? The only thing that ever happens to me in a reiki session is I fall asleep. I feel nothing. Sensitive as a stick, me...
 
A former friend of mine had a reiki session, even though she's sceptical, and told me of her interesting experience.

Her eyes were closed but she saw a vertical eye-shaped opening, like a window in front of her face, through which she could clearly see everything in the room. This lasted for some minutes until the 'window' closed when the session was ending.
 
Last weekend a lovely lady I didn't know once again approached me in the pub and asked me if I was psychic and knew about energies etc. She has persuaded me to find out all about training as a Reiki practitioner. I am awaiting a phone call from a Reiki Master to find out more.
 
Not a tale from, but rather of a former guest. This could fit into a million other threads, half of them started by me, but given the guest connection i'll just stick it here.

Some may vaguely remember last year I had a young American man staying for a few days who had a very dominant personality and a fixation with interviewing elderly world war 2 veterans. Despite only being here two days or so he had me acting as his secretary , giving out my phone number for ancient warriors and their families to get in touch with him while he was in the UK. His was a very entertaining presence in my life for a couple of weeks but ive not thought about him since last year.

Until yesterday when walking along he popped into my head for no recollectable reason and I found myself daydreaming him turning up unannounced on my doorstep and me rolling my eyes and saying FFS for comic effect.

Just now, 24 hours later, I got a text from a stranger. A lady addressing me by his name, asking if she could have the interview he recorded with her soon to be 100 year old father while he was still around to see it. I've had to pass it on via airbnb and hope he gets it.

Surely not a coincidence. In fact its to me another example of my observation that daydreams, like the sleeping kind, are commonly precognitive of trivial things. When we encounter people or things we were just thinking about, I hold, its a case that we were thinking of them precisely because we were about to encounter them.
 
Ok, now its looking a bit more spooky.

When the american was here in October his initial stay coincided with another unrelated guest, Tom, who was stopping over on his way between Scotland and Wales. There was conversation and interaction between them and the older man was very impressed by our young friend. When the young man returned for one night only later during his travels it coincided - literally by chance - with Tom stopping over again on his return journey. So he was here on both occassions that the American was.

48 hours ago the American and the thought of him turning up unannounced enters my mind.
24 hours ago the text message from someone thinking I was him, and trying to get in touch with him
Just now...a text message, again out of the blue as ive had no intervening contact, from Tom..saying he's passing this way again in a few days and do I have a room.

Hmmm.
 
Ok, now its looking a bit more spooky.

When the american was here in October his initial stay coincided with another unrelated guest, Tom, who was stopping over on his way between Scotland and Wales. There was conversation and interaction between them and the older man was very impressed by our young friend. When the young man returned for one night only later during his travels it coincided - literally by chance - with Tom stopping over again on his return journey. So he was here on both occassions that the American was.

48 hours ago the American and the thought of him turning up unannounced enters my mind.
24 hours ago the text message from someone thinking I was him, and trying to get in touch with him
Just now...a text message, again out of the blue as ive had no intervening contact, from Tom..saying he's passing this way again in a few days and do I have a room.

Hmmm.
You lead a spooky life G.
 
So the aforementioned Tom is here and I got him to repeat the fortean experiences i vaguely remembered him telling me last time.

1) His grandmother's death bed. He and his mother are on either side of the dying lady. He wakes from a slight doze , turns and sees, standing at the foot of the bed and cast against the drawn curtain around it, a shadow figure, a human silhouette matching - he says - the bodily shape of his deceased grandfather. He says he stared at it long enough to be certain of its presence and form (as opposed to a brief flash)

2) His own mother who he looked after and lived with died of cancer. During her illness it was her habit to watch reruns of Frasier in the mornings, to avoid watching news programs. When she died, he so associated her with watching this show that he couldn't bring himself to do so again for a long time...before one day consciously deciding he needed to get over the association and watch it. So he switches it on...at which precise point the character Roz says "Pam is on the line for you".
Pam was his mother's name.
 
So the aforementioned Tom is here and I got him to repeat the fortean experiences i vaguely remembered him telling me last time.

1) His grandmother's death bed. He and his mother are on either side of the dying lady. He wakes from a slight doze , turns and sees, standing at the foot of the bed and cast against the drawn curtain around it, a shadow figure, a human silhouette matching - he says - the bodily shape of his deceased grandfather. He says he stared at it long enough to be certain of its presence and form (as opposed to a brief flash)

2) His own mother who he looked after and lived with died of cancer. During her illness it was her habit to watch reruns of Frasier in the mornings, to avoid watching news programs. When she died, he so associated her with watching this show that he couldn't bring himself to do so again for a long time...before one day consciously deciding he needed to get over the association and watch it. So he switches it on...at which precise point the character Roz says "Pam is on the line for you".
Pam was his mother's name.

Coincidentally Frasier has a very similar meaning for me, albeit I could still watch it. Friends - I was not able to watch until some 15 years later.
 
When my husband was going through a difficult time, he would watch Frasier, it must be something about the show. He won’t watch it now though.

When I was going through desperate, dark times, I found myself watching 'Come Dine with Me' on virtual loop. Never watched it before and can't now watch it at all. It seems there are some programmes that just have a soothing predictability about them.
 
When I was going through desperate, dark times, I found myself watching 'Come Dine with Me' on virtual loop. Never watched it before and can't now watch it at all. It seems there are some programmes that just have a soothing predictability about them.

Big Brother was a good way of getting through the summer/early January months for me, but when it went to Channel 5 I decided enough was enough (!).
 
Not supernatural, but Charlotte Church used to love Frasier until she met Kelsey Grammer and he was "such an arse".
Mr Grammer has had a bit of a miserable life. 2 close family members(father and sister?) were murdered and he apparently struggled with drink and drug addiction.
 
Mr Grammer has had a bit of a miserable life. 2 close family members(father and sister?) were murdered and he apparently struggled with drink and drug addiction.

I've never met the guy, and we all have bad days, but Charlotte met him when they were attending George W. Bush's inauguration when you might have thought he'd be happy his guy was now in charge. I suppose we're all the product of our experiences.
 
A most peculiar little incident last night. Though not from my perspective. Which is what makes it interesting.


Guest. Ethiopian-American girl. Petite, black, with an entertainingly large poodle-like mane of blond curls. You'd pick her out in a football crowd.

She went out yesterday morning without me seeing her. Out all day. In the evening I went into town to see Midsommar at the cinema with a friend. Finishes half past ten and I head to the main central bus stop for my bus. One comes within minutes. I let everyone else get on before me and I sit in the single seat near the front behind the stairway. Spend the journey distracted by my phone.

With about 6 stops to go I put the phone away and notice I'm in front of the TV screen showing live cut aways of the cttv cameras around the bus.

A few seconds later I see it close in on the unmistakable image of my guest, checking her phone screen and looking anxious. Where the hell did she come from? She must have been already on the bus when I got on.

So I go upstairs to greet her. From my perspective being on the same bus is a nice coincidence of timing but no more than that. But from hers....She had forgotten my address, the buses don't announce or display the names of stops, you can't see much out of the window in the dark.. and she had been silently panicking not knowing where she was or where to get off...when the one person in all the world who could answer her prayers appears like a genie from a lamp.

If this was a ring in the belly of a fish story I would be the fish, who simply happened to swallow a ring and witnessed nothing magical at all. I certainly didn't feel summoned into existence, nor buffered by chance distractions to be on that particular bus at that particular time.


However what makes it objectively mysterious is the discovery she actually got on at the same stop as me. How could we not have seen each other? I was standing at the front of the line when the bus pulled up but conscious that I was among the last to arrive at the stop i let almost everyone already waiting file on in front of me. I never saw her. And she presumably never noticed herself walking past me. So perhaps she got on behind me and I was obscured from her by the staircase and she from me by my phone fiddling. Perhaps. Except she spoke of an interaction with the driver ...she only had a credit card , not contactless, and a single pound coin and was lost as to how she was meant to buy a ticket but the driver said it doesn't matter and let her on anyway. If this was happening a couple of feet from me after I sat down I surely would have looked up. Most peculiar.

Clearly in the real world one of those two things MUST have happened. There's no denying it. But as far as seeming and the imagination goes it had the appearance of each of us living a separate reality up to the point her thoughts and needs folded mine into hers and the universe brought her what she required. Of course that didn't happen. But if anyone wants the premise for a book...
 
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My mate's brother had a similar experience. He was lost late at night in the middle of nowhere in the wilds of Cornwall on his bicycle, having camped at a site miles away (pre mobile phone days). A camper van drove past and stopped when they saw him sitting in the dark by the side of the road. The driver was his next door neighbour from Leeds and they had booked at the same camp site he was staying. Bizarre coincidence.
 
I love stories like this. I heard something in a familiar vein. A woman I knew had broken down in the North, with her two kids. It was a difficult time for her as she had just split with her husband and had little money. In fact she had just been to view her new home before driving back down South. Unfortunately she broke down and had no idea what to do. Fortunately there was a Police Station near by.She locked the car and took her two small children in to the Police Station. The Police were sympathetic enough but were unable to really offer much practical help, but suggested she tried to contact family etc to see if they could help out.She walked outside the Police Station to phone her ex Mother in law to see if she could book them in a hotel using her credit card.She noticed a man smoking a cigarette near the front door. As she left her mother in law to try to sort something out she began crying, she was aware of the man looking at her. He approached her and apologised for over hearing her conversation but asked if she would except £115. and some change. It was all the man had on him. The woman stated she couldn't possibly accept it. The man insisted and said he would have given her more if he had more on him. He then explained there was a warrant out for his arrest and he was handing himself in. He explained he wouldn't need the money where he was going. He asked her to take it for her children. The woman accepted the money and the man went in to the Police Station and handed himself in.She never found out what he had done or what happened to him and some people may judge her for accepting possible crooked money, but I can't help but think it was meant to be.
 
New guest tale. A young woman whose father died at 57 of a heart attack. On the day of his death, in the family waiting room the hands of the clock were inexplicably and to their fascination spinning round at speed and continued to do so until the moment the consultant enter the room to inform them their father had just passed, at which point it stopped dead.

(Not at the correct time, before you ask)
 
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