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Odd Experience On A Worthing Bus (Vanishing Person)

The_Discordian

Mmm... crunchy!
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Jun 14, 2002
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I almost feel embarrassed by posting this, as I may have just experienced some wort of sensory anomaly, but here goes:

This afternoon, I got on the bus in Worthing town centre to go over to Lancing and see my mum (as is my wont these days). Before boarding, I stepped aside to let a bloke with a pushchair off, and noticed as I did so that there was one other passenger still on the bus - a woman probably in her 70s, wearing a dark coat, nothing remarkable. As I registered her age, I gave her a few moments grace in case she wanted to get off as well, before stepping into the front of the bus to get my ticket. After buying said ticket (and having, obviously, obstructed the only route of egress from the bus in the meantime). I turned round to sit down ... and there was nobody else on the bus.

And that's it - probably the most banal way to have a potential ghost sighting. Felt this was the appropriate place to report it, though.
 
Was she sitting in the front of the bus, or standing there like maybe she wanted to get off? Could she have slipped off the bus while your back was turned?
 
The two times I've seen human apparitions were equally banal. First time walking through my local train station, quite late, deserted, except for a little old lady a few feet in front of me pulling one of those two wheeled-shopping trolleys. I remember thinking "You don't see many of those these days" glanced up at the station clock, looked back down again and she had vanished. It was impossible for her to have made any of the exits in the second it took to look up and back down again as we were in the central hall of the station which is pretty big.


The second saw a grey haired lady ahead, did the look away and look back again and she had gone. Again with the road on oneside and the big drop on the other it was impossible that she left the path we were both on.

I think that apart from sightings at home most of these cases are so banal that they are under-reported as folk don't known that they are looking at something that isn't or is no longer a human.

What is interesting that all our apparitions are little old ladies dressed in dark clothing. Maybe it's a good disguise for whatever they are not wishing to be spotted?
 
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Was she sitting in the front of the bus, or standing there like maybe she wanted to get off? Could she have slipped off the bus while your back was turned?

Nope, she was sat about a third of the way back, and the entry area to the bus wasn't wide enough for two people to pass each other without having to really squeeze.
 
Just a thought, could it have been one of those buses with more that one exit?

Nope, it just had the one door:

14441262663_06aa1dcd98_m.jpg
 
Kind of reminds me of an experience I had in about 1998 when I was working in a very old hospital in the centre of Bath. For anyone who isn't familliar with it - it's called the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases or the "Min" (presumably a shortened version of Mineral Hospital with reference to the spa and hydrotherapy facilities it has). It dates back to the 1700's so it's old!

I was working as a cleaner at the time down on the basement floor, in the x-ray department. I shared the job with another girl who I'm still friends with today. As I was vacuuming the area behind the reception, a man in a white coat with grey hair walked past and went through a door into the clinical measurement department which is where they do bone density scanning. It was about 19:30 so the department was not operational at the point and I assumed he was a physician or radiologist of sorts who was visiting from another hospital and was either lost or looking for somebody.

A bit puzzled; I switched the vacuum off and came out from behind the reception and went through the same door that he went through. It's not a big room and the only way to get back out of it is to go through the door you entered by, otherwise there is an emergency exit at the other end which is well and truly alarmed (trust me - I've heard it go off and it's a racket!). When I got in there the only person I saw was the girl I worked with. I asked her who "that bloke was" to which she said - "what are you on about?!".obviously she hadn't seen him and by this time was getting a bit freaked out by what I was telling her. Thinking about it again now the man looked, we'll just that - a man. Nothing more nothing less.
 
I wonder if that generic quality - some bloke, some little old lady - is a factor of ghosts the witness doesn't recognise, no striking distinguishing features so they don't think anything odd is going on until... well, until they vanish. Don't know what the reason for that would be.
 
A lot of this reminds me of the 'obscured vanishing man' I saw last year, again, no remarkable features other than that he was there and then not there.
 
I wonder if that generic quality - some bloke, some little old lady - is a factor of ghosts the witness doesn't recognise, no striking distinguishing features so they don't think anything odd is going on until... well, until they vanish. Don't know what the reason for that would be.


Yeah this is my feeling too or is it a disguise or camouflage?

Onewingedbird saw a guy vanish crossing the road. I saw two old ladies vanish on separate occasions. Thediscordian an old dear vanished from a bus and tommxx watched a guy vanish going into a room.

"They" don't provoke any alarm or anything in the witness. Is this deliberate? Choose a form that stops people noticing them?

Every witness is pretty much certain they couldn't have gotten away without the witness spotting them.

If you wanted to move around in society it's prefect. 99% of the time you won't be spotted and if you do you just disappear and people go "odd but no big deal" - apart from us of course :p
 
Not ghosts, but aliens wandering about with some form of camouflage technology?
 
I can't help thinking that it's also a feature of hypnogogic faces that they are both bland and always unknown to the person seeing them.

Do we know of any cases where the unremarkable vanishing person was seen by more than one person at the same time?
 
My vanishing man was waiting to cross the road at this crossing, on the r/h side.

He vanished as a van passed in front of him, I'll concede that at a push he could have made it behind a tree if he timed it just right while the van was blocking me from seeing him, and moved around the trunk to avoid my line of sight. Which would be very odd thing to do.

It's more likely I was just very tired.
 
The two times I've seen human apparitions were equally banal. First time walking through my local train station, quite late, deserted, except for a little old lady a few feet in front of me pulling one of those two wheeled-shopping trolleys. I remember thinking "You don't see many of those these days" glanced up at the station clock, looked back down again and she had vanished. It was impossible for her to have made any of the exits in the second it took to look up and back down again as we were in the central hall of the station which is pretty big.



What is interesting that all our apparitions are little old ladies dressed in dark clothing. Maybe it's a good disguise for whatever they are not wishing to be spotted?

Ah. Refer to Terry Pratchett's "Johnny Maxwell" stories for Mrs Tachyon, time-and-space travelling bag-lady with shopping trolley containing the Secret.... you evidently saw Nora Tachyon as she was passing by...
 
In response to whether more than one person has seen the same human apparition, I think my parents and I did.

We were walking our dog across some fields bordered on one side by a railway track with a very steep and high bank on the other side, a small stream separates the track from the field side but it's all pretty open.
We spotted a guy in a beige trench coat walking in the opposite direction on the track, which wouldn't be too hard to get to if you scrambled through the stream. Him being there wasn't a big deal as the track is only used in summer months once an hour by the local steam train and the bank itself has been studded with garden gnomes over the years as a sort of pixie grotto, I assume to entertain the rail passengers. I thought he'd probably just gone to get a closer look.
We then heard the approaching steam train and waited to see it pass, only when it did we realised the man had disappeared. I had expected him to have hugged the bank and to emerge after the train had gone but he was nowhere to be seen. We found it faintly amusing at the time but walking back to the car it occurred to us how odd it was and that he had been wearing a trenchcoat and trousers on a hot sunny day.
 
You're famous! :)
 
I like the way there's a photo of a man and a bus on the report, in case we couldn't picture the scene. Shame there's no picture of the ghost, but they're funny that way.
 
Most buses carry CCTV these days. Maybe it's just a matter of time before some story like this one does get corroboration from the on board cameras.

But probably the footage is only reviewed when crime or antisocial behaviour is involved.
 
I can't help thinking that it's also a feature of hypnogogic faces that they are both bland and always unknown to the person seeing them.

Do we know of any cases where the unremarkable vanishing person was seen by more than one person at the same time?
Hey, sorry to just butt into this thread but your question intrigued me. First off, I don't see those faces as I was about to go to sleep, that I saw as a child. Often elderly men with a strange, distorted silent scream and not of someone I'd known. I'm 51yrs old and still recall one very clearly. Your second sentence is particularly intriguing to me. One, because of my own experiences with what is now known as 'the hat man' or 'shadow man/person' because I experienced the hat man as a child, and it was with my sister, who not only saw him but yelled to me, "don't let him get you". But also, more recently, I have come across this bizarre image that people apparently see regularly. http://www.thisman.org/ He's fairly uninteresting, except possibly for the eyebrows. He has a fairly uninteresting and unremarkable appearance over all, being of a difficult to define age, as well.

For discussion about 'This Man' / 'Thisman' see:

https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...te-about-dreaming-viral-marketing-hoax.39196/
 
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I noticed that when I searched for him. My point being that the similarity between the idea that the shadow man (shadow men?) and people saying they've seen something similar. In my case, it's the hatman. I like to think of myself as questioning, sceptical individual and find the idea that people are seeing the same "entity", specifically the hatman, intriguing. I cannot deny the experiences that my siblings and I experienced.
 
I must say, I have had odd experiences with disapearing people in the past. But then I always chalked it up to my imagination. Since reading some of the things on here I have realised I may have actually seen something x
 
After many years of bus usage some old codger once told me never to grumble when it turns up late. He never explained what he meant by this and I never saw him again. Some months later it dawned on me what he meant. See, a late bus can reduce the number of peeps waiting further down the route. It also avoids some of the school-run/off to work traffic too. Well it used to where I lived at the time.
 
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