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Our Old IHTM Threads

escargot

escargot

Disciple of Marduk
Joined
Aug 24, 2001
Messages
43,408
Location
HM The Tower of London
I sometimes pop back to the old IHTM threads for a little bedtime reading.

If you go back to the early days and pick a page at random, say this one, you'll find weirdness galore.

Back then when it were all fields, new posters could join quickly and unburden themselves of that personal strangeness which they'd been carrying around all their lives.

What riches you can find. 8)
 
Nearly fell out of the bath, I did! :lol:

It was mentioned quite recently, I seem to remember.
 
Ooh, it were grand here in the old days ;)

Anyone remember the story about the guy who was accosted on the street by a gibbering old woman, complete stranger and seemingly crazy, who told him his wife or someone had broken their ankle and had to go to hospital, only for it to turn out to be true?

Very beezarre as I recall
 
Oh the banging kitchen door gives me the proper creeps.

You get nothing like that these days. The youngsters don't know the meaning of a proper IHTM story.
 
Aye. Time were, reading that, you were PROPER cacked up.

I remember someone posting that they'd REALLY enjoy thinking about a particular thread. At 3am. Alone. With the Devil. :lol:
 
It's definitely not a proper IHTM thread unless you're shitting it too much to read it after dark. :lol:
 
AngelAlice said:
Ooh, it were grand here in the old days ;)

Anyone remember the story about the guy who was accosted on the street by a gibbering old woman,
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That wasn't in Crew by any chance? :roll:
 
i have a funny addendum to the timeslip gas station if anyone can find the thread

there was a recent hierpophants apprentice piece containing a very similar account but someone on here posted their first person story ... from somewhere in europe
 
I agree it seems as though there was more strangeness being contributed in the olden days. Although there have been a couple of real whackadoodles recently too.

So: is the universe becoming less strange and more rational? Or was there just a built-up backlog of weirdness that was waiting for a message board to post to?
 
or bored witless with the same kind of strange story that most times turns out to have the same kind of mundane explanation?
 
Or was there just a built-up backlog of weirdness that was waiting for a message board to post to?
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A lot of weirdness has been explained or consigned to the realms of unsolvability.
Of course an awful lot of weirdeness is just the mental exrescences of febrile moonbats, and we don't get so many of them round here these days.
 
I feel that the reason there are fewer febrile moonbats around here is that it takes a bit longer to join up now than it used to. Perhaps people are put off if they just want to share their one strange experience.
 
Which is a pity, most witnesses have only the one experience, people with more than one can often be 'experiencers' i.e. half way to being psychotic.
 
I tried to set up a new account when I started a new job 2 months ago.

My old account worked on my laptop but I forgot the password.

Eventually I remembered my old password but after a month my new account did not work.
 
Febrile moonbats can be fun, as long as they aren't repetitious.

I've had a few minor strange experiences in my life, but I notice things, and I'm receptive. Having had an odd upbringing has something to do with it.

I think that people in general have closed their minds to a lot of what goes on around them and become more materialistic - even more so than 10 years ago. I don't think they are any less credulous, mind you, but the types of things that people are willing to believe on flimsy evidence have changed from paranormal or extraterrestial much more towards conspiracy theories and revisionist history, neither of which are either Fortean or entertaining, since they largely consist of reinterpretation of existing stuff rather than new wierdness.

It sure makes for a dull life when all people want to talk about is football or global warming when really I'd like to be discussing the fabric of the universe and the structure of belief. :)
 
the types of things that people are willing to believe on flimsy evidence have changed from paranormal or extraterrestial much more towards conspiracy theories and revisionist history
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I agree that conspiracies and revisionism are growth industries....but not that interest in the paranormal has dimished. If anything I think there's growing popular awareness/acceptance of some paranormal topics, though I don't see this as constructive. There are now so many "ghost hunter" TV shows and UFO web sites that have absolutely no standards. The bar has been lowered, it's all just popular entertainment. Maybe the result is that people can go elsewhere for cheap thrills and spooky stories without bothering about the more "responsible" tasks of critically evaluating sources, loooking for prosaic explanations, looking for patterns and meaning. That in conjunction with it being a bit harder to obtain a FTMB login (if that's true) would mean less traffic here. (Is there less traffic? Are there fewer registered users and postings than in past years?). On the plus side, it should mean a somewhat more filtered membership and higher quality postings overall.
 
For me, the best part of the FT magazine has always been the little pockets of weirdness that people want to share. This was mainly found in the readers' letters until the website came along and IHTM is a natural extension of it.

At first, an IHTM story had to be nicely-written and formally submitted, and only certain stories were accepted. I sent in a cracking one about my then boyfriend being haunted at work. It was rejected without explanation. I wonder how many other great stories didn't make it? Madness.

Later of course the IHTM forum was introduced so that people could 'publish' themselves. This was a real improvement and is still my favourite forum.

I still look back at the old threads on there now and then to remind myself how strange this world really is, and especially some of the people who live in it. :lol:
 
IanSunDog - do you think the prevalence of these ridiculous ghost hunter shows and things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I'm sure my son thought was a documentary for a while :roll: ) have actually demistifyed 'the unexplained' so people no longer regard 'real' but lesser events they actually experience as noteworthy? I mean, a marble inexplicably rolling across the floor is as nothing to what happens in the typical Derek Acorah extravaganza.

escargot1, yes, I was also initially attracted by the totally wierd (I had a paperback copy of the Book of the Dammed at about 14) but I also am fascinated by the minor inconsistencies that give on a sudden feeling of altered conciosness or 'out-of-placeness'. And I think if we as the human race took the investigation of some of these things more seriously then actually our knowledge of what goes on would be greatly advanced. After all we get electricity from an observation of the peculiar behaviour of a dead frog.
 
I wonder if there is a 'Twitterfication' for a possible decline in the number of IHTM posts. I'm guilty of it myself. I remember back in the day when I got my first email account, and the emails I sent were more or less in the same format as a written letter. Now, you're lucky to get two lines.

There's an idea that online communication is fast and instant, not something conducive to writing a good 'ol fashioned spooky tale. I can't be the only click and go girl out there.

Shame really, I sometimes flick through the old IHTM threads, there's always good fun.
 
do you think the prevalence of these ridiculous ghost hunter shows and things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer ...have actually demistifyed 'the unexplained' so people no longer regard 'real' but lesser events they actually experience as noteworthy?
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I dont think they demystify the unexplained but they sort of "cheapen" it. I'd say people have always been interested in 'the unexplained', and are just as interested today as ever. I think efforts to be a little more rational, careful, scientific about this stuff are relatively rare and recent developments. This site to me is one of the rare places where normal intelligent people can share thoughts and experiences about this fascinating area. The ghost hunter shows are junk food/titillation. The credulous idiots get their cheap thrills but dont have to invest any effort into thinking things through. At the same time, the skeptics and reductionists out there can be even more dismissive of the whole subject area because these shows and websites have no standards of skepticism whatsoever. So the whole subject area gets kind of trashed.

I've always loved the IHTM board - my hands down favorite place to be on the web, and I like going back through some of the good old ones from time to time. Because I'm convinced (from experience) there is something to this, I dont know what it is, and my instinct is that its something important.
 
whatever happened to the days when the dogheaded men roamed london? or people got phone calls from dead relatives?
those are the tales that chill the blood before bedtime!
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
or bored witless with the same kind of strange story that most times turns out to have the same kind of mundane explanation?
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Though, to be fair, I'd say not that many IHTMs fall into that category. Most are at least curious and a fair few are still completely off the wall.
 
I remember when I first joined there was a thread titled "The Mystery of the Missing Cow-orker" (yes, spelled like that) which just fascinated me.

After a while (okay, several years) I went looking for it and it had been relegated to oblivion. Not only did I not get closure, but for a time I thought I was absolutely barmy.

I remember it fondly because it was the second thread I had ever read here and I recall thinking, "What the hell is a cow-orker?" :D
 
Well that's what happens when we stop using words like work mate in favour of Americanisms.
 
Whoa! Wait jest a cotton pickin' minute there, bub!

"Cow-orker" isn't even American - it's from Tolkien. You know, one who turns cows into orks. Get your facts straight before you start knocking the great nation that brought forth the hotdog, instant coffee, and all the other stuff that's made modern life so darned modern.
 
I think as well the ability to find any information you need extra quickly via the internet on smartphones has stopped some of the stories, just like it has scuppered some urban legends.
Do you remember how you would spend ages in the pub discussing if Captain Pugwash really did have characters call Roger the Cabin boy? Well now someone will fire up a smartphone and prove it not to be the case.
Well I think it is somewhat the same with stories of high strangeness. Someone tells you a story of high strangeness and it can be quickly dismissed and cases found to back it up.
 
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