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You could well be right.
We had a depression in the tarmac at the front of the yard,when it rained, it filled up and made a fairly large pool.
Ferkins,one of the idiots I worked with used to flatten himself against the fence and edge past it,claiming it was alligator infested. :D
Frankie,the other ,one had a small garden pond,about 2' by 2' by 1' deep, he bought a carp,about 4lbs which promptly used up all the oxygen and died.
Sad but understandable. :cry:
Less understandable was why Frankie brought it in and left it on a shelf in the trade counter, what's more nobody said anything,and it was there for a few days before the boss poked his head around the door and told me to 'get rid of the fish'.
I could go on for hours,but that's what the place was like, always something daft going on, I was so lucky, I spent the first few years at work doubled up with laughter most of the time.
But in dreams, always the same area,and I'm terrified.
All the best.
 
Something I just stumbled across. Not a building but a river in Australia. (Please could the mods move if it does not belong here?)

http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/11/the-cursed-river-of-australia/

an a place be evil? I’m not talking about the evil deeds perpetrated by the inhabitants of a certain location or its dark history, but the actual place itself, its land, air, and water saturated with a sinister energy that we cannot comprehend and which may or may not have some sentience of its own. It may seem like a rather far out notion, and perhaps it is, but there are certainly locations throughout the world that have a definite air of bizarreness and the unexplained which is not always benign in nature, and indeed lends itself to the idea that something there is not quite right. One such place is a river in Australia which has long been the origin of stories of strange creatures, ghostly phenomena, mysterious murders and disappearances, and just plain weirdness. It is a place which, if evil or cursed places do exist, is most certainly one of them.[/unquote]

Continued on the site...
 
A few days ago, our family went to a nearby canyon for a walk. While we weren't necessarily afraid, we all did end up feeling strangely off-kilter. I've been trying to pin down the cause ever since. Especially since I've had been having persistent bad dreams about it.

The place is a public nature trail that seems more remote than it really is, likely because of the canyon walls. It's not too dark or especially creepy. Mostly it's just full of rocks. We weren't even alone on the trail, as a few walkers were passing through. It's a bit drab, but not ominous.

All the same, after we'd been walking for a bit, our teenage son pulled me aside to say he felt uncomfortable, he'd been hearing noises that sounded strange. Soon our youngest complained of feeling like his head was being squeezed, which was making his eyes feel funny. I knew what he meant, because I was getting it, too - that sort of pressure behind the eyes that creates a "fishbowl" effect. We discovered this was intermittent - we could step into one place and feel pressure, then a few more feet away and it would be gone. There were also patches of what seemed like muffled silence.

We wondered if the head/eye pressure might be an allergic reaction from tree pollen or some such thing, and of course the strange sounds could be attributed to echoes from the rock. Sound was liable to bounce all over the place there. Still we couldn't quite explain the muffled silence effect.

Anyway, we continued on exploring, even though we were feeling a bit discombobulated. Dad and 6 year old were fairly content looking for fossils, but teen and I felt more and more...I don't know if "gloomy" is the right word for it, but it wasn't necessarily positive, either.

As PeniG said upthread about being the one to pick up vibes from places, well, I'm the same. I can't help being affected by the atmosphere in a place. This canyon most definitely had a "vibe" but it's beyond me to describe it in any meaningful way. There was no information to be gleaned from it, so by the time we left, I was ready to dismiss it as "nature is funny that way" and shake it off.

The feeling has persisted, though, and has manifested in surreal, fever-like dreams every time I so much as nap. I dream I'm running on the trail, but don't know what I'm running from or toward. The trail stretches and elongates the more I run. There is also music in the dreams, 70's era music that is also stretched out and slowed down - it's seriously unsettling. No idea if this has any meaning at all, but might as well report it as part of the experience. Hopefully it will clear off soon.

There may not be a definite answer or solution to all this, but thought it was worth writing down, at any rate.

Here are some photos, if anyone's interested in seeing loads and loads of rocks. There are a couple of neat anthropomorphic trees, though.
Canyon2.jpg Canyon6.jpg
Canyon3.jpg Canyon9.jpg
Canyon4.jpg Canyon5.jpg
Canyon7.jpg
 
Really good story Ula so lets work it out Fortean-style.


So where is this place first off?
 
Could it have been due to wind blowing over the top of the canyon, creating low frequency sound waves?

Sounds possible, certainly. Any idea what might have caused the small areas of silence? I don't know enough about acoustics to figure it out.
Really good story Ula so lets work it out Fortean-style.

So where is this place first off?

Is it enough to say it's located along the Balcones fault line?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balcones_Fault
The fault has been inactive for millions of years BTW, so not likely to be earth gasses making us woozy or anything.

I did check around various reviews of the trail to see if any oddness had been mentioned, but it seems not.
 
Sounds possible, certainly. Any idea what might have caused the small areas of silence? I don't know enough about acoustics to figure it out.


Is it enough to say it's located along the Balcones fault line?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balcones_Fault
The fault has been inactive for millions of years BTW, so not likely to be earth gasses making us woozy or anything.

I did check around various reviews of the trail to see if any oddness had been mentioned, but it seems not.

Hope we have an acoustics expert on the forum. Just pure speculation but maybe the areas of silence could have been caused by the shape of the canyon plus vegetation absorbing the sounds.

The fault line is interesting too. Maybe minor activity was causing electrical discharges, not enough to create earthlights but enough to cause slight disturbances in the brain.
 
Sounds possible, certainly. Any idea what might have caused the small areas of silence? I don't know enough about acoustics to figure it out.


Is it enough to say it's located along the Balcones fault line?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balcones_Fault
The fault has been inactive for millions of years BTW, so not likely to be earth gasses making us woozy or anything.

I did check around various reviews of the trail to see if any oddness had been mentioned, but it seems not.
The areas of silence may be where the acoustics get cancelled out - a bit like the zone of silence in the eye of a huge tornado, for example. There are probably a lot of subsonic sounds bouncing around all of that little canyon, creating eddy currents in the air. The parts where you encountered the eye popping/head squeezing may have been points where these eddy currents intersected.
 
The parts where you encountered the eye popping/head squeezing may have been points where these eddy currents intersected.
That's consistent with infra-sound effects. It's possible discrete areas are functioning as Helmholtz cavities, with most infra-sound (<20Hz), cavities in the region of the size of a room in house are about right. So with vortex shedding higher up in air, at a frequency of <20Hz, then feeding energy into resonant cavity at ground level.
 
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Thanks for all the replies. Very interesting possibilities there. I wonder if exposure to infrasound can cause these lingering cruddy feelings and bad dreams I've been having. I've been trying to research the effects online but it looks like there's considerable controversy there. Ah well.

I confess to having had a faint worry about the fault becoming active. We've long been told it was completely safe, but there's always the question of "what if...?" Hopefully it's nothing that dire and it's just me being over-sensitive to the environment again.
 
An update -

Teen son had spent the weekend with friends and did not come home until Sunday, so I didn't know if he was having any similar issues with sleep. However, Sunday night he mentioned (he brought it up, I didn't ask) that he'd been sleeping terribly and had been startled awake again and again as if from a nightmare, although he couldn't remember any dreams. He also complained of having no energy and feeling blah.

6 year old woke up Friday night with a nightmare and then on Sunday morning commented he'd had "really crazy dreams" on Saturday night.

So that's three of us who'd had disturbed sleep or weird dreams after vising the canyon.
I asked OH how he's been sleeping and he said he's been in a spate of weird dreams for the last 2 weeks, so there was no way to tell if anything was different.

I'm coming to the conclusion that we must've come into contact with something that had an ill effect on us. What it might have been remains a mystery.
 
Thanks for all the replies. Very interesting possibilities there. I wonder if exposure to infrasound can cause these lingering cruddy feelings and bad dreams I've been having. I've been trying to research the effects online but it looks like there's considerable controversy there. Ah well.

I confess to having had a faint worry about the fault becoming active. We've long been told it was completely safe, but there's always the question of "what if...?" Hopefully it's nothing that dire and it's just me being over-sensitive to the environment again.
I can see how you could be affected by explicable, physical phenomena, whilst there and at the time. But dreams, afterwards? Interesting!
 
An update -

Teen son had spent the weekend with friends and did not come home until Sunday, so I didn't know if he was having any similar issues with sleep. However, Sunday night he mentioned (he brought it up, I didn't ask) that he'd been sleeping terribly and had been startled awake again and again as if from a nightmare, although he couldn't remember any dreams. He also complained of having no energy and feeling blah.

6 year old woke up Friday night with a nightmare and then on Sunday morning commented he'd had "really crazy dreams" on Saturday night.

So that's three of us who'd had disturbed sleep or weird dreams after vising the canyon.
I asked OH how he's been sleeping and he said he's been in a spate of weird dreams for the last 2 weeks, so there was no way to tell if anything was different.

I'm coming to the conclusion that we must've come into contact with something that had an ill effect on us. What it might have been remains a mystery.
Can any of yous remember the dreams? Or even just aspects of them?
 
There may be a scientific explanation for this.

I'd read before about animals that can detect seismic activity, and those that appear to flee before an earthquake.
It is now thought that reports of dancing lights before an earthquake and this phenomenon are connected.

It is now thought that the high pressures and friction that build up before an earthquake somehow produce positively charge ions which can manifest as lights and produce fields of positively charge air particles.

One scientist described it as inducing a feeling like negative gravity. It's like when you are in a car and go over a hump back bridge that feeling when your stomach appears to be headed through your ribcage, and it releases all sorts of chemical triggers because it feels wrong.

He said that the feeling of suddenly going into a field of positively charged particles would be similar. To your body, it just feels wrong as there are very few places where such things naturally occur, and all are associated with bad outcomes. He reckoned that there may be other sources of naturally produced positive ionisation. Where these are not as strong as a seismic event might produce, it might lead to that creeping, growing dread as your subconscious and then your conscious mind become eventually aware of the effects.

There were some tests done but I don't recall seeing a peer reviewed study.
 
There may be a scientific explanation for this.

I'd read before about animals that can detect seismic activity, and those that appear to flee before an earthquake.
It is now thought that reports of dancing lights before an earthquake and this phenomenon are connected.

It is now thought that the high pressures and friction that build up before an earthquake somehow produce positively charge ions which can manifest as lights and produce fields of positively charge air particles.

One scientist described it as inducing a feeling like negative gravity. It's like when you are in a car and go over a hump back bridge that feeling when your stomach appears to be headed through your ribcage, and it releases all sorts of chemical triggers because it feels wrong.

He said that the feeling of suddenly going into a field of positively charged particles would be similar. To your body, it just feels wrong as there are very few places where such things naturally occur, and all are associated with bad outcomes. He reckoned that there may be other sources of naturally produced positive ionisation. Where these are not as strong as a seismic event might produce, it might lead to that creeping, growing dread as your subconscious and then your conscious mind become eventually aware of the effects.

There were some tests done but I don't recall seeing a peer reviewed study.
I like that and it's consistent with the unease that accompanies typical thunderstorms, in that positive charge builds up on the ground under the negatively charged cloud.
 
There may be a scientific explanation for this.

I'd read before about animals that can detect seismic activity, and those that appear to flee before an earthquake.
It is now thought that reports of dancing lights before an earthquake and this phenomenon are connected.

It is now thought that the high pressures and friction that build up before an earthquake somehow produce positively charge ions which can manifest as lights and produce fields of positively charge air particles.

One scientist described it as inducing a feeling like negative gravity. It's like when you are in a car and go over a hump back bridge that feeling when your stomach appears to be headed through your ribcage, and it releases all sorts of chemical triggers because it feels wrong.

He said that the feeling of suddenly going into a field of positively charged particles would be similar. To your body, it just feels wrong as there are very few places where such things naturally occur, and all are associated with bad outcomes. He reckoned that there may be other sources of naturally produced positive ionisation. Where these are not as strong as a seismic event might produce, it might lead to that creeping, growing dread as your subconscious and then your conscious mind become eventually aware of the effects.

There were some tests done but I don't recall seeing a peer reviewed study.

Unbelievably, there was a mini earthquake in this part of Yorkshire, a few years back. It was night time and I was upstairs at the time but knew something weird was happening as quite suddenly, all the house martens flew out of the nests under the eaves, making a racket. They never, ever did that once they were roosting. A few seconds - can't recall how long but no more than a minute - later, the house shook. But they definitely flew off screaming before anything perceptible started.
 
I wonder if it's connected to the "Panic" thread, that feeling of extreme unease in a rural area that makes you want to leave, and fast? If it's strong enough, it could cause stress that lasted a few days, including disturbing dreams, just like any traumatic experience can. Might be connected to mass hysteria (to coin a loose term), might be something in the air, but if you've been freaked out for whatever reason, it can have aftereffects.
 
I can see how you could be affected by explicable, physical phenomena, whilst there and at the time. But dreams, afterwards? Interesting!

I was thinking of the way illnesses can cause bad dreams (like fever dreams) or other discomfort while sleeping (think night sweats, etc.) None of us were obviously ill, but feeling draggy and "off" for a few days.

I'm wondering if there wasn't some toxin in the environment that might cause some low-level symptoms for a few days. Mold spores or some such thing. Or if it was something like infrasound, perhaps that can cause brain function to go a bit muddled for a short time. Just speculating, of course.
Can any of yous remember the dreams? Or even just aspects of them?

For me, they were very much like fever dreams, even a bit psychedelic. Running down the trail which gets longer and longer in a surreal way. Youngest mentioned dreaming of rampaging circus animals and teen dreamed of being hauled away by the FBI for having 'state secrets'. All very Kafka-esque.

We're feeling better now, but I think I'm going to do some research on the environment around the fault line. As I said before, we've always been told that the fault was completely safe, with no chance it would become active again.
But then there are stories like these:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/26-earthquakes-later-frackings-smoking-gun-is-in-texas
http://www.newsweek.com/fracking-we...ter-texas-and-pennsylvania-study-finds-270735
It might not be good to be too complacent.
 
It does look from the piccies like a gloomy place as you mentioned , and quite claustrophobic. I think I would probably have felt a sense of unease as well.
 
I was thinking of the way illnesses can cause bad dreams (like fever dreams) or other discomfort while sleeping (think night sweats, etc.) None of us were obviously ill, but feeling draggy and "off" for a few days.

I'm wondering if there wasn't some toxin in the environment that might cause some low-level symptoms for a few days. Mold spores or some such thing. Or if it was something like infrasound, perhaps that can cause brain function to go a bit muddled for a short time. Just speculating, of course.


For me, they were very much like fever dreams, even a bit psychedelic. Running down the trail which gets longer and longer in a surreal way. Youngest mentioned dreaming of rampaging circus animals and teen dreamed of being hauled away by the FBI for having 'state secrets'. All very Kafka-esque.

We're feeling better now, but I think I'm going to do some research on the environment around the fault line. As I said before, we've always been told that the fault was completely safe, with no chance it would become active again.
But then there are stories like these:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/26-earthquakes-later-frackings-smoking-gun-is-in-texas
http://www.newsweek.com/fracking-we...ter-texas-and-pennsylvania-study-finds-270735
It might not be good to be too complacent.

I was reading this post quite intently just now when an empty plastic bottle nearby (that I refill for watering plants) decided to do that loud CRACK thing. Made me jump out of my skin!
 
I was reading this post quite intently just now when an empty plastic bottle nearby (that I refill for watering plants) decided to do that loud CRACK thing. Made me jump out of my skin!
Your not losing your bottle are you 'escargot?'
 
Great thread!

A number of years ago, some friends of mine moved into a cottage in Derbyshire which had been converted from something else. My friend was showing me into the lounge and I hated it; it felt cold and sad and had a distinct edge to it - I couldn't stay in there. When I mentioned it to her, she said that she'd thought that's where cattle had been slaughtered. (It was old farm buildings.) :shock:

I went to a housewarming at a cottage that'd been once been the local slaughterhouse.
It was an area that'd once been remote but was by then built-up and on a busy road.

Outside there was a big rock, about chest-high, with a metal ring set into it halfway down. This was where cattle would be secured before being killed. The new owners found this quaint but it creeped me out a bit!
 
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