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Something Unpleasant, Unseen

The agency responded quickly and attended to the issues, but a sensation of utter dread remained. I put this down to grief, stress and exhaustion.

However, I could smell a dog.

This only occurred close to the long wall which the stairs and kitchen ran against. The carpets were new and the walls repainted. So I guessed the previous tenant had a dog. Still, the sensation was unusual in that whilst being able to smell a dog, I also felt strongly that it was in distress. Again, I had no real option other than to attribute my feelings to stress.

I am going to suggest something that is a little bit delicate here. Perhaps you had an episode of Phantosmia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantosmia

Given that you could smell a dog, but your partner couldn't, perhaps the smell of the phantom dog was actually a phantom smell? Note that phantosmia is often a precursor to epilepsy, and might go some way towards explaining the sensation of the electric spider web you experienced later? That could be a light epileptic fit brought on by stress and fear.

Now there are a lot of explanations apart from this that could fit, and while I could offer a spurious connection with your heightened stress and your cat's behavior, clearly your cat was behaving strangely in a way that suggests there was some other stimulus present, be it ghost or ultrasound or electric wraith hound hiding in the mirror dimension.

I must say Merricat that I found what you wrote quite gripping and thanks so much for sharing it. I am sure it was the correct decision to leave the property asap if it was having that effect on you.
 
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I am going to suggest something that is a little bit delicate here. Perhaps you had an episode of Phantosmia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantosmia

Given that you could smell a dog, but your partner couldn't, perhaps the smell of the phantom dog was actually a phantom smell? Note that phantosmia is often a precursor to epilepsy, and might go some way towards explaining the sensation of the electric spider web you experienced later? That could be a light epileptic fit brought on by stress and fear.

Now there are a lot of explanations apart from this that could fit, and while I could offer a spurious connection with your heightened stress and your cat's behavior, clearly your cat was behaving strangely in a way that suggests there was some other stimulus present, be it ghost or ultrasound or electric wraith hound hiding in the mirror dimension.

I must say Merricat that I found what you wrote quite gripping and thanks so much for sharing it. I am sure it was the correct decision to leave the property asap if it was having that effect on you.

I hadn’t come across this before, so thank you, it is quite scary! I am especially squeamish at the idea of nasal polyps!

All I can say, regarding the scent, was that it only existed along the stair wall. If you stepped away it was no longer noticeable (likewise with the web encounter), so not sure how that would tie in with a seizure?
I was fairly shocked but not terrified. Definitely very stressed though.

There was a strong smell of male aftershave in one corner of the bedroom, which my partner couldn’t smell either, but it was most definitely likely to have been a previous tenant’s accident/spillage.

Later, the boyfriend admitted he’d refused to ‘go there’ with the strange stuff so as not to scare me. He did say he never felt alone there when visiting on his lonesome, and didn’t feel comfortable..

That's all there is to it really. I will never know, and I don’t have a desire to, only a certainty that the place was indeed....very unpleasant.
 
I did wonder, later on, whether it was one of those circumstances where the cat may have been acting a tad spooky, my heightened stress latched on to it, then my reaction further affected the cat, etc, etc.

It was a horrible phase in my life, and I would not be surprised.

I also wonder about the energy concept - it sure didn’t feel ghost like, although if pushed I’d say that I ‘feel’ that it had force, intent.

No idea either way. I guess we can only go off our gut reaction, our feelings at the time (later perusal does tend to colour things a bit), and my only certainty was that something quite negative and unpleasant occurred, regardless the source.
 
Brilliant post.

The mention of the kind of spider's web feeling reminded me of a post on Secret Leeds forums about a bunch of chaos magicians leaving a 'thought form' in the cellar, I think, of a student house in Hyde Park. Which stuck in my mind as I had a boyfriend who had lived at Hyde Park Terrace. And his flat was creepy AF.

Ah, yes - not Hyde Park, that was another one but check out Steve Jones' 'spider god' post on this page:

http://www.secretleeds.com/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2434&start=10

Check out the post on the following page by someone else involved in the spider thought forms! Maybe a prankster chaos magician lived in the place before you!

Forgot to say but I grew up in a house that had a lot going on, experienced by a number of people including those who'd never been fore-warned - and am a very experienced researcher so I spent a fair bit of time trying to find out from old newspaper databases, etc, if something really 'bad' had happened there. I came up with nada. But the place was so bad I am convinced something happened there. Can't find a thing, though.

That's very interesting - I recall reading a book by Ron Halliday years ago describing a similar entity in a flat or house in Edinburgh. I don't have it to hand but basically the story was that someone interested in the darker things had, through some means, brought 'something' here that they couldn't then send back and 'it' is still there. According to the story as I remember it.
 
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A couple of years ago, I was at home working away at the computer. Home being a mid-seventies one-bed flat in a quiet building. It had belonged to an elderly lady from new and she ended up living her last year in a retirement home. So my flat had been empty for a long time before being put on the market by her daughter. I bought the place in 2011 and noticed no strange feelings whatsoever.

Anyway, back to the original story. One Saturday afternoon, I was typing away at my computer and out of nowhere, I started to get the most awful, skin-crawling sensation that I was not alone in the flat. I sensed there was someone in the hallway, watching me through the doorway. Having my back to the door I slowly turned around in my seat. No-one there. I just could not shake that horrid feeling of being scrutinised by person(or persons unseen).

I got up, went to every room in my flat and couldn't rid myself of this nasty vibe. There was no-one in the flat. I live alone and there is no way anyone can get in without getting past the security system, making a racket because my front door is impossible to open without the squeaky hinge sounding off, or using a ladder or scissor lift to access the 3rd floor.

I grabbed my jacket and bailed out. I just had the most urgent need to get out of the building. I ended up browsing a supermarket but I still couldn't lose the fear. After an hour of aimlessly biking around, I decided to go back home. Thankfully, everything seemed to be back to normal. I turned on every light, radio and the TV which managed to change the atmosphere completely.

Since then, there have been no more spooky incidents. What is strange are the very realistic dreams about visiting the flat whilst it was under construction and another when I have come home to find the whole area being totally abandoned, all the windows to both blocks being shuttered with steel panels and I am the only resident still occupying my building.
 
A couple of years ago, I was at home working away at the computer. Home being a mid-seventies one-bed flat in a quiet building. It had belonged to an elderly lady from new and she ended up living her last year in a retirement home. So my flat had been empty for a long time before being put on the market by her daughter. I bought the place in 2011 and noticed no strange feelings whatsoever.

Anyway, back to the original story. One Saturday afternoon, I was typing away at my computer and out of nowhere, I started to get the most awful, skin-crawling sensation that I was not alone in the flat. I sensed there was someone in the hallway, watching me through the doorway. Having my back to the door I slowly turned around in my seat. No-one there. I just could not shake that horrid feeling of being scrutinised by person(or persons unseen).

I got up, went to every room in my flat and couldn't rid myself of this nasty vibe. There was no-one in the flat. I live alone and there is no way anyone can get in without getting past the security system, making a racket because my front door is impossible to open without the squeaky hinge sounding off, or using a ladder or scissor lift to access the 3rd floor.

I grabbed my jacket and bailed out. I just had the most urgent need to get out of the building. I ended up browsing a supermarket but I still couldn't lose the fear. After an hour of aimlessly biking around, I decided to go back home. Thankfully, everything seemed to be back to normal. I turned on every light, radio and the TV which managed to change the atmosphere completely.

Since then, there have been no more spooky incidents. What is strange are the very realistic dreams about visiting the flat whilst it was under construction and another when I have come home to find the whole area being totally abandoned, all the windows to both blocks being shuttered with steel panels and I am the only resident still occupying my building.

Thanks for sharing that, I too have had many odd and scary dreams about the houses I have occupied, even those which in waking life felt lovely.

Your experience reminded me of the excellent ‘panic’ thread (or is it ‘panic in the woods’?)
Many of the people posting there talk about experiencing extremely unsettling feelings and sensations which later vanish, as if whatever it was had ‘passed along’ or moved away....definitely worth a read!

The unpleasantness in my house didn’t simply go away, although the intensity of that night on the stairs never came back - but then I did wind up taking the cat to my bf’s until my tenancy was up, and only popped back there during this time for bits and bobs every week or so.
 
I forgot to mention, a few weeks later, when returning to the house to pick up some stuff, we found one of my cotton tote bags twisted around a door knob. The handles had twisted so tightly they looked like a solid section of rope, as if stiffened by glue. On taking the bag off the door knob it just flopped back into it’s regular shape.

That was unreasonable!

Well, this post resonates with me on several levels.
In 1995-6, I've been living in the house where i'm living now, for about one and two years. My husband always lived here. His mum passed away there, too in 1985. She was a German Lady, with a strong personality but had, according to her son, what I could qualified a Fortean streak. I never knew her. Anyway, for a while at this time and coming back from the pub, we used to find stuff moved around and one day, I found one of my woollen jackets tightly entwined around a childhood muppet belonging to my husband.
About an hour ago, coming back from the pub, I was in the kitchen, when I heard something falling on the floor. I had a look and saw a book on the floor, which had been thrown from a side board.
Then our cat, which was in the verandah, before and after that happening, stared at me and miaowed. She is very fast and could have come in and out of the verandah and knocked the book of the side board, but, she usually don't do that. However, she just came back from the cattery where we left her for nearly a week and had been a bit excited to be back home. Another thing about our cat. She sometimes stares at the ceiling, but I thing she can hear mices in the attic.
Yesterday, coming back from holiday quite exhausted by the heat and the long drive, I heard someone say an unintelligible word or grunt from my husband's 'den'. He was in the same room and I asked him what he was saying but he replied he didn't say anything, nor making any other noises.
I just put it to tiredness, and to listening to too much radio in the car. But we never know. Last year in the house, several times a day and always from my right side, I was seeing something passing at a breakneck speed. It was tall and fawn colored. I had an eye examination at the time and my eyesight was fine and my eyes healthy. It stopped around May last year, having started around the autumn 17.
Curiously, I'm reading Gef! by Christopher Josiffe, about the Talking Mongoose and we were in the Isle of Man, that last week. If we have a 'presence', it is not malevolent, slightly playfull and curious. I never felt I was observed, though, when I'm on my own.
 
In the early nineties, my then girlfriend and I, along with her young child, moved in to a house at 8 Wilton Street, Old Basford, in the suburbs of Nottingham. The house seemed quite ordinary and pleasant enough, but within days, "things" began to happen. First off, an old music box that belonged to my girlfriend began to play of its own accord - I had no idea it was a music box and my girlfriend said the spring had broken and that it had not played for years. I just put it down to the spring righting itself after having been transported from London to our new home, although it refused to work when I tried to make it play. Then the tapping started. We would be sitting in the front room and it would sound as if someone was standing in the centre of the room, spinning round and tapping the walls with a cane. Very odd. Then, one night I was at home alone, sitting watching the TV in the front room, when, from the back room came a strange sound, - I looked round to see a toy tambourine that belonged to my girlfriend's son come rolling in to the room before circling around the room to fall flat right in the middle of the carpet. A couple of times I was sure I saw a black cat in the house, once it seemed to have slunk into the baby's bedroom, but when I went to shoo it out there was nothing to be found. One night we were lying in bed when loud rapping started on the headboard right behind me. At first I thought it was someone next door banging on the wall, but the house we were attached to was unoccupied for the entire time we lived there. The final straw for my girlfriend came one evening when I was coking in the kitchen and could hear the baby crying. I called out to my GF to go and see to the baby but she couldn't quite hear what I was saying so came in to the kitchen to ask what I wanted, carrying the baby in her arms, but we could both still hear the crying coming from upstairs. I went to investigate, but found nothing that could explain the sounds. We moved out soon after...

Now, that is weird. I also used to live in Old Basford and I had some very odd experiences in the house. My boyfriend at the time was very attuned to the paranormal and saw a man sitting near me when I was sleeping. He said it wasn't scary - in fact, the man seemed to be watching over me. Less pleasantly, a different boyfriend once woke up with the bedroom door open, the hall light on (I'd left for work, closed the door and turned the light off and there was no - one else in the house) and bruises of fingers on his upper arm. :ghunt:
 
My sister had a similar experience, she moved into a room in a beautiful Victorian house in Forest Gate in East London, it was the attic room. She’s always been a sensitive but something in the house really did freak her out, in the end my mother had to go and get her in the middle of the night and bring her home. She was vague about the experience but she did say that there was something black in the room.
 
Well, this post resonates with me on several levels.
In 1995-6, I've been living in the house where i'm living now, for about one and two years. My husband always lived here. His mum passed away there, too in 1985. She was a German Lady, with a strong personality but had, according to her son, what I could qualified a Fortean streak. I never knew her. Anyway, for a while at this time and coming back from the pub, we used to find stuff moved around and one day, I found one of my woollen jackets tightly entwined around a childhood muppet belonging to my husband.
About an hour ago, coming back from the pub, I was in the kitchen, when I heard something falling on the floor. I had a look and saw a book on the floor, which had been thrown from a side board.
Then our cat, which was in the verandah, before and after that happening, stared at me and miaowed. She is very fast and could have come in and out of the verandah and knocked the book of the side board, but, she usually don't do that. However, she just came back from the cattery where we left her for nearly a week and had been a bit excited to be back home. Another thing about our cat. She sometimes stares at the ceiling, but I thing she can hear mices in the attic.
Yesterday, coming back from holiday quite exhausted by the heat and the long drive, I heard someone say an unintelligible word or grunt from my husband's 'den'. He was in the same room and I asked him what he was saying but he replied he didn't say anything, nor making any other noises.
I just put it to tiredness, and to listening to too much radio in the car. But we never know. Last year in the house, several times a day and always from my right side, I was seeing something passing at a breakneck speed. It was tall and fawn colored. I had an eye examination at the time and my eyesight was fine and my eyes healthy. It stopped around May last year, having started around the autumn 17.
Curiously, I'm reading Gef! by Christopher Josiffe, about the Talking Mongoose and we were in the Isle of Man, that last week. If we have a 'presence', it is not malevolent, slightly playfull and curious. I never felt I was observed, though, when I'm on my own.

The jacket entwined around the muppet........Somewhat similar to my bag handles, but even more unsettling!
It’s the uncanny element isn’t it? Something behaving in a decidedly ‘wrong’ way.
 
The jacket entwined around the muppet........Somewhat similar to my bag handles, but even more unsettling!
It’s the uncanny element isn’t it? Something behaving in a decidedly ‘wrong’ way.
Once, that muppet was found as if it was staring at a big painting I just finished. I put it up on a side board to dry and the muppet was sat at a chair just in front of it when we came in. It wasn't there before we left. It bemused, more than frightened me. Also, at the time we didn't have a cat.
 
Once, that muppet was found as if it was staring at a big painting I just finished. I put it up on a side board to dry and the muppet was sat at a chair just in front of it when we came in. It wasn't there before we left. It bemused, more than frightened me. Also, at the time we didn't have a cat.

It was perhaps a fan of your art work! :D

However, that is truly frightening.
 
merricat...

Given that the fabric of the house seemed to be in a pretty deplorable condition (taps, boiler etc), did you ever have the electrics investigated? The 'web like' feeling could possibly have been some kind of electrical discharge or field, caused by...errrr....something electrical malfunctioning? (not an electrician, I have to add).

The tale of the cat getting freaky and fur on end made me think of static, possibly earthing through the cat (enough to make anyone behave slightly randomly, let alone cats), and made me think vaguely of a story about when they were laying electricity cables somewhere back in horsedrawn times and found the the horses metal shoes were earthing a current which was making the horses play up in a certain area. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than me can find that story...

I lived in an old house in my youth where, by leaning against my bedroom wall you could make all the lights in the house flicker, so I know that dodgy electricals can cause very strange effects.
 
merricat...

Given that the fabric of the house seemed to be in a pretty deplorable condition (taps, boiler etc), did you ever have the electrics investigated? The 'web like' feeling could possibly have been some kind of electrical discharge or field, caused by...errrr....something electrical malfunctioning? (not an electrician, I have to add).

The tale of the cat getting freaky and fur on end made me think of static, possibly earthing through the cat (enough to make anyone behave slightly randomly, let alone cats), and made me think vaguely of a story about when they were laying electricity cables somewhere back in horsedrawn times and found the the horses metal shoes were earthing a current which was making the horses play up in a certain area. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than me can find that story...

I lived in an old house in my youth where, by leaning against my bedroom wall you could make all the lights in the house flicker, so I know that dodgy electricals can cause very strange effects.

I thought of this as possibly the only practical explanation outside of the unknown.
The house next door, joined to my stairway, was empty at the time, although refurbishment hadn’t yet started. The house next door was desperately in need of modernising, so I even wondered if it was something ‘electrical’ from there.

Still, there’s the feeling....the cold, unhappy feel of the house and the sense of not being alone. At the end of the day I personally think that something ‘dark’ lingered there, but in many ways it kind of doesn’t matter. It is still great to share it and hear people’s thoughts. I’ve lived in just a couple of places which may or may not have been host to something unusual, but I have never experienced anything as seemingly hostile and unsettling as this.
 
OK! I’m going to write this as it happened, without any guesses as to what it was, exactly, that I experienced.
The truth is I dare say I’ll never know, and that’s fine.

I moved into a small, (rented) terraced house in the north west in October 2013. It was a rushed decision as I had made a sudden move to be closer to my mother and partner after my father passed away in the April of that year.
Having signed the contract after a relatively quick viewing (I knew the area and had decided to take it for that reason alone), I took the keys and visited alone for the first time around a week later.

I wouldn’t say that I felt uncomfortable, but I did regret having rushed into it. Within an hour the taps sprang a leak, the bedroom ceiling began to drip (!), and the boiler wouldn’t fire up. ‘Bastards!’ I thought. Like you do.
The agency responded quickly and attended to the issues, but a sensation of utter dread remained. I put this down to grief, stress and exhaustion.

However, I could smell a dog.

This only occurred close to the long wall which the stairs and kitchen ran against. The carpets were new and the walls repainted. So I guessed the previous tenant had a dog. Still, the sensation was unusual in that whilst being able to smell a dog, I also felt strongly that it was in distress. Again, I had no real option other than to attribute my feelings to stress.

.......

My partner lived a few streets away, so was present quite a bit during that first week. He couldn’t smell the dog so I left it at that.

Around the two week mark something really disturbing occurred. I won’t beat around the bush here, I will just relate the event as it happened. Around 11pm one evening, sat watching Catweasle series 1 on the bed upstairs, my cat sleeping on the pillow beside me woke suddenly with a start. A few minutes later I became aware that my cat was peering fixedly into a full length mirror across the room which reflected the upstairs hallway.
When he didn’t get bored with this, I took notice. I’m somewhat ashamed to say that after a few minutes of watching him wide-eyed and serious I began to feel apprehensive. This might be regular cat behaviour, but it was unusual for him. So I jumped up from the bed and in that excited way you behave when trying to get your pet to follow you, I thought I’d coax him downstairs for some treats. That ought to do it, or so I thought.

As I reached the top step of the stairs, cat a few inches behind me, the atmosphere here felt charged, unusual. I recall this in slow motion, as I began to walk down the stairs the sensation became stronger, and when I looked behind me to check on him he was stuck, as if paralysed mid-step, hair on end. And I mean stuck-up spiky fright-cat type hair. Like a cartoon.

Whilst I’d heard of such things, I’d never actually witnessed anything like it.

I continued down the stairs and close to the bottom I walked into something which felt like (please humour me!) a large, electrified spider’s web. It was most definitely unpleasant, negative, terrifying. I continued to walk through it and it felt as though it covered my entire body, through my clothes and through every strand of my hair. It felt slightly cold, damp and ‘moving’.
I walked into the dining room to the right and it persisted until midway through. At the point where it stopped I felt every strand of hair on my head release, as if it had been stood up.

Fairly terrified and in shock, I gave the cat some treats but he didn’t eat them. He kept to the front downstairs room and stayed there until a few hours later when my partner came to collect us. We never returned.

I gave up the tenancy at the 6th month mark and stayed with my partner until we found a new place. We eventually moved in together and lived quite happily as a little family until my beautiful kitty passed away last week, at 17 yrs old.

His leaving us prompted me to write this account, which I’d intended to do since registering with the forum - it is my only significant experience of this nature.

I’m not so much interested in figuring out what it was, rather I wanted to share it as an experience in itself.
The house is constantly on the market now. It seems to be an unhappy place.

Interestingly, about a year later I had a dream in which the ‘thing’ or force, or energy (call it what you will, but ‘ghost’ doesn’t fit) tried to overwhelm me. Thankfully I managed to ‘will’ the damned thing onto oblivion.

I am happy to leave it there.
ok, I've been thinking about your experience, and wondering if you weren't experiencing very strong electromagnetic exposure. Wiring in older (esp rented and unlikely to be fully properly maintained homes) might have poorly shielded electrical boxes, build ups of static charges, and possibly improperly grounded wiring. EM has been shown to give people that creepy feeling of being watched, and create other physical sensations. Perhaps the cat built up a static charge that left him temporarily paralyzed and spiked out. Maybe you walked thru an area of interference. Bad wiring in the walls might have been responsible for the odd smells. It has been shown to be related to illness and health effects too. It is possible there were other explanations, but this might be an answer too. Theres a whole list on this link of some of the more extreme effects of exposure, and there are many more scientific studies available online. https://io9.gizmodo.com/5851828/10-things-an-electromagnetic-field-can-do-to-your-brain
 
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ok, I've been thinking about your experience, and wondering fi you weren't experiencing very strong electromagnetic exposure. Wiring in older (esp rented and unlike to be fully properly maintained homes) might have poorly shielded electrical boxes, build ups of static charges, and possibly improperly grounded wiring. EM has been shown to give people that creepy feeling of being watched, and create other physical sensations. perhaps the cat's built up a static charge that left him temporarily paralyzed and spiked out. Maybe you walked thru an area of interference. Bad wiring in the walls might have been responsible for the odd smells. It has been shown to be related to illness and health effects too. It is possible there were other explanations, but this might be an answer too. Theres a whole list on this link of some of the more extreme effects of exposure, and there are many more scientific studies available online. https://io9.gizmodo.com/5851828/10-things-an-electromagnetic-field-can-do-to-your-brain

This did occur to me, and I do wonder.
I don’t know enough about the subject but your post does make sense in relation to the sensations I experienced at the time.

I said to my partner later that it felt as though I had walked into a ‘searching’ electrical force....the sensation of which went straight through my clothes to my skin and picked each hair on my head up.

One thing is certain, it felt hostile, so I guess I will always remain on the fence about it, not knowing the ‘truth’ either way.
 
Ithilien says what I was trying to say, only more concisely and intelligently. Electricity is a funny old thing.

I once lived in a share house where the electrics were so bad that leaning your chair back to touch a wall in the lounge room would always cause the lights to flicker across the house. There was also a floorboard in the hallway where if you stepped on it in the dark, the kitchen light would pop on for a second like a brief low glow, as if there was someone in the kitchen with a candle or some-such. My "psychic" room-mate insisted the place was haunted until I debunked it by locating and duplicating the effect repeatedly. Needless to say we had words with the landlady about the wiring, and eventually convinced her that they constituted a potential fire hazard that her insurance probably didn't cover, as well as being a threat to our lives. I moved out before it was fixed however.
 
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