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The kind of thing that can happen

Cochise

Cochise

Priest of the cult of the Dog with the Broken Paw
Joined
Jun 17, 2011
Messages
8,476
About 20 years ago, my wife and I bought our first house. It was a picturesque but small cottage, about 60 years old at the time. Because we didn't have huge amounts of money, it was in an unfortunate position by a main road, at the end of an airport runway, and just at the point where the railway ran between the end of the runway and through a bridge under the road. Nevertheless, it was fairly quiet at night between say midnight and 6am.

One night Mrs. Cochise and I are sleeping peacefully. It was Octoberish, and foggy - an unusually warm day for the time of year. We are both woken up by a distant noise - tss -crunch-grind-crunch. crunch-grind-crunch -tss. Then a pause, then repeated a few times again, louder. The wife hides under the quilt - it sounds exactly like you'd imagine a larger Transformer or one of the Martians in their machines from War of the Worlds. And our road was unmade gravel.

Cochise, however is not afraid (although on other occasions I have been).

This may have been due to alcohol intake, or because he is really tired and wants sleep, dammit. He gets out of bed, pulls on jeans and T-shirt, and goes outside to investigate. The noise is much louder, it is still foggy and still unusually warm.

He goes to the front of the house, and the noise is louder still and there are strange yellow and white flashing lights from behind the small copse on te other side of the road (a sad haven for dead wildlife killed while crossing the main road above). He walks through the dark copse up the embankment to the deserted main road. Still nothing to be seen , other than flashing lights and the noise now apparently marching on the spot.

He walks up to the railway bridge, swallowing hard and begining to think there is something both terrifying and exciting about to happen - maybe a UFO has landed on the floodlit Rugby field further down the railway line, and is disgorging killer machines but then he sees... he sees...

Some darn automated railway maintenance machine packing the stones under the railway track using long arms and jacks. Jack down - (tss) arms down (crunch) shove stones under track (grind) repeat as required. And of course floodlights so it can see what it is doing and yellow flashing warning lights to alert any fool who hasn't heard it or seen the floodlights. In addition the fog dampened other futher off noises making it sound just that little bit more freaky.

But if I hadn't got out of bed me and the late Mrs.Cochise'd have spent the rest of our lives thinking it was lucky the aliens abducted someone else. :oops:
 
Yes, exactly that kind of thing.

But I bet not many people are familiar with the sound of one operating - even though I've lived near railways for most of my life that's still the only time I've seen one actually doing its tamping (or tramping, which is what it very much sounded like)

I guess my point, if I had one other than to entertain, is that there are things out there which are perfectly normal (in one sense) but are also quite out of the experience of the normal person and thus easy to misinterpret, especially if one is already in a heightened state of tension. If I'd have had one of those 'feelings' when I heard the noise and decided to take a defensive reaction instead of going to find out, well, you know what I mean. And I have had those 'spooked' - for want of a better description - feelings on other occasions but not on this one. Of course, someone who insists on paranormal explanations might argue that if it had been paranormal then I _would_ have been spooked. Catch 22, I believe :D
 
On (slightly) the same topic , i was once walking my dog late at night through Bruce castle park , when i heard this ssssssss noise and at the same time the dog started jumping about in circles. Snake!! i thought and ran over to save Daisy , only to see she had disturbed two hedgehogs , i had no idea they could make such a strange noise.
 
My big dog once sat up howling and whimpering on the stairs all night. I convinced myself that I must be secretly descended from a noble Irish family and therefore entitled to have a hound unearthily announce the death of the head of the clan. Felt a bit worried about my dad for a while, then put my head under the pillow and dropped off.

Next morning my delusions were shattered when Rocky threw up the bark he'd chewed off a branch on his walk. He'd given himself indigestion.

We had a thread called 'Things that seem Fortean, but aren't' a few years back. Great fun. :lol:
 
I suppose a lot of the way we think comes down to expectation. When I was young we had an outside toilet and I was always nervous at night. Once as I came out I saw a dark shadow and screamed, frightening a wandering black cat.
Last weeK I was at my friend's house where I've written before about odd things happening.
We were talking and her partner was in bed sick with the flu when from that corridor came a sound like metal banging on a tin tray. She just shrugged and said they had heard it before. They have had so many strange things there that they just accept them now.
 
Sorry, should probably have posted to that thread but I hadn't found it.

A friend of mine (not a FOAF) told me once he woke up to be terrified by a grey alien in the corner of his room wearing a turban. It then appeared to start slowly taking off the turban.

When its head fell off he realised it was his photographic enlarger. (the old film ones used to have a dome shaped head on a stand). He'd used it a day or two before and the head had become insecure so he'd taped it on. Presumably because it had cooled down or just because of the weight the tape was slowly giving way as he watched it half-awake.
 
I've had a very smilar experience to yours, Cochise.

I woke up in, what I thought was the middle of the night, with a blue strobing light coming through my bedroom window and a really low, humming throbbing noise.

I totally convinced myself the there was some alien craft hovering over my roof and it was only when I forced myself to get up and look out of the window (I was shaking like a leaf! It was during the height of the alien abduction phenomena) that I realised it was actually 5:30am and the light and noise was the bin lorry going down the main road on the other side of the houses that backed on to mine.

:oops:
 
Fluttermoth said:
I've had a very smilar experience to yours, Cochise.

I woke up in, what I thought was the middle of the night, with a blue strobing light coming through my bedroom window and a really low, humming throbbing noise.

I totally convinced myself the there was some alien craft hovering over my roof and it was only when I forced myself to get up and look out of the window (I was shaking like a leaf! It was during the height of the alien abduction phenomena) that I realised it was actually 5:30am and the light and noise was the bin lorry going down the main road on the other side of the houses that backed on to mine.

:oops:
Click to expand...

Blue strobing light?
Aren't they normally yellow or orange?

I'm sure I read somewhere that only emergency vehicles are allowed to use blue strobe lights.
 
So it was actually an alien craft diguised as a bin lorry driven by colour blind aliens.
 
I remember waking up at our grandparents' house many years ago in the middle of the night -- more than once -- and hearing the weirdest noise pass by -- part large motor, part loud whine and hum. And there would be strange bright lights flashing over the windows. When finally becoming brave enough to peek out the window, it proved to be some sort of street washing/sweeping vehicle, the whine being caused by huge, spinning circular brushes. They only seemed to come out at night -- and they never seemed to come by our own house.

Once I took a shortcut through a semi-rural neighborhood on a dark, dark, night, and on one unlit, very narrow road I had to edge by some sort of weird machine or vehicle that I absolutely could not figure out. I was in a great hurry (can't remember why now), and I could only go by what my headlights, spreading out to my right, told me as I drove straight by it. It was long, tall, and rather narrow; I saw wheels so it had to be mobile. I glimpsed large slabs and bars of steel, so it seemed quite massive. Indeed, it seemed so tall compared to its width, I feared it might fall over on me!

Later I drove down the street in daylight. The Thing turned out to be a small bulldozer on the back of a long, low trailer. Still looked top-heavy. It was an odd feeling to pass by something that huge and be unable to figure out what it was, though.

I've always had the half-baked notion of writing a story about an Unidentified Driving Object, an unknown ground vehicle frightening people instead of a UFO. About the closest to that I've seen on telly was the goofy "Death-Probe" on The Six Million Dollar Man back in the seventies. :)
 
When my son was about 4, I lived in Cirencester and we often visited the Roman Museum. One of the exhibits was a little weathered stone carving of three cloaked female figures, standing three abreast, the cloaks wrapped tightly about them, only their faces showing. They are deities from the genius cucullatus - very ancient. Fertility related, I believe.

One evening, at dusk, (almost all the light was gone), I turned a corner in my car and saw the three cucullatus about 50 feet away, standing by a farm gate. They were standing three in a row dressed in white, their faces were black, but you could make out the white cloak around their head and over their bodies. As I drew nearer, in some fright, I saw that they were three huge squat fertilizer sacks with their handles drawn up into loops on top, the night sky showing through them.

Had I not taken a second look, I'd be busy writing to It Happened to Me about my magical apparition.
 
titch said:
On (slightly) the same topic , i was once walking my dog late at night through Bruce castle park , when i heard this ssssssss noise and at the same time the dog started jumping about in circles. Snake!! i thought and ran over to save Daisy , only to see she had disturbed two hedgehogs , i had no idea they could make such a strange noise.
Click to expand...

Yes, My ex and I heard that outside our bedroom window in the middle of the night, really creepy. What the B-Hell is that hissing? I was the one who had to brave the unknown with a torch - two large male hedgehogs having a face-off.
 
Hypermetropia said:
One evening, at dusk, (almost all the light was gone), I turned a corner in my car and saw the three cucullatus about 50 feet away, standing by a farm gate. They were standing three in a row dressed in white, their faces were black, but you could make out the white cloak around their head and over their bodies. As I drew nearer, in some fright, I saw that they were three huge squat fertilizer sacks with their handles drawn up into loops on top, the night sky showing through them.
Click to expand...
A good one for the Misperceptions thread!
http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22321
 
Last Friday I was in a pub in Tooley Street in London called the Shipwrights Arms. It's a lovely old pub with a central bar and I've enjoyed many a cider in there in preparation for the weekend.

Around 10pm I decided to call it a night and head down to the ladies before making my way home. The toilets are in the basement which is a creepy confined area but they're nicely decorated and (mostly) clean. I was alone, and ablutions finished I left the cubicle to wash my hands.
At that moment there was a manic mechanical whirring noise back in the cubicle and I spun round to see the sanitary bin vibrating and its lid trembling. I stood by the sink watching it for about 5 seconds before it stopped.

"OMG, a poltergeist-infected sanitary bin" I breifly thought to myself, just staring at it. It was quiet now, and still alone in those toilets I didn't know whether to beat a hasty exit or investigate.

So I investigated. Obviously.

:roll:

It was a new-fangled bin, one that you wave your hand over and it opens automatically. Except the lid was jammed shut, so any movement over it resulted in it getting manically irate as it tried to open its lid. Imagine me, standing one foot in and one foot out of the cubicle, hesitantly waving a nervous hand over a sanitary bin then leaping back when it started whirring and twitching. Yes I'm glad to say no-one caught me in that act. Frankly it would have been embarrassing, being female and all that....

Well eventually I gave it a strategically aimed kick as it started whirring and its lid flew open to reveal the not-very-nice reason for the stuck lid.
I left feeling a bit silly, but also a little dissapointed there wasn't a more Fortean reason and I could tell you about a toilet-ghost.

Unless of course when the lid flew up I released a Djinn..... :shock:
 
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