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The Scariest Fortean Thing Ever To Happen To You

Mythopoeika said:
I like to smoke ham.
Smoked cod is OK in small amounts too.

Murder on the lungs though. :)

It tires me out - they really don't draw very well... :p
 
In 1985 I was doing basic training at RAF Swinderby. One night I was "duty airwoman" in our block and I heard the sound of a man's footsteps (distinctive sound of shoes on polished floors)and the heavy internal door swinging open then shut. I genuinely thought someone had come into the block so I went and checked, nothing. When it happened again I woke one of my friends so we could search the block but there was no one there. I don't remember being scared because I didn't think it was anything paranormal. I was worried that a man had got into our block on my watch and that I'd be in trouble. It was only after the third time, third search I thought, "That's weird"

A few years later I moved into a rented house with my husband. It was a modern build but it had a strange, "off" vibe. Nothing you could put your finger on, just not quite right. On the day we moved out I was the last to leave. As I walked down the stairs I had the most intense feeling of "something" behind me. My whole body felt filled with static electricity. It felt malevolent and I found myself thinking, "don't run, it'll know you're scared" It took every ounce of composure to walk downstairs and towards the front door normally although my heart was racing. I think that's the only time I've been genuinely scared of....what? No idea,except I knew it was seriously bad juju, enough to have me reciting the prayer to St Michael in my head. I had always felt that there was something not quite right about the atmosphere in the house but it was only on that last day, in those last few minutes that I felt a very genuine, intense fear of "something" that had the potential to harm me.

I'm not sure that counts as a "scariest, Fortean thing" because I couldn't tell you what "it" was. All I can say is for those few moments in that house I felt a true, hard-core fear that I've never experienced before or since.

I now live in a 200 year old "haunted" cottage but I've never seen a damn thing!
 
I can't have been much older than ten or eleven. I was walking home from a friend's house, and I vaguely recall we thought we'd seen some strange lights in the sky. I'd previously devoured Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World, my formative Fortean text, and with a child's impetuosity I wanted certainty. I wanted proof of the paranormal. The lights in the sky were ambiguous - Leeds/Bradford airport was nearby. As I walked home I was almost muttering an incantation, a plea, a prayer (although I was not a religious boy) - call it what you will - for proof. But nothing out-of-the-ordinary happened on the walk home, nor in the evening, and I must have had supper and climbed the wooden steps to Bedfordshire, as per usual.

In the small hours of the next morning I was awoken by the sound of malign laughter from my window-ledge outside.
 
I was in my mid 20s, living with a friend in the back room of his house. The room received no natural light due to a closed in carport outside the single window, making me feel very melancholy even with the light on. I was having one of those dark nights of the soul. I must have fallen asleep at some stage, and dreamed that as I lay there in the pitch black I was picked up by a gigantic hand around the torso and shaken from side to side in the middle of the air. I struggled to pull myself back to consciousness with a very loud yell that brought my host running to the room. I never slept in that room again and I moved out of the house that weekend as a result of the experience.
 
A was having a lovely dream the other night where I was walking through a sunny glade when suddenly, the duvet was pulled from me and as I looked at the bottom of the bed, it was wrapped around a figure obscuring it. Then it was flung back over me. There was a rushing noise in my ears and I woke with a start. The pleasant dream had become a nightmare in a split second. And there was no-one there.

Now the thing is, I was telling the guys at work about it this morning and one of them looked up and said 'That happened to me the other night'.

Anyone else experienced this?
 
It's not the scariest thing, i posted that to the Storthes Hall, Huddersfield thread.

There is a story i have, that happened also while at Uni in Huddersfield, there must be something about that town i think.

Anyway i had been enjoying a white wine spritzer (x1, i was not drunk) in the local watering hole with a couple of girlfriends when i got the all to familiar feeling of static electricity in my ears and what i like to call the zone out affect, where you feel like you've just slipped into a foggy, trance like, dream state.

I heard the girls from a distance (like listening to some one talking in another room, through a glass cup you'be placed on the wall.) [They where sitting right next to me.] saying ``we are leaving, are you coming with us?'' I told them i was and i'd join them in a second. The reason i did not follow them sooner was that i had what i can only describe as a ghost or spirit of a girl stood directly in front of me.

I did feel terrified, luckily it was the middle of the day, sun was shining and i was sitting in a packed beer garden. This girl was white and i mean, really white!! She looked dead. She had a floral sundress on, white arms and legs exposed. nails painted blue, short cropped curly hair. One thing that stood out above everything else was her neck. Her neck had a thick red burn mark all the way around it like a choaker. I assumed and got the feeling shed taken her own life through some form of strangulation.

Then i heard her speak, which made me squeak and nearly jump from my chair, making people stair at me. Scariest thing was, she never moved her mouth once, it stayed closed the whole time, her eyes transfixed souly on mine. what i heard her say in my head was ''can you please tell my friend (she points at the lady behind me, with a stretched out arm and long white finger) that i am really sorry and she should'nt be blaming her self theres nothing she could have done and that i'm ok.'' I nodded and she simply walked away.

I slowly came back around to reality and could here the buzz of the garden coming back into technicolour volume and bussle. I sat for a couple of minutes thinking to my self that this woman is going to think i am completely skitzo what if i haven't seen a thing, what if i had just imagined the whole thing. I did get the courage to speak to this lady however.

I approached her table where she was sitting with a friend. I told her that before i said anything i wanted her to know that this might sound crazy, i had no intentions to upset her or frighten her and that she was well within her rights to scream and shout and ask me to leave. She naturally looked at me rather strangely then at her friend who seemed just as confused and a little worried, understandably. I proceeded to explain to her what i have just explained to you all. She slumped into the table and burst into tears, her friend was looking at me like i was the ghost and was frozen in shock.

I immediatly started to apologize and walk away when i felt a hand grab my arm. I turned around to see that it was the lady id spoken to and my heart fell into me arse, i was convinced she was going to hit me or worse.

She didnt at all. Instead she hugged me and said thank you. ''I dont know how you know what you have just told me but my friend hung herself last week and i've been blaming myself, wondering if there was anything i could have done. The reason i am here today is my friend has tried to take me out, to take my mind off things. You''ll never know how much what you have just said to me meant.'' She continued to thank me and asked if id like a drink. I respectfuly declined, told her i had friends waiting for me outside and hoped that she had a wonderful day.

All in all it was a strange experience but it left me feeling liked i'd helped someone. That lovely dead girl not only helped her friend with her message be she taught me alot too.
 
"One of the scariest experiences I've had occurred when trying to find King John's Castle in Odiham, UK"

A very odd-feeling place. I sometimes cycle down the canal tow path past the castle ruins. I stopped once to take some photos just as the sun was setting. Didn't see anything exactly Fortean, but can vouch for a heavy and oppressive atmosphere around that place.
 
The first night i slept there, I was woken up by my digital alarm clock.

It wasn't unusual to find the bathroom taps turned on in the middle of the night

My own bathroom weirdness included the bedside clock flipping on its side (I saw this happen) and one night I awoke to see the clocks night light on. :eek:

Someone suggested placing items made of Iron in each room. I took their advice and placed an old-fashioned clothing iron in my bedroom. Ive found several old horse shoes over the years - mostly in streams - and have placed them around the house. After doing this everythings been fine for me (touch wood), just wondering if this idea is something for you to consider with any oddness around your house.
 
My own bathroom weirdness included the bedside clock flipping on its side (I saw this happen) and one night I awoke to see the clocks night light on. :eek:

Someone suggested placing items made of Iron in each room. I took their advice and placed an old-fashioned clothing iron in my bedroom. Ive found several old horse shoes over the years - mostly in streams - and have placed them around the house. After doing this everythings been fine for me (touch wood), just wondering if this idea is something for you to consider with any oddness around your house.


hell I don't like your posts most of the time George but that that was a good one. The old belief that iron being used to keep things out of the house is interesting.
 
My own bathroom weirdness included the bedside clock flipping on its side (I saw this happen) and one night I awoke to see the clocks night light on. :eek:

Someone suggested placing items made of Iron in each room. I took their advice and placed an old-fashioned clothing iron in my bedroom. Ive found several old horse shoes over the years - mostly in streams - and have placed them around the house. After doing this everythings been fine for me (touch wood), just wondering if this idea is something for you to consider with any oddness around your house.

Interesting idea, George. I thought iron only worked against fairies? But if it worked for you, maybe not - unless your bathroom ghost is really a pixie! It's true, there wasn't much made of iron in that spooky old apartment.

I dunno - as my neighbor back in those days said, "the only help for this place is burning it to the ground!"
But I'll consider iron in the future, should some malicious presence rear its head again.
 
Interesting idea, George. I thought iron only worked against fairies? But if it worked for you, maybe not - unless your bathroom ghost is really a pixie! It's true, there wasn't much made of iron in that spooky old apartment.

I dunno - as my neighbor back in those days said, "the only help for this place is burning it to the ground!"
But I'll consider iron in the future, should some malicious presence rear its head again.

I`ll PM you more details as sometimes its not wise to share such things here :)
 
Oh, I thought most people would poo-poo what I experienced. There was hysteria involved, but I was not hysterical, probably because I had not been involved with the actual Ouija. I was very worried about the girl, and I do realise she could have been acting, but I've seen people genuinely white since then, and I am not sure it's possible to act yourself that colour. So, I was concerned, (and genuinely bewildered at first) but not in hysterics.

Isis177 - You, too? I had a mental image of the bathroom where I was not existing and it was just me in some dark void with hideous things clamoring and laughing beating at my mind. I suppose that is real terror of the unknown, because I have since been made very afraid by people, but they were a known quantity, this was not. It was horribly, sickeningly alien.

I am pretty sure I was silently screaming 'God help me,' or something, but it was then I remembered the Rosary. By that point it was a case of 'This is like a horror film, so I will treat it like a horror film.' Lol, I am sure there was a part of me saying, 'This is completely insane.' It certainly felt it. Far outside the boundaries of anything I had experienced then, and I've never (thank goodness) experienced that since.

It's still taken me years to write it down, and I am in my 40's now. I would always mentally back away from it because I just didn't like remembering.



I have seen threads, here and elsewhere, Escargot, and to be honest they stir memories too much for me to read them. But yes, I would say 'Keep away from that stuff' if any-one asked me. Perhaps there are very experienced practitioners who are fine with them, but definitely not teens who do it for s__t and giggles.

I know teens like the 'thrill' factor, which may account for many tales of things 'going wrong', but there seems to be too many stories by adults to completely discount there is something dangerous about them.

That story would make a great episode of an IHTM TV series. Just the perfect blend of truly unnerving terror but without being too unbelievable, the snowy setting, the lost soldier, I assume, by your age, the early-mid 1980s setting, the curse...

I don't mean to imply in anyway it is a made up story, just I really had a vision as I was reading it of how genuinely frightening it would be as an episode of a horror TV anthology series compared to the CGI-assisted nonsense that most shows and films are reliant on now.

I think it is almost a rite of passage the ouija board. We had an incident in our school in 7th year (11-12) around the time of our school leavers play. Some of the girls had done it and I remember they'd been told there was going to be an accident during the performance and naturally a lot of us became terrified that something was going to happen. Second time I experienced it was at university when I came home one night and my flatmate and landlady had done one and got some unpleasant responses which had shaken them up.

Whether they are real, I doubt it, but the psychological effect that they can have on people and on your own mind makes it something not worth dabbling with IMO.
 
I've posted this before, but I do like to bang on about it ;). I once had a terrifying hypnopompic hallucination early one morning when I thought a group of rubbery aliens had materialised around me.

They seemed to be trying to 'corkscrew' me out of my body and up through the ceiling. My eyes were still closed, but I had a tremendous feeling of their physical presence. As I remember, they were whirling me around anti-clockwise, which seems reminiscent of the folklore about fairies dancing around people in a circle to whisk them away to fairyland. (Also a lot of UFO reports feature spinning craft or spinning lights around the craft)

It really did feel incredibly real at the time. With great difficulty I managed to desperately shout "Aliens are here! Aliens are here!" which broke the spell, and the beings seemed to rush up away through the ceiling.

Not funny at all at the time.
 
I've posted this before, but I do like to bang on about it ;). I once had a terrifying hypnopompic hallucination early one morning when I thought a group of rubbery aliens had materialised around me.

They seemed to be trying to 'corkscrew' me out of my body and up through the ceiling. My eyes were still closed, but I had a tremendous feeling of their physical presence. As I remember, they were whirling me around anti-clockwise, which seems reminiscent of the folklore about fairies dancing around people in a circle to whisk them away to fairyland. (Also a lot of UFO reports feature spinning craft or spinning lights around the craft)

It really did feel incredibly real at the time. With great difficulty I managed to desperately shout "Aliens are here! Aliens are here!" which broke the spell, and the beings seemed to rush up away through the ceiling.

Not funny at all at the time.

Graylien - there is a horror/documentary about hypnopompic hallucinations or sleep paralysis called The Nightmare (2015) - which I have started watching (half way through before an interruption). It's quite good.
 
Ghosthunt (yes, I can hear the board's collective sighs and sniffs from here) in the City of Caves under Nottingham. The first disconcerting element - although not Fortean, was being let into a deserted shopping mall at 1.30 am in the morning and walking through it to the caves. The fortean element was sitting in a cave with little stones being thrown/dropped on my head, with no logical explanation I could find as to how that was happening.
 
Graylien - there is a horror/documentary about hypnopompic hallucinations or sleep paralysis called The Nightmare (2015) - which I have started watching (half way through before an interruption). It's quite good.

Was the interruption anything to do with being scared? I watched half of this documentary and found it terrifying.

I see some reviewers are not convinced the patients involved were not actors.

When the lady near the beginning mentioned a tapping on her bedroom window during sleep paralysis I near shit as this is what happened to me as a kid. Whether i was asleep or awake is up for debate, but I know someone was knocking that window.


Edited to add window.
 
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I must get round to watching that. There's also a Channel 4 Documentary about sleep paralysis on Youtube at the moment: The Entity.
 
i have died in a dream, infact i have died twice. I didnt feel scared but woke up with a feeling of sadness and my heart was pounding. In both dreams i was shot (both dreams were years apart).

I've had two dreams of being shot as well. One was years ago I was opening the door to the postie and the other one was about a month ago. I was walking under a large bridge when someone called me and shot me. It does give you a very strange feeling when you wake up.
 
I've had a few Fortean things happen and the scariest - by far - is one I will have posted here before.

So just briefly - I was 11 or 12 and saw a full body apparition floating a couple of foot in the air one night, in my dad's bedroom. I was sharing the room for a week with a little girl the same age as me who was visiting and would become my step-sister, not long after. The thing I saw was what you'd now call 'pixellated' - no word for it then. It was an elderly man.

I would have assumed it was a dream but I was in an unfamiliar bed with a metal bed-head and when I turned away, I banged my head hard and that didn't wake me up. Which told me I was already awake.

Next day I didn't want to look like a nutter so only told my dad. He probably didn't want me to look like a nutter as he didn't tell the guests or anyone.

15 years later, out for a meal with my step-sister, she launches into a story about something she saw one night that week she was staying with us, when we shared a bedroom. It turned out she had seen exactly what I had. But I know when I turned round, she was asleep and she said when she saw it, I was asleep. So we don't know if it was the same night or one other, that week.

She only told her mum as she thought we'd think she was a nutter. Etc.

Easily my 'worst' experience. I could have kidded myself it was a dream but the next morning I had a huge bruise on my forehead where I'd banged my head on the bedstead.

ETA: my dad slept in that room for years and claimed he never saw a thing. My younger step sister took over that room when the step family moved in, so that is probably one reason why neither me nor the stepsister my age, ever talked about it. No-one would have wanted to scare her. But so far as I know, she never saw a thing in that room, either. I have no idea why only two of us saw it. But an elderly man was consistent with a voice that other people heard, over the years. No-one else ever saw it, though.
 
Graylien - there is a horror/documentary about hypnopompic hallucinations or sleep paralysis called The Nightmare (2015) - which I have started watching (half way through before an interruption). It's quite good.
 
in Lviv, western Ukraine in the early hours of sunday 26th(?) oct 2015 I woke up in a state of absolute terror, the most scared I've ever been and yet I didn't know why and still don't.
the weekend was the best of my life but I was due to lay a wreath at a mass grave the following day (and did so)
maybe it was affecting me more than I realised
 
I probably have posted this one elsewhere here already but I only had the sleep paralysis - at least I hope it was sleep paralysis - once. And it happened during a terrible time in my life. So may be due to that. But anyway I had moved back to my old village 150 miles or so from where I had lived most of my adult life, so starting again, essentially. I'd been lucky and had been offered a newbuild Housing Association house. It was almost opposite my aunty's house too. And one night I had the classic (I now know didn't the) sleep paralysis experience - vile, goblin like thing, in the room and I couldn't move. It said it would come for me when I died. I thought I was awake but hopefully, wasn't.

Not long after that I remembered that in the early 1980s, after I'd left the village and was at uni miles away, one night we saw on the national news a man had gone postal and killed his entire family, in one of the old council houses in my village (same estate as my aunty). I knew the family vaguely, but the one survivor had been his son - who I'd been at school with - who came home from work and found his entire family dead. Dad had gone off and killed himself in the garage. It was only then I remembered that the newbuild house I was living in, was on the site of the old block of garages - the house had not been knocked down after the murders; but the entire block of garages, had.

When I rang my aunty to say I was taking the house she tried, really strongly, to talk me out of it. But she wouldn't say why just some vague stuff about "those houses are damp" - they'd only been built a year or so earlier (I was the second tenant). I never had that dream or one like it again - and I'm prone to recurrent dreams. My aunty died not long after and I got offered a council house in a beautiful village about 10 miles away - which I took. I was never happy in that house even though it was, on paper, the nicest house I ever had lived in.
 
Sleep paralysis comes for me at times of stress and I'm fortunate that I've never had an experience for many years. Must be chilled out these days. In my twenties, I was for a time, working shifts and was asleep on my bed in the middle of the afternoon.
I was awoken (thought I was awoken) by my bedroom door slamming open violently. Extremely shocked, I stared at the door unable to move as a woman walked in. This bit sounds corny but I can assure you it was terrifying at the time - she was dressed in a raggy old dress, Miss Havisham style. It could well have been a wedding dress, it was pale in colour but very dirty. Her hands were held out in front of her like Frankenstein's monster.

She had no head.

I could only watch in terror as she turned towards my bed and dashed across the room at me. Yes, that's when I woke up. I blamed working shifts on that one. Had some other very strange dreams around that time.
 
Sleep paralysis comes for me at times of stress and I'm fortunate that I've never had an experience for many years. Must be chilled out these days. In my twenties, I was for a time, working shifts and was asleep on my bed in the middle of the afternoon.
I was awoken (thought I was awoken) by my bedroom door slamming open violently. Extremely shocked, I stared at the door unable to move as a woman walked in. This bit sounds corny but I can assure you it was terrifying at the time - she was dressed in a raggy old dress, Miss Havisham style. It could well have been a wedding dress, it was pale in colour but very dirty. Her hands were held out in front of her like Frankenstein's monster.

She had no head.

I could only watch in terror as she turned towards my bed and dashed across the room at me. Yes, that's when I woke up. I blamed working shifts on that one. Had some other very strange dreams around that time.
:eek: .. I would have shat the bed.
 
I've had a few realistic dreams set at home in which an invisible entity has grabbed me from behind and I'm screaming all exorcist dialogue like "In Jesus name I command you to go!" and woke up breathless. The first of these involved a spirit of a young boy who whispers in my ear "I can't go to heaven, because there is no heaven"....

I've had a number of false awakening dreams, whre you appear to wake up and are lying in bed, but then you wake up a second time and realise you dreamt the first occassion. A couple of these had elements of sleep paralysis and hallucination..such as feeling a cat like tail growing out of my chest and hearing a voice saying "the eyes..the eyes follow you.." When you're convinced you're awake during this but hten wake up again your sense of reality is kind of thrown into disarray.

The most sinister, though not necessarily scary, thing I've encountered was a parliament of birds. A tree full of screaming screeching crows in their dozens, possibly hundreds, while immediately next to the tree, on a roof top a huge owl with orange eyes sat regally, with a single magpie either side like lieutenants.
 
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