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The Scariest Fortean Thing Ever To Happen To You

Not the scariest fortean thing, but something that has stayed with me: in 1994, i was 8 years old and my year group had been taken on a school trip from south london to the village of Shere in surrey. It was a beautiful place - it felt like a thousand miles from home and i now realise it really wasn't (still within the M25 i think) but it was a world away - we went to a farm, saw the animals, went to Leith Hill i think, it was really lovely.

We walked through the church grounds and graveyard and as i was walking along the path, i felt huge energy travelling between two graves which faced each other on either side of the path - i didn't see anything, only felt it - it was like a force field which i didn't want to walk through (almost like the occupants were having an argument and i didn't want to interrupt, but it felt so strong. The graves looked itentical, large grey tombstones so they may have known each other in life i guess). Nobody else seemed to notice, and as i didn't want to get left by my year group, took a deep breath and ran through the energy! Sounds strange but that's the only way i can describe it
 
I wanted to recount something that absolutely terrified me after moving into an old farm house some years ago. We had been living there for a couple of weeks and me and my husband had gone to bed, I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night with a feeling that there was 'something' in the corner of the bedroom. I have never experienced a feeling like it, I was completely petrified, all I could think to do was repeat the Lords prayer in my head over and over (I am in no way religious) but whatever it was felt malevolent, I tried to nudge my husband awake but as he is a very heavy sleeper had no luck, I was far too frightened to move anymore or turn on a light. Eventually after quite some time the feeling from the corner just began to lessen and finally it faded away. By the morning I had tried to rationalise my experience, and didn't mention it to anyone. A couple of days later, whilst we were unpacking boxes I heard my husband say something upstairs, and assumed he was talking to himself. He came downstairs and when he saw me in the kitchen he stared at me in disbelief and said 'I just saw you upstairs'. He recounted that in the corner of the bedroom he had seen the figure of a woman with long blonde hair staring out the window, what I heard was him saying 'hello baby' to it. It was only then that I told him my experience of 'something' in that corner only a couple of days before. I must admit I did not sleep well for months and hated sleeping in there on my own. Only after moving out of that house do I realise how unsettling it felt.
 
Good story! Halfway through your account I thought, hmm, sleep paralysis? But your blonde visitor seen by someone else suggests a different presence, unless that presence causes SP. Sometimes that presence can exhibit "jealousy" towards a partner of someone they've taken a liking to. Does that make sense to you?
 
Good story! Halfway through your account I thought, hmm, sleep paralysis? But your blonde visitor seen by someone else suggests a different presence, unless that presence causes SP. Sometimes that presence can exhibit "jealousy" towards a partner of someone they've taken a liking to. Does that make sense to you?
I was of the same mind with sleep paralysis/night terror until my husbands sighting. Weirdly me and my husband work in a Tudor Manor house and years ago a 'psychic medium' told my husband that a figure follows him around that house as he reminds her of someone who was kind to her when she was living there, she the proceeded to look at me and say 'she doesn't like your girlfriend though' I am deeply sceptical of psychics but interesting none the less!
 
The psychic could be guesswork, and the fact your husband saw a psychic may mean he was suggestible to this kind of thing so they knew what buttons to push. But then again, you do wonder - is being "adopted" by a spirit (for want of a better word) more common than we think? I'm just guessing myself!
 
The psychic could be guesswork, and the fact your husband saw a psychic may mean he was suggestible to this kind of thing so they knew what buttons to push. But then again, you do wonder - is being "adopted" by a spirit (for want of a better word) more common than we think? I'm just guessing myself!
Sorry, to clarify the 'psychic' was at our workplace and told this to my husband unbidden, neither of us have a belief in such things. I must admit in general I am quite sceptical but have had things happen that I cannot readily explain. Its all very interesting ☺️
 
Decades ago, when I was in my 20s, I had a series of what I can only describe as dreams. They were more like a semi-conscious awareness rather than a typical dream but, in them, I had committed a murder. The experiences had no plot but, rather, centered on my absolute dread of being caught. I remember, on more than one occasion, sitting bolt upright in bed, drenched in cold sweat. I don't know that I can ever recall having had such a feeling of panicky fear.

These episodes recurred for a few months but finally ended when I moved to take a job in another state. I know your subconscious mind can come up with all kinds of things, but I continue to wonder whether I had accidentally tapped into someone else's thoughts and that the connection was only broken when I relocated.
 
Sorry, to clarify the 'psychic' was at our workplace and told this to my husband unbidden, neither of us have a belief in such things. I must admit in general I am quite sceptical but have had things happen that I cannot readily explain. Its all very interesting ☺️
That reminds me of a living history one.

A group of living history people I know, take over a certain castle several times a year and live there over the weekend. I've been there once or twice with them and at some point, talk turned to the paranormal.

Part of the castle is in ruins and part still inhabited. Lord Whatever is never there when they are and lets them go wherever they want in the entire place, once the public have gone home. You can literally pick a room and sleep in it. Most people tend to fall asleep in a 'puppy pile' in the kitchen. Safety in numbers.

One person often goes there ahead of the others to lay a fire in the kitchen, the cooking range, etc and stays after everyone else has gone to make sure the fires are out. They said that once, unbidden, a woman who identified as a 'psychic' came up to them and told them that they are always followed by a woman. She likes them being there. Anyone could say that, right, some random nutter. But then, they added... she finished with "She always follows you round the castle when everyone else has gone home and you're putting out the fires."
 
I am a person who has experienced psychosis on numerous occasions (I take anti-psychotics and am doing well now) and on one of the occasions I experienced a phenomenon where everywhere I looked there were faces and then numbers. Pointy fours and sevens slender fives everywhere on every surface I looked at. I don’t know what that means but I was haunted by the idea that I would be driven crazy by the numbers. I don’t know what the phenomenon is but I would appreciate any suggestions on what it could have been. Thank you in advance for any information on what it could have been. I have MS also and have numerous lesions on my brain I don’t know if that could have exacerbated any symptoms but this was one of the strange things that happened to me and I wondered if anyone had ever heard of such a thing.
 
Millarca1:

First - welcome to the forum.

I'd like to ask some questions to clarify some points ...

Did you always see faces and numbers / numerals (together), or did you see only one or the other at a time?

You said you saw "faces and then numbers." This seems to imply faces came first, and number / numerals came later. Did this transition from faces to numbers happen during a single episode or incident? Or do you mean something more like "I used to see faces everywhere, but later it was numbers I saw everywhere"?
 
I saw faces first in patterns and in wood and in curtains. I would look until I saw my husband, myself and our children amongst the faces. I would see the faces of familiar people and then I would see movement in the faces—they seemed to be looking from side to side. After that came the numbers and they were everywhere just numbers imprinted on surfaces, it was overwhelming and I thought I would always see them and I knew it would drive me crazy. I have tried to look and see if this was a common trait that happened during psychosis but I couldn’t find anything about it (as a phenomenon) anywhere.
 
Your description of the perceptions is entirely consistent with the innate and natural human propensity for perceiving patterns and objects when gazing at visual stimuli (other objects; clouds, wood grain, mottled surfaces, assemblages, machinery, etc.). Phrased another way, we humans project certain patterns onto otherwise random features and interpret them as if they were examples of familiar forms such as faces. The general term for this attribution of patterns / objects is pareidolia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

Pareidolia is most often mentioned in relation to seeing faces, but it actually covers all manner of such attributions projected onto ordinary objects and features (e.g., seeing clouds as fluffy versions of ordinary objects, animals, etc.).

Pareidolia is now recognized as a normal and built-in quirk of human perceptual processing. Pareidolia does not constitute hallucination in the strict sense, because it relates to your perceptual interpretation of something that's "really there" (e.g., the swirling wood grain). In times past pareidolia was sometimes regarded as possibly being symptomatic of psychosis, but now it's regarded as natural.

My point is that seeing faces, objects and (yes - even ... ) alphanumeric characters in the first place is natural and normal when those perceptions are derived from the features present to you in your environment.

I can assure you from personal experience that once you project faces (etc.) onto things you see repeatedly thereafter it can seem almost impossible to ever "un-see" them on subsequent encounters.

This forum has an explicit policy against offering medical or psychological diagnoses or advice, so I'll need to stop there. However, I'll add one more comment as a response to something you specifically mentioned ...

Pareidolia - especially in relation to interpreting images as faces - seems to involve brain / neural functions early in the visual processing path rather than cognitive processes in the final phase(s) of visual processing. This means pareidolia is a matter of something invoked or triggered outside your conscious self-perception. It's how your brain works, not how you're thinking in the moment.

You mentioned having multiple sclerosis and brain lesions. It's conceivable your state of neural damage is such that your normal and innate pareidolia capabilities are less dampened or otherwise somehow more accentuated than they once were.
 
I've been reluctant to add this, but here goes...
I'll relate something that happened to me when I was 8 years of age. This was 1973, my parents had recently separated and I was spending the weekend with my father in the family home.
What I'm about to describe was so bizarre and out of the ordinary that it's stuck with me all throughout my years. It's as though I can go back in time and recall the incident so clearly despite it being decades ago and lasting only a few moments.
It was a Saturday night and he was cooking a roast chicken for dinner. Our kitchen was narrow, not quite a galley kitchen, but longer rather than wider. As a family we had recently bought a brand new, large white refrigerator, which was still a marvel to me (being at a time when such purchases were something to be amazed at).
My father was bending over checking the chicken in the oven and I was replacing a bottle of milk in the fridge when I glanced over him towards a doorway that led to a hallway where the bedrooms of my sister and mine were.
Holding one side of the door frame and leaning into the space was what I can only describe as a demon/ogre type creature. Massive in size, filling the doorway, no neck, stumpy horns, a broad mouth with sharpened teeth, wide, slitted eyes, skin the colour and texture of scabs. It's finger nails were clawed and it wore no clothing that I could see. A it was leaning around the door frame, I couldn't see the lower part of it's body so I have no idea as to what it's legs/feet/tail (?) looked like.
It grinned once menacingly at me and looked down at my dad and the moved back into the hallway.
The entire incident took only a matter of seconds.
I couldn't believe what I had seen, didn't say a word to my father and was left with a sense of dread and foreboding, though I felt at the time that it's visit was directed more at my father rather than at myself. If the word 'sinister' could be encapsulated into an entity, this was it.
I don't recall anything in particular bad happening directly afterwards. My parents stayed separated and subsequently divorced 3 years later. My father passed away 12 years after this happened, none of which I attribute to the creature's visit.
I've never seen it since, have no idea what it was and in all of my reading on the paranormal, the occult and demonology I still cannot come up with an answer.
I'm not a fanciful person and certainly wasn't as a child.
It was too real to have been something I imagined and if it was an hallucination, why haven't I had others, even if ''it'' wasn't one of them?
Whatever it was, I remember it like it was yesterday.
 
Woah, what a post! Can't believe you've been sitting on that one for two and a half years! No explanation from me, but you would hope it was a hallucination, wouldn't you? The thought you may meet again would be worrying.
 
Thank you EnolaGaia, I am aware of the inclination to see faces in patterns, wood, etc. as a artist I frequently use such images as inspiration for pieces of art. This was something different, it was like an onslaught of faces they were everywhere and the numbers were imprinted on surfaces not like drawing them out like an overlay of large numbers covering everything. I cannot communicate how frightening it was there were large numbers everywhere. It was unnatural and agonizing on the eye because there was no way to escape them. I also had a hallucination? of children imprinted on white walls that enlarged to the point where they covered all the surfaces. The children grew larger and larger until I could no longer distinguish their individual faces and then they turned into occult symbols. I don’t know exactly what caused the children to come and grow but I know what I saw and it was frightening.
 
Just so we're clear about this ... Are you saying the perceptions of numbers / faces / children / symbols weren't always derived from features of your environment, but instead were ephemeral visualizations overlaid on the scene?
 
The faces were derived from the environment to a degree, but instead of seeing faces in the grain or pattern the faces were everywhere. The numbers were overlaid on surfaces they were not naturally distorted images they rested on top of surfaces. The children were projected on the walls. They began small and then they enlarged to take over the area of blank white walls. They morphed into occult symbols and later they just remained imprinted on the walls. I was in a hospital at the time I had suffered a concussion and later went into a catatonic state. There were other things that were happening at the time and I was later diagnosed as schizophrenic.
 
I need some more clarification(s) ...

I'd like to know a general timeline for the order in which you had the following 4 issues:

MS diagnosis / concussion / catatonia / schizophrenia diagnosis

My guess is that the order in which I listed them is the order in which they occurred, but I want to be sure.

Next, I'd like to know (even if only in rough / general terms) how much time passed in between these 3 occurrences:

concussion / catatonia / schizophrenia diagnosis

Finally .... Have you been prescribed and been given any anti-psychotic medication? If so - how many times, and when (in relation to all 4 of these events or phases)?
 
Hello, Millarca1, thank you for joining and sharing your experiences! They sound so difficult and dismaying. Its easy to see how overwhelming and frightening they could be. I'm glad your meds are working for you, and hope you are able to get good help for your MS too.

People on this forum are smart and good hearted, funny and thoughtful. It's a good place to be.
 
Thank you for your warm welcome! I take Haldol now then I was being bounced around on everything and anything. I kept trying to kill myself because I had a voice in my head telling me God wanted me to do it. I had had a diagnosis of bi-polar and I knew the voice meant I was going insane and I thought suicide was the answer to everything. Anyway the progression of events was just the way you listed it, EnolaGaia. I was diagnosed with MS first
then the concussion then I was catatonic then the schizophrenia diagnosis. I was thought to be bi-polar (other instances of psychosis happened with manic episodes) until this bout of ill mental health. I was on zyprexa for about 6 months before the Haldol. I have been diagnosed with MS for 12 years, schizophrenia for 5.
 
Thanks for the additional details ...

I wanted to know more about the general sequence of events because your description of the hospital version of the faces / numerals visions seemed 'way too extreme for over-elaborated pareidolia and more like outright delirium.

Delirium isn't a common symptom or side-effect associated with concussion (or, for that matter, clinical catatonia), but it is a common occurrence in negative reactions to anti-psychotic medications.
 
I've been reluctant to add this, but here goes...
I'll relate something that happened to me when I was 8 years of age. This was 1973, my parents had recently separated and I was spending the weekend with my father in the family home.
What I'm about to describe was so bizarre and out of the ordinary that it's stuck with me all throughout my years. It's as though I can go back in time and recall the incident so clearly despite it being decades ago and lasting only a few moments.
It was a Saturday night and he was cooking a roast chicken for dinner. Our kitchen was narrow, not quite a galley kitchen, but longer rather than wider. As a family we had recently bought a brand new, large white refrigerator, which was still a marvel to me (being at a time when such purchases were something to be amazed at).
My father was bending over checking the chicken in the oven and I was replacing a bottle of milk in the fridge when I glanced over him towards a doorway that led to a hallway where the bedrooms of my sister and mine were.
Holding one side of the door frame and leaning into the space was what I can only describe as a demon/ogre type creature. Massive in size, filling the doorway, no neck, stumpy horns, a broad mouth with sharpened teeth, wide, slitted eyes, skin the colour and texture of scabs. It's finger nails were clawed and it wore no clothing that I could see. A it was leaning around the door frame, I couldn't see the lower part of it's body so I have no idea as to what it's legs/feet/tail (?) looked like.
It grinned once menacingly at me and looked down at my dad and the moved back into the hallway.
The entire incident took only a matter of seconds.
I couldn't believe what I had seen, didn't say a word to my father and was left with a sense of dread and foreboding, though I felt at the time that it's visit was directed more at my father rather than at myself. If the word 'sinister' could be encapsulated into an entity, this was it.
I don't recall anything in particular bad happening directly afterwards. My parents stayed separated and subsequently divorced 3 years later. My father passed away 12 years after this happened, none of which I attribute to the creature's visit.
I've never seen it since, have no idea what it was and in all of my reading on the paranormal, the occult and demonology I still cannot come up with an answer.
I'm not a fanciful person and certainly wasn't as a child.
It was too real to have been something I imagined and if it was an hallucination, why haven't I had others, even if ''it'' wasn't one of them?
Whatever it was, I remember it like it was yesterday.
Maybe what it was there for was to cause your parents to divorce?
For some reason, it reminded me of this:
Wherethe-5c60a9d0c9e77c000166221b.jpg
 
My parents simply grew apart as some couples do. My father had a stressful job that required long hours away from home and lots of interstate travel. His way to relax was to be social with his mates at the pub, not to be at home with his wife and children. Not unlike many other men of the time (early 70's). It was an amicable parting and they remained on good terms, often meeting for lunch, we enjoyed Christmas together as a family, that sort of thing.
As for the thing I saw, that's not a bad representation in a general sense, except what I saw was purely evil and had no ears. What I saw had no hair, just a rough, scab like skin that was a mottled brown/green. Very unpleasant and wholly sinister.
 
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The thing that is weird is that this occurred before I had any medications. After I had the concussion I was unconscious for three days when I awoke is when I saw the children.
 
I have already written about the Fortean thing that scared me the most:
https://forums.forteana.org/index.p...-for-shadow-people-please.60216/#post-1535478

As it happens, I have since discovered the totally understandable explanation for it (which is still fairly unusual but no longer Fortean). At the time, though, it was terrifying. Weird entities that had escaped into our dimension? Ghosts? "Demons"? Aliens?

The effect of sleep deprivation from working night shifts not only (probably) increased the tendency to see these "beings", but also vastly magnified the reaction - of being very scared; I was scared for either what they were, or the possibility that I was losing my grip on reality.

Somewhat ironically, after receiving a completely rational explanation, I did have a brush with mental illness, and unsurprisingly that was the cumulative effect of decades of night shift working. It screws up the sleep rhythms and all that.

Anyway, mysterious shadow people won't terrify me any more. Didn't half shit me up then, though.
 
Not scary, but made me wonder -

Someone recently sent me a gif of a newborn baby being held up by a doctor and apparently walking along the delivery bed. This is a normal reflex which new parents can find a little disconcerting if they're not made aware.

I used to bath my babies on the hearth rug as we only had the coal fire, no central heating. When I gave my youngest her first 'rug bath', aged just a few days, she decided she didn't wish to take part. She flexed her legs, stood up, stepped over the side and strode away! Of course I was supporting her so had to lean over the bath to lift her back. This was the funniest thing I'd ever seen and I was laughing for a good while afterwards.

So we finally completed the bath and I'd dried and dressed the tiny Escette and was cuddling her on my shoulder and chatting to her, as you do. She suddenly placed both her hands on my shoulder and pushed herself away, and swung herself back and to the side, and stared straight into my face. She stayed like that for as long as she wanted to, a minute or more, scrutinising me.

The overwhelming impression I had was that she was thinking 'Okaaaay, so here I am, and here we are, and YOU'RE my Mum this time, are you? Rightio!'

I said 'Yes, I'm your Mum, and your name is Escette, and we all love you very much! Welcome to the world.'

A truly old soul.
 
My mother in law owned an old cottage in Norfolk which she claimed was haunted. So, I didn't really think much of it but then one day we all experienced something while sitting in the kitchen. There was some thing stamping about upstairs in this little two bedroom cottage. There was nobody else there. We were all in the kitchen, the front door was locked and nobody had gone past us - we'd been there for most of the day. So I went up to have a look and when i went in to one room the stamping came from the other room - and so i went into the other room and the stamping was going on all around me, but gradually shifted to the walls and then to the ceiling. There was no ceiling space by the way. I stayed and listened until my mother in law told me to "leave her alone" referring to the ghost she claimed she had.
So after that it stopped but my then partner who had seen many strange things already, told me what she'd seen in the cottage and I couldn't sleep that night. I just laid in bed terrified all night. I've not been back either.
 
What a completely crazy experience. I would say you're lucky (but it sounds rather terrifying). Stella, Stella, Stella. You're not going to leave us hanging like that are you? (N.B. you can if you'd rather not think about it).
i left it out because it doesn't translate into anything i can describe sensibly. What she said she saw was some sort of light show in the living room - in the corner of the room, where she thought something was trying to manifest itself - or it was a pure light entity. It shot out light from a central column. I don;t know why that terrifies me so much but it still does.
 
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