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What Are Your Favourite IHTM Stories?

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Gone But Not Forgotten
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What is your favourite IHTM story? (can be from here or other forums).

My favourite from here has to be Finehair's terrifying story about the dwarfs in the wardrobe;

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewt ... c&start=45 (scroll down to near the end of the page).

This one about a black-eyed waitress always sticks in my memory;

http://paranormal.about.com/library/bls ... y06_10.htm

and this one about an evil car;

http://paranormal.about.com/library/bls ... 05_som.htm

These are the ones that have really stuck in my mind anyway. Would love to know your favourite paranormal/IHTM stories.
 
I hate it when a woman I'm thinking of picking up turns out to be a crazed screeching hell beast,though usually that tends to happen more often when it's someone you're meeting from an online dating site. :shock:
I wonder if it was because the guy stiffed her on leaving a tip
 
I can't recall the story properly at all but my favourite had something to do with a group of kids out in the woods when they saw something like a human bird type thing with red eyes. They ran out of the woods and the "thing" started to chase them (hovering or flying rather than running) but it wouldn't leave the cover of the woods. They ran across the field and this thing followed in the arch of the woods trying to get to where they had to escape out of the field before they did. They had to get through a metal grate or something so were running as fast as they could so they reached it before the devil like "thing" got there. They managed to get through and close the grate (or whatever it was) behind them, and as they ran off they heard the thing rattling the grate behind them. Sorry it's so very vague, I haven't read it in years but it always sticks in my mind as being one of the really scary ones!

Another was the one where some young person sleeps over at someone's house and in the night he thinks one of the dogs has come into the room to see him, so he goes to stroke it. Instead of fur there's scales and so he screams. The thing runs off and the household wakes up. Downstairs the window is smashed where whatever it was escaped out of the house!

The green baby one in the pond was a good un too - not so scary but just plain weird!

Can anyone find these stories so we can all have a read?
 
I remember the Green Baby in the pond -- sounded pretty fake to me.

I vaguely remember the Mothman-ish thing in the woods, but darn if I know where it is.

"The Reptile," though -- a nice, short, bizarre occurrence, with an implied but never seen creature! That was one of the first IHTMs I read when I found the FTMB:

http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5797

Too bad it was hijacked for an "extradimensional Reptoid" advertisement.

There are a lot of topics I could list, like "Dog-Headed Men," full of favorite similarly-themed stories (hard to pick or even remember individual items), but single tales? Have to give it a thinking over.
 
Drat! When I tried to follow the link to the original IHTM board -- the original story seems to be gone! Have our favorite weird reports vanished into cyberspace?
 
amarok2005 said:
Drat! When I tried to follow the link to the original IHTM board -- the original story seems to be gone! Have our favorite weird reports vanished into cyberspace?
Click to expand...

That's what I have noticed. Practically all the old IHTM have links that do not work and end in 'page not found'. If anyone knows where all the old IHTM stories can be read in full can they please let us know!
 
It'll take a bit of trial and error, but if you go to the Internet Archive, specifically this page:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www ... ntimes.com

You can check out vintage FT pages, including ITHM. All the lost stories seem to be there, but I've only checked a few. 2002 and 2003 seem to be the best years to try from what I can see.
 
I would have to say the "stick man" story (stories?) are the one(s) that appeal to me. Even though they are quite disturbing, I can't help but associate the entities seen with the opening title of "The Return of the Saint" which had the famous haloed stick figure perform various acts of daring. Too much TV watching as a child I had.....
 
Actually that story linked to above about the strange white car....anyone else picture it as a dirty, rusty white VW Beetle? Maybe it the description of the engine noise?
 
I remember the green baby one! One that has always stuck in my mind is about two young men being chased by a big black dog with glowing red eyes. Brilliant, terrifying read... but a little unbelievable. Was prob just a dog!
 
Oh my word, I just read the one about the waitress.... it's given me the massive creeps!!! Like out of a horror film, can't think of any explanation if it's true!! :shock:
 
Same here, I'm glad I read that in daylight, with people around! One of my favorites is the dancing cow story, it's just too weird! Anyone remember that one?
 
The waitress story is obviously bad fiction - one really glaring gap in the narrative is when, using a cliche from horror films (along with the rapidly moving monster), the narrator glances in the rear view mirror and sees the monster waitress sitting in the back seat - he's already said in the story that it was screaming loudly, and was still screaming in the back seat, yet the narrator only notices it is there when he looked in the mirror!
And of course, the location and name monster-haunted cafe is not given, no follow up on whether the cafe's owner still employs shape shifters as wait staff (do they have to pay extra medical benefits for silver bullet wounds?).
I think the writer's tried to copy a Twilight Zone episode where the waiter turns out to be a three eyed alien.
 
Another favorite one of mine, which I've just remembered, was the one where a woman, her husband and kids go to a party. The father leaves early for some reason and walks home. The women and kids leave a little bit later in the car and on their drive home they catch up with the father walking along the road and slow down and unwind the window. It looks like him but isn't acting like him and there's something odd about him that suggests it isn't actually the husband at all!!! Even the kids don't think it's their Dad even though it looks like him and is in the right spot based on the time it would have taken him to walk there.....remember that one anyone? Again I don't know where it would be on here and we probably won't be able to open it and read it due to the site problems. Perhaps someone remembers the story better - or the original poster is still reading on IHTM and can relay the story once again? It was rather chilling to read anyway!
 
Yes, I do agree that the waitress one is far too cliched and has too many gaps to be true. I did enjoy reading it though. Although not as much as reading the creepy ones that do appear true! I mean it can't be possible that every person here on FT are skilled (or not) writers of fiction, no? :)

I'm still just waiting for something to happen to me, where I actually can tell a great story on here rather than minor occurences such as orbs and sleep paralysis etc. Although I should be careful what i wish for :twisted:
 
I, too, found the one about the dancing cows apparition exceedingly bizarre. Certainly not any kind of conventional folk-tale!

The white car, I always pictured as a small, squarish thing from the '50's, like a Nash Rambler or some such. Maybe something from a little later, but definitely square in back, boot, and bonnet, in my mind's eye.

But my mind wasn't there.

One of my favorites, a genuine IHTM, from this site, not from paranormal.about.com, was the "it's happening to me right now" story. A fellow working at the front desk in a hotel wrote of an apparition of an old man who appears on the staircase regularly. He appears to be agitated when the door is open and calms down when it is closed. I may have the door / attitude correlation backwards, but some correlation was there.
 
Dancing Cows is on Obi-Wan (though I suppose it might have been posted here, too). I like the Transdimensional Gas Station and am not at all put off (as some people were) by the poster's inability to turn up the receipt. I never expected him to be able to turn up any such thing; and if he had, it wouldn't have proved anything. I can't turn up normal receipts I specifically saved, and the ones you get from gas stations have no information on them to speak of anyway.

Besides, it is not in the nature of these occurances to be provable. You accept the story, or you don't.
 
I'd like to point out that I did post a scan of a receipt of similar vintage in that thread - all I had to do was look through some boxes, the same thing the OP said that he was just about to do for the past few years - he never said he couldn't find it, he just said towards the end that he was gripped by some mysterious force that was preventing him from thinking about it. And the receipt would have told at least the name of the gas station.

What I think happened was that he did find the receipt - in his last post about the receipt he writes:

Anyway, I just described that reciept from memory, the point being that its nothing special - thin, off-white paper and green print. There´s a serial number in the upper left corner ( i think) in red ink. It has the amount in black biro, and a signature or initials at the bottom.
Click to expand...

Which sounds like he looked at it very recently - I couldn't tell you what the ink color is on the one I posted.

So what I think happened is he found the name of the gas station, discovered that it just was in a different place that he had thought, and was just a bit too embarrassed to tell us about it.
 
icarusgirl said:
I mean it can't be possible that every person here on FT are skilled (or not) writers of fiction, no? :)

I'm still just waiting for something to happen to me, where I actually can tell a great story on here rather than minor occurences such as orbs and sleep paralysis etc. Although I should be careful what i wish for :twisted:
Click to expand...

You know, it wouldn't be a bad idea to start a thread here just for fictional short stories. "It might have happened to me".
 
PeniG said:
Besides, it is not in the nature of these occurances to be provable. You accept the story, or you don't.
Click to expand...

In my case, I'd rather say: you enjoy the story, or you don't.
 
It's true that the thread is about "favorite" IHTMs, not those you find most plausible. One may enjoy a story without believing it for a moment, or accept it and wish you'd never heard it.

Storytelling talent is not uncommon and is an independent variable from truthfulness. Fiction writing is a different matter. If you want to make a true story sound false, apply fictional conventions to it! Counterintuitive, but true - we don't tell made-up stories the same way we tell those we believe.

For my own part, I accept all of them. I'm honest, within the limits of my capacity to confabulate, so why shouldn't the tellers be? It's not for me to tell people they didn't experience what they think they did. And what's the fun of having people on if you don't reveal the joke in the end?

(Incidentally, I get lots of receipts with no information on them but the numbers, especially from hole-in-the-wall places like that gas station. )
 
My favourite one was from an issue of FT a couple of years ago. A bloke was working in a water works in Tennessee and saw a Thing that sort of silently screamed and stretched out to him. In the story he said that there were rumours of strange goings on at said plant; a few workers apparently carried guns round with them and someone hand become a jibbering wreck. Really scary.
 
I don't think it was an IHTM story, but my favourite story was the one about the guy in a restaurant in the US. Over several posts he detailed an account of meeting a tall, strange looking bloke. Cannot remember many details, just that the tall bloke came across as really 'otherworldly'. I think it was in the original 'Strange Folk' thread. Whatever, I can't find it now.
 
I know I'm abusing this thread, but I didn't know any better one. And I don't think this merits it's own thread ...

Anyway ... this story has that IHTM look and feel, and it was one of the (too few) stories that really gave me the shivers. It's from the "Pacific Vortex" book by Clive Cussler:

A NUMA zoologist was studying and recording fish sounds off the Continental slope near Iceland where he'd dropped a microphone in ten thousand feet of water to pick up noises made by the rarely seen benthos. For several days he recorded the usual clicks and creaking sounds with pretty much the same tones as surface-dwelling fish. He also noted the continuous cracking noise made by shrimps.

Suddenly, one afternoon, the cracking stopped and he began receiving a tapping sound, as if something was rapping a pencil on the underwater microphone. At first he figured he'd only run onto a fish with a previously unrecorded sound. But it slowly dawned on him that the tapping was in some kind of code.

The ship's radio operator was hastily called and he deciphered it as a mathematical formula.

Then the noise stopped and a shrieking laughter, eerily distorted by the density of the water, burst from the listening room speakers.

Shaking off disbelief, the crew quickly lowered a TV camera. They were about ten seconds too late. The fine bottom silt had been stirred up by a rapid movement, leaving an impenetrable cloud of muck. It took an hour before the bottom cleared. And there, in front of the cameras, was a set of odd-looking indentations in the silt going off into the black void.
Click to expand...
 
my favourite is because its identical to mine!

I read one many years ago where the narrator related 'staking' out the old church in Cranham, Essex which as any fule no, is haunted. The conclusion was that one of the party, who had gone round the back of the church, came screaming round the front, jumping into the car and could never talk about what had terrified him! The date was given as about 1967; in either 1976 or 1977, a group of us decided to investigate after the service on a Sunday evening in Autumn.

We waited until everyone had left and all the lights had gone off. After a few minutes we heard the noise of either heavy chairs or pews being moved about. We listened for about 30 minutes, recognising that although itwas scary, there could be a perfectly ordinary explanation. We walked down the lane and when we looked back at the church we could see a giant bat-like shape crawling up and down the spire. Again, we realised that it was almost certainly an optical illusion, caused by the streetlights and the darkness of the church's setting.
 
my favourite is because its identical to mine!

I read one many years ago where the narrator related 'staking' out the old church in Cranham, Essex which as any fule no, is haunted. The conclusion was that one of the party, who had gone round the back of the church, came screaming round the front, jumping into the car and could never talk about what had terrified him! The date was given as about 1967; in either 1976 or 1977, a group of us decided to investigate after the service on a Sunday evening in Autumn.

We waited until everyone had left and all the lights had gone off. After a few minutes we heard the noise of either heavy chairs or pews being moved about. We listened for about 30 minutes, recognising that although itwas scary, there could be a perfectly ordinary explanation. We walked down the lane and when we looked back at the church we could see a giant bat-like shape crawling up and down the spire. Again, we realised that it was almost certainly an optical illusion, caused by the streetlights and the darkness of the church's setting.
 
I always remember a story from a different forum that I read a good few years ago, but can't find again!

It was about a woman who was married to a rough sort, I think he dealt drugs or something similar. Anyway, she fell pregnant and not long after he was killed by heavies. Or druggies. Or someone that was peeved with him.

When the child was born, never having known the father, he/she once said to the mother that they could see said father, for whatever reason, stood right next to the mother. And the thing that scared the mother the most was the child's observation that he had a foot cleaved off - which she (and maybe a few others) were the only ones who knew of it. Scared her enough to flee the house.
 
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