Paranormal Thread

[Noodles]

I know America, like Australia, has a lot of highway ghosts, and some of the native monsters like wendigo are still about.

Yeah, around here most of what we've got are sasquatches/bigfeet, which are presumably co-opted Native critters. They're kinda ... pop-culture-ified, though? Like, not many people really really believe in them, even little kids, but there's merch all over, and they're like a little bit of an area symbol? Like, if you see an indie shade-grown organic coffee shop, there's a decent chance it's got one on the sign.

[Piney]

sasquatches/bigfeet

I've never heard the plural of bigfoot before, so for some reason this was really funny to me. But I digress.

I know America, like Australia, has a lot of highway ghosts, and some of the native monsters like wendigo are still about.

Whenever I'm on a highway at night, I'm always lowkey afraid of highway ghosts/phantom hitchhikers. I've also heard theories that rest stops on highways are liminal spaces.

[Róisín]

Liminal spaces is a good way to put it. Especially on the really old roads, or the pioneer trails.

[urbicande]

Aw yeah, how could I forget the Old Town stories. The Old Town in Stockholm, Sweden, dates back to around the 400 A.D. or so, with plenty of political uprisings, mass executions, warfare and deadly games of politics, so we've had some time to collect stories.

When King Christian of Denmark invaded Sweden, he had all of the old kings allies executed against the agreement, family, friends and all. About 80-90 people were executed. It is said that if it rains on the 8-9:th of November, one can still see headless ghosts wander the streets of Stockholm.

During the reign of the black Plague in Europe, a great number of dead were transported by horse and carriage to be buried in mass graves. In Rackarbacken, Södermalm, there's apparently such a carriage that still travel the roads on early mornings, its bells, wheels and the sound of horse hooves heralding a black wagon full of plague-dead. Many of these raves are gone now, having been removed to make way for buildings, but some people say that there are spots all over the city where you might see the ghosts of the buried, waiting for a priest to come and hallow the ground, wailing and bemoaning their early deaths.. (... Oooor just chilling out and sunbathing in the grass, the sources are admittedly a bit diverse on the subject of what they're actually doing...)

Back in the middle ages, Stockholm, like most European cities, was a bit of a disgusting sludge-hole, filled with rats, disease, and the excrement of both people and animals. There was so much filth, the current street level is actually three meters higher than the original one! This attracted a major amount of insects, which were said to actually have grown so large in numbers, that they darkened the skies over the entire town when they swarmed. If you go down to the excavation sites, to the original street levels, rumor is that you can still hear the buzzing of insects in certain places, even though there should be none there.

Stockholm have historically been surrounded by a number of city walls, built and then taken down as the town grew, or as they were destroyed in the tides of war. Back in those days, people believed in the presence of the vättar, land spirits of sort. Some of the builders were making offerings to the vättar, claiming they helped them build the wall, but another one laughed at them. He said there was no such thing as vättar, and even if there was, they sure as hell weren't building the wall. He'd prove it by sleeping on the unfinished wall one night, and keeping an eye out for them; the plan was that the next morning, he would tell everyone that they didn't show up. Unfortunately, when his co-workers showed up the next morning, the wall was a meter higher, and his arm was poking out of the bricks. The vättar had indeed appeared to build the wall, and they had built it right on top of the arrogant brick worker, now crushed to mush and dead as could be.

All that time I spent wandering around Gamla Stan and nothing!

(Of course, it was right around Midsommar and never actually go dark)

[Ana Nymus]

I know America, like Australia, has a lot of highway ghosts, and some of the native monsters like wendigo are still about.

Most of the older roads have some sort of story associated with them, yeah. And if we're talking about native monsters, then I need to mention the Jersey Devil. An odd mishmash sort of creature: bipedal and hooved, with a goatlike head, bat wings, and a forked tail. The story goes that a woman in ye olde days was cursed to have a demon for a child, and she bore the Jersey Devil as her thirteenth child. It killed its whole family and fled into the pine barrens, where it has resided ever since. Like bigfoot, it's been someone subsumed by pop culture, but if you've ever been to the pine barrens (I went there once and that's where I heard the story), it does have an eerie feeling that there could be something strange in the woods.

[Noodles]

I've never heard the plural of bigfoot before, so for some reason this was really funny to me. But I digress.

I've also heard theories that rest stops on highways are liminal spaces.

I've also heard "bigfoots" but that just sounds silly.
Rest stops do kinda fit the liminal bill, don't they? Food for thought. *noms*

[Aierdome]

*sits back, takes notes*

I am absolutely fascinated with all I'm reading here.

[Purple Wyrm]

I just remembered a great documentary from a few years back called The Darkside which was a collection of ghost stories told by or involving indigenous Australians, retold by actors. It's not available online (unless you want to pay for it) but there's a companion website with a bunch of user submitted stories.

[Helia]

Hungarian beliefs are centred around people with all kind of witchcraft (witches, seers, cunning shepherds, clever coachmen, wandering scholars, táltos (shaman) etc), supernatural beings are less significant. But let’s see what we have:

-   lidérc (incubus) appears as a fiery light or a will o' the wisp, but can turn into human form and became a satanic lover. It sits on the chest while the person sleeps and makes them weak or sick and suffocates them. The Hungarian word for nightmare is lidércnyomás (Lidérc pressure)
-   lidérccsirke (magic chicken; sometimes it’s a small man) It hatches from a black hen’s egg kept warm under the armpit of a human. It hoards gold to its owner and fulfils his/her wishes, but it also can turn into a demonic lover and harm the person. To get rid of the lidérccsirke, it must be given an impossible task such as haul water with a sieve.
-   bolygó mérnök (Wandering Surveyor)is the ghost of a surveyor who falsely measured the land during his life or cheated the people, so he walks the fields at night with a lantern in his hands. He’s harmless, but if somebody bumps into him he can hit with his lantern.
-   (ghost)dragon, dragon snake – it’s different from the dragons of folktales; it has only one head and born and lives in damp places like swamps, wells, rivers. It can fly in the clouds and change the weather, make storms. The dragon can be tamed by a garabonciás diák (kind of wandering scholar) who can ride it – he’s also able to do weather magic.
-   házikígyó (snake house spirit) – it is believed, that a small snake lives in the walls or under the doorstep which is related to the spirit of a distant ancestor of the family. It’s responsible for the wellbeing of the family; if it’s hurt or killed, disaster happens. Children used to leave milk in a small bowl for the spirit snake and people respected snakes around the house in general, trying not to harm them. (poisonous snakes are rare and they don’t live near humans)
-   there are also a lot of supernatural beings living under water or in forests (wild girl, fair maid, forest man) who were normally harmless, but could lure people into their world or steal things, but these beliefs are much stronger in the folklore of the neighbouring nations

[Asterales]

Highway spirits? Are those the ones on the sides of roads?
... I might have made acquaintances with them in this case.

When I was physically very, very ill, but still thought that it was 'only' something mental or, alternatively, that life really is that vile and disgusting and freaking painful, I often saw or even heard things on the highway. Especially in places that had forest or bushy areas next to the road. But then, at that point I was having a variety of tinnitus, including the start of voices In any case, these are some of the very few memories I have of that worst year.
Usually these things passed by in the blink of an eye and the creepy feeling lessened. However, there was one time when I had left the highway and drove on the fairly small road leading to our village. This road leads through several kilometers of forest that extends in all directions and it is a rare occurrence to meet another car during night time.
I was on edge, because things had started to creep into the road or move suddenly at the sides of the highway in the corner of my eye since my last visit home.
So I was extremely careful to watch for actual hedgehogs, boars or deers wanting to cross the road.
I had sunk into that strangely removed feeling, that makes your body seem wooden and steals all sense from your skin, your flesh, your muscle - it was a day to day companion and even as I drew near the only crossing between the highway and my village and the feeling increased beyond the usual, I was not alarmed by it.
My thoughts had wandered to dark places and I was exhausted in a way that means you should definitely not be driving.
Then there suddenly was a young man in the middle of my lane. Looking right at me - somewhat expectantly.
I yanked the stirring wheel so hard, I almost swung off the road. As I turned my head and looked for the man, even in the motion, he was gone.
The shock had somehow dispelled some of the dissociative feeling and I was 'fine' for the rest of the drive.

I don't know if it is at all related, but about a kilometer prior to the crossing, a young man form a nearby village had crashed into a tree with his motorbike and died about a year ago. His parents still come to the place of his death now, more than four years later, and lighten a candle and lie down flowers every evening.

I haven't seen or heard anything on the road since. All the more not since getting healthier. Well, if you ignore the occasional feeling of queasiness, which I am sure everyone has to fight from time to time.

[Róisín]

That's a strange one. But a pretty classic highway ghost of the more benevolent kind. Might well have been the young man who died, trying to jar you out of your fugue before you had an accident. Sounds as if he succeeded, fortunately. Sometimes such ghosts can finish dying properly after they save someone, sometimes they haunt an area for what would have been their natural lifespan, sometimes they just stay on as guardians of a stretch of road. There's one of those at Dead Man's Pass in SA, not far from here, who is a bullocky, and will step out and flourish his whip at people doing stupid things on the road. One of the young louts in town was telling me he'd been speeding on the steep road there, stood on the brakes when the old fella stepped out into the road, and thereby didn't hit the car that came over the crest of the hill a few seconds later. I've heard similar tales, and seen a few odd things myself, from all over the outback, especially in Far North Queensland and up in the Snowies. We used to have one on the road between Walhalla and Woods Point when I lived in Walhalla. He was often seen, especially at night, generally trying to make people slow down before they went over the edge of the steep twisty mountain road.

Not all of them are friendly. Some of them will try to cause an accident, or actually attack cars. Dunno why. Maybe they're angry at how they died, or want company.

I encountered a very sad one out on the Hay Plains, and wound up spending the night there, just sitting with him in the grass by the road. There didn't seem to be anything else I could do for him, poor man. I think he was one of the ones that didn't fully know he was dead. He was just sitting there with a little boy in his arms, muttering about it being her car and what was he going to do now. It was the sort of clear freezing moonlit winter night you get out on the plains, with hardly any wind and the grass covered in frost. I'd stopped because I saw him sitting there with the child and didn't realise they were ghosts until I tried to touch him, thinking he was in shock after an accident, and there was nothing but slightly cooler air. There was no wreck that I could see, just some angular shapes and shadows.  When it started to get light they just sort of faded into the air.

Oddly, that was very close to the spot where a friend and I had stopped to give help at an accident a few years before, where a semi had hit a car. There used to be a lot of crashes, single or multiple, along that stretch of road, which was strange because it was just empty plain, clear road and a view to the horizon. You could see other cars coming for quite literally miles.

[Piney]

I encountered a very sad one out on the Hay Plains, and wound up spending the night there, just sitting with him in the grass by the road. There didn't seem to be anything else I could do for him, poor man. I think he was one of the ones that didn't fully know he was dead. He was just sitting there with a little boy in his arms, muttering about it being her car and what was he going to do now. It was the sort of clear freezing moonlit winter night you get out on the plains, with hardly any wind and the grass covered in frost. I'd stopped because I saw him sitting there with the child and didn't realise they were ghosts until I tried to touch him, thinking he was in shock after an accident, and there was nothing but slightly cooler air. There was no wreck that I could see, just some angular shapes and shadows.  When it started to get light they just sort of faded into the air.

O______O This is both terrifying and fascinating that people can have experiences like this. I think mostly fascinating.

[Asterales]

O______O This is both terrifying and fascinating that people can have experiences like this. I think mostly fascinating.

My thoughts exactly!

Róisín, that stretch of road is also very prone to accidents. Especially the starting (or ending point). The highway leads over a small bridge and underneath is our country side road, quite straight so you have no problem seeing beyond. As far I know, no accidents ever happened on the bridge,  but the pillars seem like magnets for accidents that lead to death. On one side of one pillar two people have died in almost the same spot and another one on the other side of the same pillar and yet another one on the other side of the bridge, also on the pillar. I think there might be another one a bit off the road, but all these dying sites aren't tended to much anymore. Even though the last accident was only about 2 years ago.
It was always my least favourite place to walk past whenever I had to walk home from school.
That whole stretch of forest is a bit creepy, I think. I often get the feeling something is following me and my horse really dislikes some parts.
I wonder if it could have anything to do with the fact that some of the paths follow the route of the medieval road connecting our and one other village to the next town. This road eventually lead to the Camino de Santiago, too. I imagine a lot of people must have used it.
Our graveyard isn't far off, come to think of it.
As far as I know, though, there aren't any sightings at any of these places...

[Purple Wyrm]

I wonder if it could have anything to do with the fact that some of the paths follow the route of the medieval road connecting our and one other village to the next town. This road eventually lead to the Camino de Santiago, too. I imagine a lot of people must have used it.
Our graveyard isn't far off, come to think of it.
As far as I know, though, there aren't any sightings at any of these places...

Stories aside, graveyard hauntings seem to be pretty rare. Very few people actually die in graveyards after all.

Your mention of the Camino de Santiago puts me in mind of the Santa Compaña. There was a very good article about them in Fortean Times a few years back, which is happily online here.

[Asterales]

Purple Wyrm, that is a very interesting article! Tanks for sharing