Paranormal Thread

[Róisín]

Wyrm, that sounds like a Christianisation of all the Wild Hunt and Faery Rade tales that are scattered over Europe. In the West of Ireland there were old paths or trackways, seacaves and trees (generally hawthorns or blackthorns, yews or rowans) that were best avoided at certain times of the year, unless one actually had business with Themselves, in which case those were good times to catch their attention. Same thing out in the desert here, and up in the Snowies. Though the spirits are different. In England and the Borders a lot of those things move along the old leys and greenways, and the ridgetop droving paths in the Lakeland. Out here they often move along the old songlines. Where I lived in the Adelaide Hills, the Kookaburra Songline passed along our drive and across our front paddock, and in the small hours of the morning, or sometimes even in the day, things would move along it. And of course there were kookaburras all over, including some albino ones, completely fearless to the point where they would swoop down and pick fish from the pond right next to the garden bed where I was working, or even snatch grubs from the ground I'd just turned over. One got tangled in the netting over my shadehouse, a youngster probably just out on his own, still fluffy. I was pretty nervous about distangling him, there's just something about having a four-inch dagger beak right next to your hands, but he cooperated and we managed. The birds stayed friendly after that, so I guess it was okay.

Asterales: my general rule with forest that makes a horse nervous is to avoid it, and only go there if I really have to. Sometimes if you mention out loud to the thingies that you are just passing through and won't bother them, they'll leave you be. They can be quite territorial.

[Asterales]

general rule with forest that makes a horse nervous is to avoid it, and only go there if I really have to

*nods* What my horse and I agreed on.
Strange that you should mention the talking out loud just after I have decided it is generally a good idea to inform things of what I want to do or what I would like them to do. The suitcase, the bike and the plants, everything seems to be more cooperative. Not necessarily in a very noticeable way, but everything seems to go far smoother to me.
Tough, I do feel strange standing over the suitcase, patting it and exclaiming, "Well done!", when it closes without trouble 


I thought about believes in folklore. Here is the meagre spoil:

- If a clock stops someone dies.
- Just as when you hear a screech owl call. The louder boohoo one is the male, the other one the female. Her call sounds a little like "komm' mit!" which translates to "come with". It is believed that it calls the soul to the afterworld.
- If you have a sudden, inexplicable and violent shivering fit, someone has walked over the spot where your grave will be. "Jemand ist über dein Grab gegangen."
- If a person has been cruel or immoral during their life, they might return as "Feuerputz". It is a kind of apparition that is burned by purgatorial fire emerging from their body. They usually try to help people to lessen their sins. A simple "god bless you" as thanks for their help may be enough to set them free.

[Róisín]

The 'god bless you' and signing them with the cross for Christian spirits, or thanking them for help, seem to be very widespread.

And asking the thingies to please put back something they've been messing with is also useful.

[Purple Wyrm]

Wyrm, that sounds like a Christianisation of all the Wild Hunt and Faery Rade tales that are scattered over Europe.

That's actually the exact conclusion the article comes to!

[Antillanka]

Goodness, Róisín! That's a sad story to tell

My mom and sister have had paranormal experiences shortly after giving birth... their stories match so closely that it's kinda creepy: they popped awoke in the middle of the nigh, with their babies by their side, and they started listening to a buzzing sound, like a train, or a thunderstorm, or both combined, coming from every possible direction but just in her ears, approaching very swiftly, getting louder by the second. When they started praying, terrified, the sound started to go away until it faded abruptely. My sister "felt" it wanted exactly that, to be prayed for. May it be that birth enables an exceptionally receptive state in some women? Who knows..

And a very dear friend of mine is haunted by a whistling ghost. It has followed her around since she was a child, and whistles a pretty song which she's never got to hold the memory of. She first heard it whistling in her hears when she was strolling around with her mom. One of the last times, she heard someone whistling the song in her house, upstairs; she wondered why was her elder brother home so early and went on, minding her business... until her brother arrived two hours later. She'd been home alone all along. She's heard it a few other times,but she just stands there, listening in silence. She likes to think they're friends and she fondly call it "el silbador".

[Róisín]

Antillanka: has she ever tried whistling back to see what it says?  Yes, childbirth does often make people more sensitive to stuff that's there all the time but not perceived, as do near-death experiences, or the actual process of dying. There's a reason why, in most cultures that have shamans, the threshold experience of shamanic initiation is often an ordeal that has serious potential to kill, or in cases where it occurs spontaneously, often does so after a life-threatening illness or injury.

[Jumezat]

omg i love all these stories, they are so interesting! qwq
I hope it's ok of i write about some more local ghost stories? Northern norway is supposedly packed with stuff like that so

Spoiler: show

There's one story that got talked about a lot during my childhood, which is one of a late principal of a school near where i live. The story was passed around by a lot of gradeschool-kids wanting to impress their peers, so it is 1) not true 2) completely ridiculous!

It is said that the principal was a scary and strict man called "Carl" (ominous, i know) one time during a gym class he tried to help set up a tennis net and SOMEHOW managed to get rolled up in it and choked to death.

Years later a girl was at the school one night for some unexplained reason. she was about to leave when she decided to go to the bathroom, but not just any bathroom: she of course chose the one in the basement. After she was done powdering her nose or whatever she heard a voice that said "C here, C here, C here". and then she saw the principals ghost in the bathroom mirror and fainted :U
she was found the day after completely fine tho. so no harm done i guess.

there was also some rumors going around a few years later that two girls got attacked by him on their way to school. he apparently tried to possess them so that he could become principal again?? because why wouldn't he?

I swear my aria has a few legitimate ghost-stories. I just think it's funny seeing how much children build up these things and tries to make them as scary as possible.

[Róisín]

Yeah, it's strange how kids develop their own set of scary stories. I know when I was small my brother and I were terrified of the local big landowner, who had quite the reputation for sinister behaviour, but were totally unfazed by the dangerous local landspirits, because they were something that had always just been there on the farm. There were places we knew not to go by ourselves, and things we knew not to do, but those were just sensible domestic precautions like being careful with knives or fire, not teasing the dogs, or not walking behind horses. They weren't scary, but an unpredictable, powerful outside person definitely was.

[SectoBoss]

I don't know if this is really an example of what this board is for, but some of the stuff on here reminded me of it.

Spoiler: First House I lived in was haunted • show

When I was born my family – mum, dad and myself, no siblings – lived in a small rural town a few miles from Manchester called Whaley Bridge. To listen to their accounts of it, the place was your standard English backwater town. Obviously I have little to no memories of it, as we moved away within a year of my birth (and with good reason!).

Our house was probably a couple of hundred years old and was out on the edge of town. It was built onto the side of a really steep hill on the edge of town that my mum still complains about if you mention it, because it made taking the bins out every week a desperate fight against gravity. She also complains about that house because she insists – quite sincerely, as best I can tell – that it was haunted.

Apparently she’d noticed a couple of things before I was born and shrugged them off but whatever was going on sure seemed to pick up the pace once my parents brought me home for the first time. Doors opening on their own, that weird feeling you’re being watched, the odd strange noise. Sometimes strange patches of condensation would form and mum says she was even flicked with water occasionally – strange spatters that just came out of nowhere.

Perhaps the crowning moment of all this was when she heard footsteps going up the stairs one afternoon. She figured it was my dad home early from work but when she sticks her head out of the kitchen door there is of course no-one there. And then there’s an almighty great BANG and the door to my room slams shut like the wind caught it. So he hurries up the stairs to my room, trying to figure out what’s going on, and apparently one-year-old me was lying in my crib with such a look of terror on my face it still upsets her a bit to think of it. The window in my room was locked shut, by the way.

Now I realise this all sounds pretty standard “normal stuff that someone – especially a nervous new mother – could easily mistake for ghostie business”. But there is one last thing that does make me wonder a bit. You see, my dad was (still is) a bit of a DIY nerd and eventually he decides he’s going to spruce up the living room a bit. Change the wallpaper and maybe get rid of the old fireplace in there, replace it with something gas or electric. So he either gets to work on the fireplace himself or gets someone in to help him – I can’t remember which. Either way, when they pull the stone slabs it’s made from out from the wall they find some weird patterns on the back of them. Upon closer inspection, these turn out to be words - specifically names, dates, and things like ‘in memoriam’.

Turns out the fireplace in our old house was made of even older gravestones.

Now I’m not saying I believe in ghosts or the afterlife or anything like that – but that said, if you want to piss off the dead, using their grave markers to build your fireplace seems like a decent way of doing that.

One month later we put the house on the market and moved to the city. I’m happy to report we’ve gone un-haunted ever since. I still don’t know what happened to those gravestones – if they were given back to the parish church, or dumped in a landfill somewhere.

So yeah. Still don't know what to make of all that.

[Vafhudr]

Wow. Making a fireplace out of tombstones is like novel worthy.

[princeofdoom]

I remembered two things that happened to my dad, who is a pretty devout Catholic.

The first was that he said he saw a Bigfoot when he was younger, with his. siblings. He was the oldest and got the others inside. He said it didn't look like a bear (at the farthest he guessed it was only 150 feet away and for most of the time he said it was a bit closer), and it didn't act like a bear either.

The other was that my older brother passed away about 10 years ago. My dad sleeps pretty well once he gets to sleep, but that night he woke up with a feeling of dread, and Maria told him the time my brother was supposed to have passed, and it was almost exactly when dad woke up.

I've also had some experiences and my mom is a very intuitive person. And I saw a Shadow Man once in my house as well as other possible spirits from time to time. And these weren't out of the corner of my eye or when I was stressed or tired. I'd just feel someone or something watching, look over and it would stay in sight for a while before just .... fading. The only one I felt threatened by was the Shadow Man though.

Maybe I should be a mage afterall

Well,

[Róisín]

Princeofdoom: Shadow Man? Don't know that one by name, though it sounds like several things I've heard of by other names. We don't have Bigfoot in Australia, but we do have Yowie or Yowah, a similarly big hairy elusive humanoid. The sort of agate inclusion in rocks that is called a thunderstone in America is a Yowah Nut in Queensland. I think the reason is that Yowah/Yowie have some association with weather, especially thunderstorms and lightning, and so do the stones. They polish up nicely as gems.

And all over Australia, but in Gippsland especially, we have the big cats, complete with rumours about them being dumped American puma mascots, or released pet panthers, but I've seen a few and they don't look pantherish to me: too big and heavy set, and completely unrelieved black. My sons encountered one, years ago, far too closely for comfort. They had a summer holiday job on a farm at Nangiloc-Colignan, up on the Murray River near the Riverland, and my older boys' Swedish girlfriend, plus her older brother who was backpacking out here, went with them as a working holiday. One pay night they had left the farm to go shopping in the nearest town. They decided to walk the five miles or so back to the farm, and set out carrying their shopping and munching on hamburgers. About a mile out of town my older lad noticed that something large was pacing them in the paddock next to the road they were walking along. His first thought was a big feral dog, but he soon decided it was way too big for that, and alerted the other kids. They all watched it for awhile as it paralleled their course about fifty feet into the paddock, then they lost sight of it. A few minutes after that they happened to be looking ahead when they saw a big shadow jump the fence, so it was now on their side of the fence, a little way ahead. They all told me, later, that it was completely silent, and that in silhouette they could see that it had a long tail with a slightly curled-over end. As soon as it jumped it disappeared into the waist-high grass.

At this point, being sensible kids, they carefully put their hamburgers and the other meat they were carrying down on the ground, stepped out onto the road, backed away some distance, and then walked back to the town as fast as they could. Then they caught a cab back to the farm, and didn't go walking at night for the rest of their stay.

[Purple Wyrm]

And all over Australia, but in Gippsland especially, we have the big cats, complete with rumours about them being dumped American puma mascots, or released pet panthers, but I've seen a few and they don't look pantherish to me: too big and heavy set, and completely unrelieved black.

There's a theory that our Australian big cats are surviving Thylacoleos, but it seems a bit unlikely. Mind you, all the theories seem a bit unlikely and yet people keep seeing them.

[Róisín]

I incline to think, from rock art and folktales, that Thylacoleo did survive long enough to overlap with the Aboriginal people, and I've the seen the bones from Copper Hills and the Nullarbor, which are fearsome. The whatever-it-is at Merigalah might be one of those, maybe. We've several times found full-size kangaroo carcases up there, with necks broken, and disembowelled. Haven't seen the culprit though. The Gippsland cats don't match.

Mind you, sometimes animals turn up in places they totally have no right to be. The Tantanoola Tiger, which was variously supposed to be a puma, leopard, tiger or giant Thylacine, turned out to be a Siberian  Wolf. It was finally shot, stuffed, and displayed at the Tantanoola pub for years. No bets on how it got to the Shipwreck Coast, down the bottom end of Australia! I like the idea that it was on a ship transporting a circus menagerie, which was a common enough thing at the time, and swam ashore when the ship was wrecked. Might never even have been noticed if it hadn't started killing sheep....

[OwlsG0]

I've lived on almost all of the English-is-the-first-language continents, but most of the interesting ghost stories I know come from the place I was a little kid. I was raised in Arizona for a time, and down there the Navajo, Hopi and Apache cultures are still alive and kicking. The Mexican and other Latin American presences are very strong as well. When my father did work for this charity he used to do, helping immigrants settle in to what could be a very hostile and conservative environment, he would take me a long. I guess a lot of the mothers and fathers and such-like figures who crossed alone missed their own children very much, because a lot of them would tell me their stories. The Native American people we knew liked to share their stories as well.

I was told about La Llorona, with a solemn warning that she would take an interest in me if I didn't clean my room. I'm sure most of you know her, but for those of you who don't- Latin American Boogeyman, drowned her kids, weeps for her crime and stalks the world. El Cucuy, too, tormented my childhood nightmares and had me petrified of cockatoos for years because I thought they were some kind of distant cousin of that furry child-eater.

I got told never to whistle in the desert at night, or I might attract a demon of some kind- possibly Kokkopeli himself, who was a trickster in either the Navajo or Hopi narrative (I can't for the life of me remember, but you better believe I don't whistle at night). I was warned never to talk to Wendigos or open the door to a single knock at night and never to drink from the footprint of a coyote and a lot of other advice that has made me superstitious.

I kind of miss being in the environment where those stories would have served me well. Now that I live Down Under, all I get told is to watch out for Drop-Bears, which are gigantic cats which wait in trees and drop down on the first person that looks up at them.