Okay, so by rights I should be going to bed now, but I'll tell you at least the first UFO one before I go. This was years and years ago, soon after my family moved to the UK - I think I was maybe 12 or 13? Way before my room cluttered up with stuff and you could actually see out of my window properly without my shelves of houseplants. Anyway, this was way before tablets and e-readers as well, so I was up late reading by torchlight because I was smol nerd with schooltime bedside light curfew. I get slowly aware of this hard, low humming sound, a bit like the noise you hear on the underground/subway before the train comes in and just after it's left. It still raises the hair on the back of my neck thinking about it, and at the time I just remember thinking don't look up, don't look up, like you do in a nightmare when you're hiding from a monster. Light flooded my room the same as if a car was pulling up on the driveway, and I looked up. There's a big tree on the other side of the street from my house, and in winter it's all twigs so you can see straight through it. and there was two massive white-gold catseye-shaped lights rising from it. I mean massive. Thinking about it now, with scale and distance allowed, each one must have been the size of a small truck. It only occurred to me later that they must have been attached to something together, because they moved in tandem, but at the time all I remember is feeling flat-out, rabbit-in-headlights, tharn terror. I've thought about it since and I really don't think it was a sleep paralysis nightmare, like I'd fallen asleep reading and hallucinated it. I remember the sound and the lights so clearly, and I remember my fingers twitching on the open book, rustling the pages. I remember the real feeling of very eldritch horror I felt looking at those lights like please please please don't see me please. They left. I don't remember if they went up into the sky or faded out, but it's one of the scariest things that has ever happened to me, including the time I nearly died. (Bonus levels: the time my dad saw a ghost in the Louvre and the cat spirit that kept me grounded when I was in ICU. I think I get most of my Weird Shit Magnet stuff from dad, which sucks because he's an asshole.)
Oh hey! If you've got an animal ghost story, I'm kind of collecting those! I have a google doc and everything.
@TwoBrokenMirrors I have a sort of animal ghost story! In middle school, our librarian used to tell us a bunch of local ghost stories, and one I remember as being very specific to our area (northeast TN) was the Black Dog of Netherland Inn. It goes something like this: In the early 1800s, there was a man who owned a huge plot of land and several slaves. He was notoriously cruel and hateful, so the slaves were all very resentful toward him. One hot, humid summer day, while he was trying to stay cool in the shade of his porch while a young slave boy fanned him, a fly landed on him. He brushed it off, but it kept buzzing around his head and being irritating. Then another one came, then another, until there was a swarm of flies around him like he was a piece of dead meat. The slave boy tried to fan them away, but they would just buzz out of range and land on the man again. They crawled in his mouth and nose, swarmed around his head, and eventually suffocated him to death. Here's where it gets weird(er). As his funeral procession was headed down the street, the horses pulling his hearse stopped in front of the Netherland Inn and wouldn't move. And then the casket started rattling and shaking, and the procession-goes were understandably curious and freaked out, so they gathered around it as it was opened and... a massive black dog leapt out. The dog ran up and over the hill and out of sight, leaving the empty casket and funeral procession to sit there and wonder what the hell had happened. No one knows if the man had been turned into the dog as punishment, forced to roam the earth as a beast as penance for his beastly nature in life, or if the dog was a seperate entity that bore away souls that were especially wicked. People still see it, even now. My friend claimed to have seen it walking along the river once, like a shadow. (Theres also the Tailypo, but idk if you want it because it's more of a folktale than a ghost story.)
@Jojo !!!!!!!!! a GOOD STORY Would you mind dropping it on this google doc for me? And yes I'm interested in folklore!
@TwoBrokenMirrors No problem, I'll drop the tailypo story there too, if you want! Tailypo- This is one of those locally-widespread folktales, something that a lot of people I know grew up hearing, but is pretty much exclusive to southern and central Appalachia, as far as I know. Once, there was an old hermit living deep in the hills with his three hounds, Uno, Ino, and Cumptico-Calico. It was a hard hunting season, and the man and his dogs were all hungry. When they were out hunting for their evening meal, the man spotted a creature like a mix between a fox and a wildcat, with dark fur, yellow eyes, tufted ears, and a long, heavy tail. He tried to shoot it, and his dogs tried to catch it; the creature got away, but not before the man managed to chop off its tail. He took it home, skinned it, and made it into stew. That night, the man woke up to see the glowing yellow eyes of the creature staring at him from the foot of his bed. "Taily-po, taily-po..... Who's got my taily-po?" it asked. The man, terrified, yelled for his hounds, who chased the creature back into the woods. The next morning, Uno didn't come back. The next night, the same thing happened. The man woke up to the creature at the foot of his bed, sing-songing "Taily-po, taily-po..... Who's got my taily-po?" Again, he sicced his hounds on it, and they chased it back into the woods. The next morning, Ino didn't come back. By the third night, the man had allowed Cumptico-Calico to sleep in his room. He kept his rifle in the bed next to him and dozed off waiting for the creature. For the third time, he woke up to the beast asking "Taily-po, Taily-po.... Who's got my taily-po?" His hound chased it from the cabin as he shot after it, but he never managed to hit it. Cumptico-Calico didn't return the next morning.. Now, left with no real protection, the man cowered in his bed with his rifle as night fell. Again, the beast appeared at the foot of his bed, demanding the return of its tail. The man, having dropped his rifle in fear, shouted "I ain't got your taily-po!" hoping the creature would finally stop tormenting him. "YES YOU DO!" the creature screamed back, and jumped on the bed, attacking the man. It was as strong as a tornado, and when the sun rose, the only thing left standing was the chimney.
@Jojo That tailypo one is pretty old, yo <3 I was hearing it when I was a tiny little thing in primary school in australia. Couple of details changed - it was the Blue Mountains he was hunting in, the dogs were never named, and the Tailypo was implied to be some kind of bunyip or yowie - a sort of spirit creature of the bush, you know? (It facinates me how different stories permeate cultures, especially pre-internet. I heard the same urban legends and ghost stories growing up in Aus as I did when I came to school in the UK. What's up with that? XD) @TwoBrokenMirrors I'm not sure if it was an animal ghost, per se. More like a guardian spirit in the shape of a cat. I was pretty ill when I was in the High Dependency ward, and I spent most of a week passing in and out of consciousness - look up Diabetic Ketoacidosis, it's not a fun thing to die of - and when I was drifting, I would often hear meowing, like the sort of insistent noise that can't be mistaken for anything else, and feel something warm jump up on the bed with me and curl up purring against my back. I even saw him a couple of times, coming into the room - a big black longhaired tomcat, with lynx-tufts on his ears and big bright golden eyes. He'd chirp at me if he saw I was looking at him, then jump up and knead and purr as I fell back asleep. Loopy as I was from the illness and the drugs that had caused it - the teal deer of it was that they thought I had TB when I didn't and the meds they put me on reacted so badly with my diabetes I was throwing up for three days before I was brought into hospital in the above state - I actually asked the nurses if there was a cat around that could account for it. Of course, no animals allowed on the ward. He was probably a hallucination - gods only knows I hallucinated enough that week - but he was a very consistent one, and it did me good to feel like something wanted me to live.
@Jojo What a good story. 8D That can go on too! @lilacsofthedead No that totally counts! What I'm interested in is sort of... the form of the stories, as it were, if there's repeating themes and stuff. And it's also hella adorable.
@TwoBrokenMirrors - I will copypasta that into your gdoc, then, once I find it again :) Okay, in the mean time I'll tell my other two UFO stories - two, because while I'm pretty sure one can be explained, the other was with another witness. Basically, one night me and dad were going out to get fish and chips for the fam, and as we came outside, there was a thickness to the air, like just before a thunderstorm, even though it was really clear out and we could see the stars - except above our house. Directly above our house, there was a curved line of maybe five or six lights, each not much bigger than a coin, and the black silhouette of something up behind them. I wanted to run back into the house and get my brother and mum out to show them, but my dad, because he too is a Weird Shit Magnet and much more used to it at that point than me, just went 'Eh, worry about it if they're still there when we get back.' They weren't. I still kind of wonder what stuff my (asshole, abusive, hateful) dad has seen, and if it matches up to any of the stuff I've witnessed. The other one was another late at night edition, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't hypnagogic. I had just turned off my light and closed my eyes, and the very instant I did, there was a big, silent flash of light. It was so bright that I saw it with my eyes closed, and immediately rolled over and looked out the window. There was another bright flash, that lit the whole sky for at least a full heartbeat, then faded. Then another, just like it. On the tail of the third flash, there was a big, rippling 'BOOM'. I've never heard the noise the sound barrier makes when it breaks, but I thought that might be it. I figure it must have been a meteor, but I've never seen anything like it before or since. Also, there was nothing on the local news the next morning. If something like that happened here, it would have been headlines. (Nothing meterologically exciting ever happens in West Yorkshire.)
Also I feel like I should note that I do not in any way believe that space aliens visit earth just to scare the shit out of humans. Nor do I think that the expanses of the universe hold two or more intelligences on a) the same plain of potiental understanding and b) within shouting distance of each other. When I said UFO, I mean it - Unidentified Flying Object, with bonus points for 'weird shit happens' 'weird shit happens IN SPAAAAACE' and 'do we even really understand dimensional theory? Like, really? Our reality is (probably) just one of a thousand thousand billion or more. There was that guy from Taured.... who knows how many other john/jane does that don't quite fit Here?
There was a fascinating thing in the Fortean Times once about the idea that there are giant... things, life-forms, living in the very upper atmosphere that might account for some UFO sightings It wasn't as batshit as it sounds here, though I'm not sure I entirely buy it.
Nope! Well, they do have a website yes but I don't use it. Not sure if it's the full mag or not. I have a subscription to the paper magazine. >>
Also, I should probably mention that one time I woke up, checked my phone, and: The wallpaper had changed I was following a bunch of new blogs on Tumblr (don't remember which ones, I vaguely remember one of them was a trans girl) My login info on other apps was replaced by random keysmashing No one else could have had access to my phone. I don't sleepwalk, and I don't dissociate that much (and I only dissociate when feeling particularly intense emotions or I'm recovering from a meltdown). Some similar stuff happened a bunch of other times, but not to that extent (it was mostly just the login info thing). This was not the phone I suspected to be haunted, because yes, I had one like that. Still do, but it's broken. Edit: Note that I'm still looking for a rational explanation for this.
I've been hearing an owl going 'kewick, kewick' all morning, loud as though it were right outside my window. Whenever I go outside, however, the noise stops and I can't find any sign of it :/
I've only read up to Oct 13th of this thread so far, but figured I could skip ahead to share something. It would have been the winter of '94 - '95, when I was rooming with Jacktrash and Seebs and going to my first year of tech school. I tended to stay a bit late and talk with my teachers and play around in the shop (machinist school), and would then catch the next available city bus. It was winter so got dark early, and was around 6 and pretty dark except for the city lights. Waiting for the bus I was looking around, and looked at the stars, and noticed one was moving slowly from west to east. "Cool," I thought, "must be a shuttle or the ISS." So I watched it cover about 45° of arc over I think it was about five minutes, and I was about to get bored and look at other things, when it just shot straight up, really really fast. Like up and out of the atmosphere and out of sight in about a quarter of a second. To the best of my knowledge we still don't have anything capable of that.
Who lived to tell the tale? P.S. I'm writing this at work and we have a cadaver lab. Now after binging this thread I have to go get something from the printer that staples which is right next to the lunchroom, which is right next to the cadaver lab.
