That's Unusual!

In terms of myths one of my favorite is how Guanyin met her parrot buddy. Basically she's often accompanied by three companions. One is a little girl who is also a teenage dragon princess. Another is a disabled boy. And the third is a parrot. Just an ordinary non-magical parrot.

His mother gets ill and is dying so the parrot goes out in search of her favorite food. He's a dedicated son, filled with filial piety and duty. Now as he's out some dickhole of a poacher catches him. The parrot manages to escape and he goes and finds the thing for his mom but when he comes back he finds that she's already dead. A sad parrot he grieves heavily and gives her a good, proper funeral. A parrot funeral. A Chinese parrot funeral.

That all done he decides to dedicate himself to the Dhamma. So he goes out and finds Guanyin and asks to become a student under her. Being awesome like she is she agrees and thus one of her three disciples is a parrot.

The dragon princess story is pretty great too. Basically the son of the Sea King gets captured by a fish monger while he's a fish. Said fish monger is going to kill him so he sell him off. Now Guanyin was happening along as she is wont to do and she hears the frantic cries of the Sea King's son. She goes to the fish monger and talks with him, and gets the Sea King's kid out of his ordeal.

She escorts him back to his father. Grateful the Sea King gives her his magical pearl. What's more his daughter comes out and so impressed by Guanyin asks to become her student. And thus Guanyin becomes the teacher of a badass teenage dragon princess.

The disabled boy meanwhile lived in India. He had a great interest in the Dhamma and wanted to study it. Again as she was happening along Guanyin came along this boy. She decides to test his resolve in the Dhamma by conjuring up an illusion of pirates attacking her. To see if he was willing to do what he could to live out compassion and concern, as well as his dedication to her.

He heads up the hill after her bad legs and pirates or no. He was determined to at least try and save her. As he makes it up though the pirates disappear and Guanyin throws herself off the cliff. The boy is not daunted though. He crawls up to the top of the hill and throws himself off after her, hoping to catch her I suppose. As he tumbles down though she saves him. He's stopped in midair and helped back down. Impressed with his resolve she takes him on as a disciple. Heals his legs too.

And together they travel about the world and help people. A parrot, a boy, a dragon and the thousand armed woman that is their teacher.

 

My boyfriend is deeply afraid of aliens because he swears he's seen one while he was camping with his dad when he was little. His town has a TON of alien abduction stories, the most famous one being a security guard in a factory that one night simply vanished and was found three weeks later, naked, in a soy field. his work had security cameras in every entrance and windows too small for anyone to get through, and the cameras have the image of him getting into work, but not him leaving at any point in time.

I used to see people at night when i was little, and sometimes i swear i see people doing stuff when i'm not supposed to - like, someone walking on the balcony at night - i live on the 9th floor - or sitting on the couch watching tv when i go get a drink or in mirrors and stuff. grandma often speaks of a girl with curly hair that talks about soap operas with her - i've seen a girl with curly hair around the living room before, and she didnt know that - so i say these are our ghostly roomies. they're chill, but i'm super creeped out.

 

My mother's seen ghosts walking through the house we used to live in. Just walking around. She waves to them. She thinks they're residual hauntings since they live in a town that's in excess of three thousand years old, and inside the original settlement area.

 

When I lived in the midwest, I was pretty sure my dog still roamed the halls. She had been hit by a car a few weeks before, and buried in her collar. One night I heard her collar jingling down the hallway and her toenails clicking on the floor.

There were no other animals in the house, she was the only pet we owned at the time.

Shit freaked me out lmao

EDIT: to clarify, this was like at midnight, no one was awake, and i could literally see into the hallway where i heard the noise from. no one walking, no visible animals to make that sound.

 

My dad has a ghost story that he likes to tell that actually happened to him.
Once, when he was young (I don't remember how young), his family went camping, but they didn't get to the campsite in time so they had to pull off the side of the road into a field with some other campers. And then they all--my dad, his parents, and his brother--went to sleep in their motorhome. All fairly normal up to this point.

Except in the middle of the night, they were all woken up by the sound of some really loud rumbling that shook the entire motorhome, shortly accompanied by a distinctive train whistle. Grandma and Grandpa were convinced that they had just accidentally parked too close to a train track, because it was shaking the motorhome itself.
So then the train passed, and they all went back to sleep.
And in the morning, they went out and checked, and sure enough the grass nearby was parted as if a train had gone through there, but they couldn't see any actual tracks. So when they continued on their way, they stopped at a nearby gas station to refuel, and asked about the train.
Apparently there had been some tracks through that field in the past, but they had been torn up decades ago. SO my dad and his family almost got their motorhome hit by a ghost train :'D

 

my in-law family is extremely kardecist, and they say it's super normal to have ghost roomies. like, they believe you're usually followed by spirits who have a grudge on you, and spirits who have grudges on the spirits who have grudges on you, and the ones who want to protect you, and certain professions attract certain spirits - like, artists have other artists giving tips, doctors have ghost nurses and ghost doctors around them, and pregnant people get the spirit that will be reincarnated in the child hanging out in the household so they can get an idea of how things are, etc.

still about my in-law family, one of my boyfriend's aunts says she's somehow of a medium and has a ghost doctor who's pals with her. one day i was at her house with one of the worst migraines i've had - black/purple/chartreuse aura in my eyes, head pounding, nausea, the whole nine yards, but i'm pretty used to acting like i'm ok and makeup hides the face of death i was wearing. i had forgotten my first aid kit and was out of medicine, and my boyfriend and i were going to go get some later, so i didn't bother asking. and she was like. "my ghost pal said you're not feeling well" and i was "yeah i have a migraine" and she said "cool, lay on the couch for a while"
and, yeah, good idea. and she put her hand, like, about an inch over my face and said 'it's gonna burn a little' and i was like. 'what?'

and then.
my face burned.
like, not burn-burn, but the feeling you get when you get into an slightly too hot bath? on my face. only on my face. specifically, on my eyes.

10 minutes later she was 'yup seems like we're done' and. i didnt have. a migraine. anymore??????????
i still got medicine to take in case it came back but it didn't and i am still ???????????????????????????????? over it. fucking. placebo effect?????

 

I'll start with a small story for now since I've got so many to tell but the ones that actually happened to me I need to shake my memory out to tell 'em accurately, so have this instead:

So my dad and I were talking recently about how aliens are totally, in a cultural sense, the new faeries. While I was out on the East coast I was talking to a friend about the same and she told me a story she'd seen while going through some of the archives of old-ass newspapers at her uni for a project.

So after the revolutionary war a lot of the old soldiers went back to being farmers, only a lot of them also kept their guns. So this farmer's asleep when his animals start kicking up a fuss at some ungodly hour of the night. Not just a rooster who's horribly confused about when sunrise is, but the whole menagerie. So he grabs his gun and goes out back, thinking it's either a wild animal or a thief. He claims he saw a trio of humanoids, that they were hard to see in the dark but were short and very pale, standing in his field. Just standing there. He calls out and tells them to get lost, but they stay put, unmoving. Just standing there. So he shoots one of them, and it goes ptank! Specifically he describes it as almost bell-like and metallic, but ptank! is such a great sound effect so I always use that in the vocal telling. The farmer is very confused! People do not usually go ptank! when you shoot them! And they seem unharmed. Now more than a little nervous, he looks down to reload (it's a revolutionary-era musket, remember) and by the time he looks back up they're gone. The next day he heads out and can't find a sign that they were there at all except for the musket ball a little ways off. No footprints coming or going, nothing. Of course the article thought he was a little loony, but apparently it had been the most interesting thing that happened all week.

 

OKAY I CAN TELL THE CLOWN STORY TO A NEW AUDIENCE.

So when I was like, 11 I think, I went to a Christmas party that was being hosted by my friend's grandma. Now, my friend's grandma is super fucking rich, so this was at her fancy-ass mansion. She'd hired a bunch of different people to entertain the children, and one of these people was a clown. This clown did a magic show, and it was a lot of fun, but y'know, magic tricks are supposed to just be tricks, right?

So, the clown finished one trick, and then she asked, "Now, does anybody have a birthday soon?" Since my birthday is very close to Christmas, mine was the closest, so I got to get up and participate in the next trick. The clown had a hat, and a black and white scarf that had a rabbit on it, and "Happy Birthday" written on it. She put the scarf in the hat, and gave me the magic wand. She gave me some words to say, and said that I had to say them and then hit the side of the hat with the wand. There were a bunch of silly hijinks like the wand being bendy and flopping around when I tried to hit the hat, or the top (bottom?) of the hat having a zip in it, and the zip being open to the scarf would fall out. Anyway, eventually everything stopped being ridiculous. I had the black and white scarf in the hat. I had the perfectly straightened wand. I said the words, and tapped the side of the hat.

And the scarf fucking changed colour right in front of my fucking eyes.

I picked it up. It wasn't black and white anymore. It was red, blue, and yellow. The bunny was coloured beige, I think. The words were coloured. The stripy background was coloured. I was completely shocked.

I was staring at the scarf the whole time. She did not switch the scarf, because I was staring at the black and white scarf as I tapped the hat.

That fucked me up. I'm still fucked up. I want to know how the fuck that happen. Like, what the fuck.

 

I think I witnessed a glitch in the Matrix some years back, down in Berlin Adlershof. And of course my phone battery had died earlier that day because I forgot to charge it ==_=="
So there was a bird, I think a crow (we've got lotsa crows in Adlershof, at least I think those are crows. Been a while since I've seen once of them up close), flying on the same spot. Flapping its wings, but otherwise not moving in any direction. I don't think it was the thing kestrels can do, looked wrong for that.

 

I am pretty skeptical? Mostly from brain fuckery though.
and other people's experienced always fascinate me.
but this is a story that is actually fairy inexplicable.
at my family's house in Canada there is a beach. My cousins and my siblings and I made a fairy house.
next day someone had put flowers in the sand.

 

Alright there's a couple posts since the last one and I'm in Storytime mode. Let me tell you about Bob.

Bob used to live in the house I currently reside in. My paternal grandparents (the sane ones) bought it shortly before I was born, and that was when they met Bob. "Meeting" Bob usually meant "colliding with him in the hallway, getting a flash of him as you landed on your ass, only to find nothing there." Sometimes instead of the hallway they would bump into him turning corners. Being ones to live and let live, they generally grumbled darkly about him but didn't mind too much, which is why he deserved a name. Weirder shit has happened to my family. So someone would come over and end up meeting Bob and it was just "Oh, yeah, that's Bob. He does that sometimes."

Eventually he started to escalate a little. When he started knocking on things it was also annoying, but whatever. The family shrugged it off and carried on. Hearing the door was usually followed by "did you hear anyone pull up or is it Bob again?" or waiting to hear if someone knocked again. Since that wasn't working, he decided to start manifesting blood in the bathroom.

My dad kind of has a Thing about bodily fluids. He'll stitch you up if he has to and did his share of diaper changing, but touching your fluids in non-emergency situations is seriously squicky for him. Dad was not amused at Bob's new party trick. Bob decided to manifest more blood! The rest of the family got sick of cleaning it up when they had to take a shower (it usually appeared in the tub). Dad told Bob to fuck off. Bob started manifesting blood in the kitchen sink. Dad bound Bob to a rock, which he took with him when he went East to get me back from the other, crazier side of the family.

Bob now lives in the bottom of a lake somewhere between here and Arkansas.

 

All these stories are both fantastic and terrifying.

 

Salish Sea feet, anyone?

 

I suppose the Woman in White legends are pretty common, the first episode of Supernatural was about one. My area has one, actually! We call her the White Lady. She's pretty harmless, though, as far as I know. She's actually one of many ghosts in Spring Canyon, because there used to be an old mining town there and the mine blew up. She's just one of the most famous, I guess?

 

/slinks in and camps in thread
I have such a boner for this stuff, honestly, but my own stories are not that impressive except the thing that happened to my mum once when I was small- like, very small. At that point she kept her horse in a livery stable a little ways away and one day she was out hacking by herself, as you do. In the area at the time there was a field that was popular to ride around because it was very big- it was coloquially known as the Hundred Acre Field. It was pretty distinctive what with being so big. Now, the season was ploughing season, so mum knew there was a decent chance that the field would have been ploughed up already, but she decided to go over anyway and have a look. When she got there, she saw that the field was being ploughed- in fact, there was a tractor working in the middle of it- but the headlands were still there, so she rode around the headlands, keeping a careful eye on the tractor in case the farmer decided to get shirty. And then she went home.
A couple or so weeks later, she went out on a hack with a friend, and the friend suggested that they go and see if the Hundred Acre Field was rideable. And mum told her about having been there earlier and seen it mostly ploughed, but the friend said they might as well go anyway, so they did.
And when they got there, the field had not been ploughed at all. It hadn't been touched. Mum cannot, to this day, think of a single explanation for that.

The only halfway interesting thing that happened to me personally was when I was in my teens, I think, and me and my family were on a dog walk through a local patch of woodland. And we found, in two separate places, the back halves of two different baby deer, wedged halfway up trees.
We live in the UK. There's nothing here that usually takes its prey up a tree to eat. This led to the creation of the jokey myth of the Black Beast of Blackmore End and is probably the key ingredient in why I can no longer walk through or even past those woods alone without being genuinely frightened.

OH AND
I recommend anyone interested in this stuff who doesn't already know about it to read the Fortean Times. The Fortean Times is a magazine specifically about the unexplained which is, for the most part, neither dogmatically skeptical or irritatingly credulous.

 

When i was little, my dad kept weird hours and it was pretty normal to wake up at night, get a cup of water, and see him fucking around in the living room, offen walking a certain path between the tv and the hallway (he liked to pace.) Whenever he moved out, he was always worrying about my mom and us girls all alone out in the middle of nowhere "with no man around to keep us safe".

So im 13, and i wander in toward the kitchen and through the hallway door i see a guy in a red overshirt and jeans walking the living room and half-awake me goes 'oh hey dads still up' and keeps going. Get my water, start walking back, realize wait. My dad is dead. My dad's been dead for weeks. No ones in the livingroom, lights are off. Go hide under blankets.

Finally, after this had happened maybe four or five times, i wake up and my sister is having a crying hysterical fit into her pillow. I ask whats going on, and she sobs that she keeps seeing dad and she needs to go to the bathroom and is too scared to go out into the hallway. So we get that resolved, and i think shit man. Its time to talk to mom about this. She just gets this wide-eyed look and says she didnt want to freak us out and figured she was just grieving.

We more or less just dealt with it until after a year or two mom got a live-in boyfriend, and it just stopped. Ive always privately believed he was worried about us like usual and just sort of... Hung around until there was a man around the house again and he felt like he could relax.