Re: Ghosts and Spooky Things

I do have one of my own, but not tonight. Too late.
So in the meantime, as there are many ghost stories around my local area, I shall post one of them, written by Tom Slemen. He has books full of them, but many of the are quite recent, which I find more interesting.

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One autumnal evening in 2006, a 22-year-old Manor Green woman named Clare Whitlock was waiting in the shelter at Upton Station, eager to catch the train down to Shotton to visit an aunt. There was a downpour, and the rain hammered on the roof of the shelter and lashed the Plexiglas windows. There was no one else around, but amidst the din caused by the rain pelting the shelter, Clare thought she heard a sigh close to her left ear, and so she turned – to see no one. The young lady took her Apple iPod out of her pocket, put on the earphone inserts, and played a few tunes on the MP3 player for company. She happened to glance through the rain-slicked window of the shelter and caught sight of a dark outline of a figure standing in the shelter on the other side of the tracks. She reasoned that the sigh she had heard had come from this person. Sound does seem to travel further at night, but only in the still of night; how could a mere sighing sound travel across the tracks from the opposite shelter during a noisy downpour? Clare began to ponder this question, and she popped her head out of the shelter to look along the tracks, hoping to see the lights of her train. The track was empty, and the skies were darkening with heavy rain-laden clouds. A song called Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own by U2 began to play on the iPod, and not being in a mood to listen to that melancholic tune, Clare was about to go to the next track on the player when she suddenly noticed that the figure who had been in the shelter on the opposite platform had gone. Then she noticed someone tall in dark clothes standing to her left in her peripheral vision field – in the shelter. She turned and saw a woman, well over six feet in height, dressed all in black. Her face looked grey, and her abnormally large bulging eyes inspired terror in Clare. They looked coal-black and lifeless, like doll’s eyes. For a split second, Clare remembered seeing a motorist dead in the road after a crash when she was eleven, and she recalled how his lifeless eyes looked exactly like the eyes of this female stranger. Clare ran out of the shelter through the blinding rain and didn’t stop running until she was almost home. She was completely soaked through, and when she reached her house, she gave a garbled version of the weird encounter to her father. He tried to reassure his daughter that she had merely seen a Goth, but Clare had never seen anyone with eyes like the pair the entity possessed, and she still shudders talking about the creepy incident today. Clare is convinced she met a ghost in that shelter, and thinks the long ankle-length skirt the apparition wore was like something from Edwardian or Victorian era. When I showed Clare a sketch of a ghostly woman in black seen on nearby Windermere Road, which is just a stone’s throw from the railway station, she held the drawing with a tremble in her hand. The sketch was made by a student named Jon Moody, who almost collided with the eerie figure one spring morning in 2003 as he went on his morning run. At around 6 am, Jon ran around the corner of Windermere Road that morning, ready to turn into Noctorum Avenue, when he startled the outdated woman in black, who seemed to be staring intently at the corner house there. Jon apologised for almost running into the oddly-dressed woman, but when he noticed her unearthly-looking eyes, he ran off a little quicker than he normally would on his morning jog. At my request, Jon later made a sketch of the strange woman. Clare said the figure Jon had drawn was undoubtedly the very image of the ghost she had seen, from its hat to the long black skirt, and she remarked, ‘Oh, I’ll have nightmares after looking at that now.’ She then handed the sketch back to me.
I mentioned the encounters with this ghost on the radio one evening during a programme about local paranormal encounters, and received many letters and emails from people who had also seen and heard things they couldn’t explain at Upton station. One woman, a pensioner named Mrs Rogers, had once seen someone’s exhaled breath condense on the glass of the railway station’s shelter. An invisible finger then drew a triangle. On another occasion at the shelter, a mother and her young daughter heard someone singing, even though there was no one else about. What song did this incorporeal crooner sing? Well, from the fragmented recollections of the witnesses, it seems the ghost was singing Two Lovely Black Eyes – a Victorian song popularised by Charles Coburn, a music hall singer and comedian. Just whose ghost was singing a music hall song and why is anyone’s guess.

Re: Ghosts and Spooky Things

On that basis, I should be seeing ghosts all the time.
Yet I never have.

Re: Ghosts and Spooky Things

Yes. Many years ago, as a young lad in Bradford, I found his book about Borley Rectory absolutely fascinating. Even since then, I have yearned to see, or even hear or sense, anything supernatural but have been disappointed.
I would still like to experience such things that people have described but, unfortunately, I suspect that I am not sufficiently 'receptive'.

I, too, would go to the Borley site but, I'm afraid, there's nothing there now, is there?

Re: Ghosts and Spooky Things

I have posted this a few times before so will condense it right down.

Worked late with a colleague. Heard a loud crash in the factory, went to investigate - large pile of boxes knocked over. Went back to where we were working - all the windows wide open. We decided to close the windows and go home. Got to our cars in the car park, both car's interior lights were on. One car wouldn't start, mine just about so had to jump start the other.

Re: Ghosts and Spooky Things

In the lack of any 'experiences' of my own, I find reading other people's fascinating.

Re: Ghosts and Spooky Things

These things are just unexplained and a bit worrying at the time. I mean it could have been someone who had broken in but the cars were locked. And if you were escaping out of a window, why open three of them?

Re: Ghosts and Spooky Things

Three people all trying to get out at once!

Re: Ghosts and Spooky Things

I suppose it could have been the boss, his wife and his fancy woman.

Re: Ghosts and Spooky Things

I'd really like to hear more of people's experiences of unexplained phenomena.

Not only supernatural events, but also unexplained 'natural' events such as ball lightning.
I also find Tesla's experiments, including transmission of energy through the atmosphere using very high voltage and high frequency electricity, fascinating.

Perhaps we may expand this thread to include all such things which, for all we know, might well be related.

Re: Ghosts and Spooky Things

I once saw the ghost of Gloria Gaynor
At first I was afraid, then I was petrified..............