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Encountering the Unexplained
Human beings have been having encounters with the unexplained ever since they first began thinking about the mysteries of life, death, the Universe and everything. Every culture around the world has its own stories of powerful deities or terrifying demons, its beliefs in a spirit realm complete with ghostly inhabitants, and its folklore concerning mischievous fairies, monstrous creatures or bizarre entities apparently not of this world.
While some would argue that the kinds of encounters found in such traditions should be relegated to the status of legends and old wives’ tales, people continue to have inexplicable and sometimes frightening experiences, even today. Drawing the line between objective and subjective reality has always been problematic, and to dismiss such experiences as hallucinations or delusions is to fail to engage with the seemingly inexhaustible strangeness of the human condition.
For the last 35 years, Fortean Times magazine has been reporting on the world of strange phenomena - and for 35 years our readers have been telling us of their own odd experiences in letters and emails from all over the world. Some of these stories are scary, some are funny, some are mystifying and some are just downright weird, but they are all accounts of events that have actually happened to people - from living in a haunted house to witnessing a rain of frogs, from experiencing a timeslip to seeing your own double.
We haven’t tried to explain the many odd and unnerving tales contained in this collection - we leave you to arrive at your own conclusions - but we’ve certainly enjoyed sharing them. We hope you do too.
David Sutton, Editor, Fortean Times
Fortean Times: It Happened to Me - Volume 1
Edited and compiled by Paul Sieveking and Jen Ogilvie
Photography and Design Etienne Gilfillan
Editor in Chief David Sutton
Cover image David Newton
Fortean Times: It Happened to Me Volume 1 is published by Dennis Publishing Ltd, 30 Cleveland Street, London W1T 4JD, a company registered in England number 1138891. Entire contents (c) 2010 Dennis Publishing Ltd licensed by Felden. All product logos and trademarks are the property of their respective third-party owners.
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High spirits
The world’s shadows seethe with spectres of all kinds, from evil baby-killing ghouls to departed family members popping back to say hello. Whether it’s a phantom monk preaching from the other side, a Nazi wraith stalking a bombed-out building, a ghostly young nun wailing in a chapel, or troubled spirits haunting spooky old houses, everyone, it seems, has a ghost story to tell...
Haunted Houses
THE SPOOK OF SMITH SQUARE
In 1949, when I was 17, I worked at the headquarters of the United Europe Movement, an organisation founded by Winston Churchill - the start of the modern EEC. My role was junior “dogsbody”: running messages, sending off post, making tea and other such tasks.
The offices were housed in an elegant Queen Anne house, Number One, Smith Square, not far from the Houses of Parliament.
One morning I was just about to make coffee when I noticed a stranger sitting in the inner room, which had been partitioned from the large one where I worked. He was wearing a long black robe and cloak, and a hat which resembled an upturned soup plate.
“Shall I make that gentleman a cup of coffee?” I quietly asked one of the other girls, Jeanne Dawkins.
“What gentleman?”
I pointed and whispered: “The one in there. He looks like a priest.”
“I haven’t seen anyone.”
Deciding to enquire of the stranger himself, I peeped into the room. There was no one there. All the time I had been able to see whether anyone came in or out. It was puzzling.
“That’s funny,” I said, “I could have sworn I saw a priest. He looked just like the label on a bottle of Sandeman’s port...”
The next day, Rosemary Streeter, who worked in the room upstairs, came into our office shaking uncontrollably, her face as white as paper. Eventually, she managed to tell us that she had been coming down the magnificent marble staircase to give us some documents when a foreign-looking priest passed her.
She’d looked over her shoulder to say “Good morning” and the man had simply vanished! “He looked like the picture on a bottle of Sandeman’s,” she said.
After that, there was no stopping “Charlie Harry” as he became known. We never saw an actual form again, but the lights would suddenly go out and come back on, doors wouldn’t open because of heavy pressure being exerted from within, objects flew about the room, there were whooshes of cold air, and we heard weird, far-away voices. It became frightening, to the extent that none of us would venture alone into the passage or beyond.
We went to see our boss, Brian Goddard, about it. He was not at all surprised because he already knew about the ghost. So did Churchill’s son-in-law, Duncan Sandys (Mr Goddard’s direct superior) and others.
“There’s nothing to worry about. He’s been doing it for years. He won’t hurt you...”
Won’t hurt you, indeed! The last straw came one day when a sudden, violent force barged into me and shunted me at speed across the room into a corner. I hit the wall and sank to the floor. My nose was bleeding, although I hadn’t knocked it. The rest of the girls ran, screaming, from the room and I fainted. The next thing I knew, everyone was standing round me looking scared out of their wits.
I left my job within a week. In time, I lost contact with my fellow-workers, and memories of the priest began to fade. But I still sometimes wonder why Charlie Harry took a dislike to me.
Josephine Taylor, Hastings, East Sussex , 1996
LADY IN BLACK
Lectures that morning had swept from the dark satanic mills up to just before the Great War. I had followed this with some two hours quiet study in the University Library. It was November, and by about three in the afternoon I returned to my lodgings in Sutton Coldfield in the West Midlands.
Mrs Branksome, my landlady, was a 76-year-old widow who put up with me more for company and to have a man about the house than for the rent I was able to pay her. I had just completed five years’ war service and was catching up on those lost years with a degree course at Birmingham. It would be fair to say that I had both feet firmly on the ground and was not given to daydreaming or idle speculation.
As I put my latch-key into the front door I knew Mrs Branksome was out and that I would have the house to myself for some hours. It was still daylight, but rapidly darkening, when I slid the door catch and entered the house, swinging round through the door with my back to the stairs while I removed the key from the lock. The stairs swept up out of the hall, with two small landings at each turn up to the first floor. As I closed the door, I knew instantly that I was not alone. I turned round to face the stairs and there, some 20ft (6m) away on the first landing, stood a little old lady, dressed from head to toe in black bombazine. She smiled at me, I drew a deep breath and then she was gone. I blinked, shook my head and wondere
d just what or whom I had seen. Strangely, I felt no fear, just an overwhelming feeling of being welcome. When Mrs Branksome returned that evening, we had our usual evening chat and that was that.
Some three weeks later my landlady invited me into her kitchen and we shared a late cup of chocolate and sat before her open coal fire. She suddenly tapped me on the knee and, casting her cat-green eyes into mine, said: “Come on John, tell me all about it.”
“Tell you about what?” “You’ve seen mother, haven’t you?”
I said that I did not know what on earth she was talking about; whereupon she rose, went over to her kitchen table and, opening a small drawer, withdrew a photograph of the old lady I had seen up the stairs.
“When did you see her?” she asked.
“About three weeks ago, one afternoon when I returned from college. I haven’t mentioned it because I did not want to alarm you.”
“Mother told me she had seen you,” she said, “so you would not have alarmed me. She left us 40 years ago, but she still likes to know who’s in the house.”
John Birch, Saundersfoot, Dyfed, 1997
BROTHER DOLLY
We appear to be haunted by a friendly monk who is almost like one of the family. We have called him Brother Adolphus (Brother Dolly for short). I have seen him on three occasions; my adult daughter, Adrienne, once; and my 13-year-old Down’s Syndrome son Jean-Paul claims to see him quite often. Even when he is not visible we are aware of his presence. Brother Dolly walks the landing and the staircase and most nights we hear his footsteps. Sometimes he lifts the latch on the bedroom door as if about to enter, then thinks better of it.
In October 1998, a stain in the shape of a cross materialised over the mantelpiece in our sitting room. On 2 January this year, after a few days’ holiday, we came home to discover writing on the wall of the sitting room. The word is tangnefedd, which we have discovered is an Old Welsh word for peace. It is usually used in a religious context and is seldom heard today.
As you can imagine, we find all this activity intriguing. Our pet monk’s presence is totally benign and the farmhouse exudes a warm friendly atmosphere.
Rose-Mary Gower, Mold, Flintshire, 1999
There has been some extraordinary activity in our house since my last letter. The first word to appear on the wall was tangnefedd (peace). This was followed at regular intervals by about 20 other words, all in Welsh and mostly of a religious nature. None are threatening. The words appear as a brown stain, slightly darker than the paintwork. Some have almost appeared before our eyes; one minute they were definitely not there, the next they were. Others have materialised slowly over days or weeks.
Brother Doli (he prefers the Welsh spelling to ‘Dolly’) is very much in evidence. We have his self-portrait on a stone at the top of our staircase with the word mynach (monk) carved on it (see photo). The figure appeared one day and the carving several days later. However, the lettering does not look new, but seems worn, as if it had been there for years. A cross over our mantelpiece appeared last October, but comes and goes at intervals. Recently, it has been joined by four other crosses and a stain resembling a ninth-century Celtic chalice. These also appear as brown marks on the stonework. A Christian symbol - a P running through an X - appeared in a couple of places on the wall and fireplace in June.
John-Paul says he sees Doli all the time in his bedroom and is trying to teach him to play Nintendo. After a recent short holiday, John-Paul went straight upstairs to play Nintendo and was decidedly put out when Doli stood in front of the TV screen so he couldn’t see what he was doing. We came to the conclusion that this was our monk’s way of saying welcome home. When he was acknowledged, Doli went back into his usual place by John-Paul’s bed and normal play resumed. On two occasions I have felt someone sit on the end of the bed and shuffle around until comfortable. It was light enough to see that there was no one there. I assumed it was Doli.
He is a sensitive soul. If a joke is made about his presence, he responds very quickly with another word or cross! This seems to be done in a slightly reproachful tone. After making a disparaging comment about our spook, my husband David woke up one morning to find himself in a pair of underpants different from the ones he was wearing when he got into bed. We eventually found his boxer shorts neatly laundered and back in his underwear drawer. We also found the word mynach embossed on some papers he was working on.
In March 1999 we were visited by a Welsh sensitive who claimed to be able to communicate with Doli. He said a mounted soldier killed our monk with a sword on the nearby riverbank in 1613. Doli thought he was too young to die and wanted to do some good in the world. He felt our family would be receptive towards him. The sensitive did an automatic drawing of the event on the riverbank where Doli is supposed to have met his end. The gentleman’s hand appeared to travel over the paper at tremendous speed as he sketched the scene. Naturally we remain a little sceptical about his analysis of our haunting.
Researchers have discovered that it is quite likely that our house is on a pilgrim route to St Winifred’s Well at Holywell in Flintshire. The monks could have come from Shrewsbury or Valle Crucis Abbey in Llangollen. This ties in with some recent words on the wall: pererindod (pilgrimage) and Amwythig (Shrewsbury) with an arrow pointing towards Treffynnon (Holywell).
Providing Doli’s haunting stays as friendly and benign as it is at present, he is a welcome part of our family.
Rose-Mary Gower, Mold, Flintshire, 1999
HELLO SAILOR
In the 1920s, in the East Park area of Wolverhampton, a young sailor by the name of Harry Parks Temple was drowned along with two young boys as he attempted to rescue them from a pool. He died a hero despite his failed rescue attempt.
Sometime in the late 1960s, my mother and her family were living in a terraced house in East Park. One night, while my mother and her older sister were talking before going to bed, they noticed a figure standing on the landing dressed in a sailor’s uniform. They initially thought the figure to be their father, as he had served in the Navy during the war, but soon realised it was not. The sailor walked towards the bathroom and disappeared.
That was the only time that this particular figure was seen, although on subsequent occasions adult-sized hand prints and child-sized shoe prints appeared spontaneously on the walls and ceilings in different rooms of the house. These prints were painted over but mysteriously re-appeared and only disappeared when covered with wallpaper and ceiling tiles. I can recall actually seeing these prints on the walls of the front bedroom after the house was stripped when the remainder of the family moved out in the mid-Eighties. On another occasion, my mother’s younger sister claims to have felt the presence of a young child brush past her in the hallway.
No contact has been made with the family that currently resides in the house to enquire whether the phenomena still occur, but I feel that Harry Parks Temple may still be making a rescue attempt which actually ended so tragically nearly 80 years ago.
Ian Deakin, Wolverhampton, West Midlands, 2000
Suicide specrtes
MURDEROUS GHOULS
Let me take you back some 30 years to a town in Malaysia, just across the border from Singapore. My father had just been promoted to the rank of Education Officer, and was entitled to free accommodation as a senior civil servant. The family was obviously delighted to occupy a large house and garden.
One evening during the first week after moving in, my elder brother, aged nine, appeared before us, totally speechless. All he could stutter was, “There... there... there’s a skeleton hanging between the bedrooms.” We eagerly went to investigate but found nothing amiss, and settled down to a quiet evening with my poor brother obviously distressed by the experience.
A few days later, I got up in the night to answer the call of nature. Though half-asleep, I made out the figure of a man standing in the dark by the doorway leading to my parents’ bedroom. I assumed it was my dad and proceeded with my business. The next morning, I asked my dad what he
was doing there the previous night. He said he had slept like a log and did not even hear me passing his room. This was followed by our live-in maid complaining that somebody kept shaking her up violently in the night.
A couple of weeks later, I came back from school at midday and was having my lunch alone when my younger brother, aged three, sitting on the stairs overlooking the dining room, cried, “Sis, who’s that man sitting behind you?” Without looking back, I screamed and shouted for my mum, who emerged with a baton, convinced she had an intruder on her hands. But no one was to be seen. Over the next few weeks, things began to disappear without trace, including my braces which I had to wear to straighten my front teeth. We were all accused of carelessness. All victims of these mysterious ‘thefts’ were reprimanded by my dad, who seemed to be the only member of the household to escape these incidents.
Then mum suddenly fell violently ill. Doctors were called in as she drifted in and out of consciousness. She eventually pulled through, by which time dad had had enough. When he returned to work after mum had recovered, a colleague asked, “How’s your wife?” Dad snapped back, “What the hell is wrong with this house?” With much arm-twisting, the man admitted that the house was believed to be haunted, with at least two men known to have taken their own lives there. One hanged himself at the spot where my elder brother allegedly saw a skeleton. Another had poisoned himself.
By now, we were all so scared that we were going everywhere accompanied - even to the bathroom, where we would have the other person facing the wall! Dad consulted various religious bodies, who generally claimed that the ghosts had to take another life in order for them to rest in peace. Exorcists were hired; any signs of religion were removed in case of conflict in faith. Then my little brother fell seriously ill. My parents did not wait any longer: we moved out to temporary accommodation. Peace at last! Soon afterwards, we heard that the spirits had claimed a baby’s life. Apparently the house has been exorcised several times now and is believed to be safe. But I, for one, am not going to find that out for myself.
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