Fortean Times: It Happened to Me vol.1 Read online

  Mario Dias, Cardiff, 2000

  In the summer of 1998, when I was 15, I lived about two miles from Beulah, a small town in rural northern Michigan. I often used to bike down to a grimy old pond down the road and fish for a few hours in the evening, then head back when it got dark. One day as I was casting out, probably a good half hour before nightfall, there came a great gust of wind that sent a ripple right across the pond. The sky was a strange orange colour. I took a few steps back, but reeled in my line and cast as normal. Then I heard singing. It was a girl’s voice, quite loud, which seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. There were no cars anywhere nearby so it wasn’t coming from a radio. It was too loud and much too clear to be coming from a house. There were two houses fronting the pond, but no one was home at either that night. I was entirely alone.

  It was a beautiful song, very comforting somehow. I couldn’t understand the words, but they were definitely not English. It reminded me a bit of Amerindian music. This went on for 20 seconds or so and I remember putting my fishing rod down and having a sudden urge to jump into the water and swim out to the middle, feeling as if this would take me to another place. Instantly another feeling came over me, as if I were snapping back into my senses. I snatched my rod, picked up my bike, and peddled up the road faster than I ever had before. It was only a couple minutes back to my house, but in that time it began to rain quite hard. I burst into the kitchen and told my mother about the creepy music. She tried to calm me, even flipping on the radio and going through all the stations, but we couldn’t find any type of music similar to what I had heard. I never returned to the pond; in fact I stopped fishing altogether that day.

  Travis Wolfe, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2005

  COUNTRY MUSIC

  As a child of about seven, I was playing alone in the snow when I heard the most beautiful singing, first a solo voice, then joined by another in harmony. It grew louder and then faded away. Many years later I read a book by Elizabeth Goodge called The Joy of the Snow, where she writes about an identical experience. It had a profound effect on me, particularly as I have a gift for music, earning my living as a director of music in a school.

  Three weeks after my husband died in May 1999, I was picking raspberries in the garden one evening when I heard the most glorious singing I have ever heard in my life, like a million people blending in the most exquisite harmonies. It lasted about a minute, faded, and then repeated about three hours later as I went upstairs to bed. I like to think that my beloved was allowed to send me just a little sample of what he was hearing to let me know that all was well with him.

  Jacqueline L Spriggs, Mountfield, East Sussex, 2001

  One late summer in the early 1990s, I visited Maiden Castle in Dorset with some friends. I went on ahead with my son and another child and stood on the entrance bank waiting for the rest of our party to come over from the car park. For the three or four minutes I was waiting I could hear the music of a pipe or flute, no particular tune, coming distantly from somewhere amongst the embankments. It was pleasing, but didn’t have any particular effect. Alas, the children were too young to confirm this musical apparition.

  Ed Griffiths, Prestwood, Buckinghamshire, 2001

  JUNGLE CHEERING

  In July 1994, my wife and I took a holiday in Cancun, Mexico. We decided to take a tour to the Mayan ruins at Chichén Itzá in northern Yucatan. Our bus journey took a good two hours through the jungle until we reached the large expanse of excavated ruins. Our guide told us to spend about half an hour looking through the orientation pavilion and then to congregate under the trees at the base of the large pyramid known locally as the Castillo. It was very hot and humid, so we were quite happy to gather under the shade of the trees in the large square.

  As we stood there, I suddenly heard the sound of cheering from what sounded very much like a large arena. I was unable to discern the source of these thousands (?) of voices. The sound reminded me very much of being inside the confines of a football stadium. I tried to see if there were any loudspeakers responsible, but I knew that the sound was not coming from any one particular spot. It appeared that neither my wife nor anyone else was aware of what I could so clearly hear. The cheering lasted a good two minutes before stopping as abruptly as it had started.

  Shortly afterwards, I discovered that close by was a ruin called The Temple of Warriors or The Temple of a Thousand Columns. Could this have been the source of the cheering (from the distant past)?

  Graham Conway, Delta, British Columbia, 2003

  Echoes of battle

  A NORMANDY TALE

  A few miles west of Dieppe, in the woods above a cove, stands a small chateau, reputed to have been many things in its time, including the Wehrmacht headquarters in World War II. It is certainly an intriguing building, impressive without being imposing. If you make your way out of the back of the building and into the woods, you soon find a little stream that emerges after a few hundred metres onto a small beach. Like so many Normandy beaches, this one has a little sand and a lot of pebbles, and it is most likely to be empty, with just the sound of the waves breaking and perhaps the wind stirring the trees above. The once-busy port lies a few kilometres to the east, and to the west there is the lighthouse on the headland.

  I have twice visited the chateau during its spell as a residential centre for British schoolchildren, a role it has now ceased to fulfil. On my first stay, in the summer of 1981, I ended up sharing a room with a male teacher called Richard from a school in London. The pair of us, though strangers, were content with the arrangement, and as we were both fully occupied during the day, were keen on a good night’s sleep whenever we could get it.

  The second night was warm and the casement was open, a little breeze stirring the curtains as we dropped off to sleep around 11 o’clock. I was woken by a noise about an hour later. I thought at first that the window had banged in the breeze, but the breeze had dropped, and the partly drawn curtains were still. Then I heard the noise again, not close at all, but seeming to come from the woods beyond the chateau, or maybe even further away. It was a single loud bang, like a gunshot, and then, half a minute later, another. Poachers! I thought. I slipped back towards sleep, maybe for less than a minute, then I was wide awake again.

  The single shots, for shots they surely were, were now coming more often, and in between there were bursts of machine-gun fire. It seemed no nearer, but it was louder, and appeared to come from several different places at once. Surely this could not be poachers, but in that case what was it? Now I could tell that Richard was awake too.

  “What’s all that?” he murmured.

  “I don’t know. Listen, do you think those are guns?”

  “Sounds like it, doesn’t it? But who’s doing the shooting?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  We lay and listened. The sound grew but came no nearer, then it seemed to grow distant. Perhaps a wind was rising and blowing the sounds away? No, the curtains didn’t stir, there was no noise of vehicles, no police sirens, no sound of commotion in the rooms around us.

  At breakfast, there was no talk of war, battles in the night, or of any disturbance at all. According to the teachers, even the children had had a quiet night, something they found remarkable in itself. I had expected anxious talk of evacuation and concerns for our safety, but it started to dawn on me that nobody else had heard a thing. I caught Richard in the lobby before his party left for the day.

  “So, have you spoken to anybody yet?” I asked.

  “Yes, and I got a very strange reaction from the housekeeper, as though she had seen a ghost. Nobody else heard anything. So far it’s just you and me that seem to know anything about all this at all.”

  When I told the organiser of the school trip on my return to England, she said that the stretch of coast nearby had had a turbulent history, and was the scene of a fierce battle during World War II. I looked this up in a history book and discovered that on 19 August 1942, a force of 5,000 Canadians, 1,000 British and 50
American Rangers attempted to take and hold the port of Dieppe. The raid was a high-risk operation and turned out to be a disaster. Of the 5,000 troops who got ashore, more than half were killed or captured, and the beach below our wood was a scene of very heavy fighting.

  David Doughty, Loughborough, Leicestershire, 1997

  SOUNDS OF BATTLE

  My wife and I had a holiday in Dorset in 1977, during which we found an ideal picnic site just outside Cerne Abbas. It was a lovely sunny day, the entrance to a fallow field was ungated (it was posted as a bridle path) and nearby was a copse of trees perhaps some 10 to 15 metres (33-49ft) deep. Perfect. We spread our blanket and settled down to a read before our meal, when I became aware of a noise which at first I could not identify. It gradually increased in volume until I was quite certain what it was: a large number of horses and riders jostling together, the stamp of hooves, the snorting, creak of saddles, the chink of bridles.

  The only place it could come from was the copse and, a bit nervously, I went to have a look. There was nothing and the sounds stopped. Nothing in the lane, and on the far side was a deserted garden. In the meantime, my wife went into the copse to answer a call of nature and came out as I returned to the car. She insisted that we move on, and all she could say was: “I don’t know, but there’s someone in there, someone was watching me.” As we packed up our belongings, the odd sounds started again and we couldn’t get away quickly enough. I mentioned this some years later to a friend whose family originated in Dorset, and he said that particular area was known to have been a battlefield in the Civil War.

  Peter Brown, Slough, Berkshire, 2001

  The Twilight Zone

  Some experiences are just so mind-bogglingly extraordinary that they are impossible to categorise. From a mysterious and menacing Mickey Mouse to a phantasmagorical pram with skittle-shaped passengers, from bouncing spook lights to a giant penguin that climbs out of a frame in the wall, we round off this collection with some truly out-of-this-world stories that defy understanding.

  Not quite human

  THE CARPET SALESMAN

  In 1965, I had just bought my first car, and took my wife and two daughters out into the country for a ride and picnic. Not far from here is a ruined castle and church, and in part of the church lies a crusader. My daughters wanted to see his tomb, and I lifted them up so that they could look inside through a grille in the door. Suddenly my wife screamed out in fright. A man had touched her on the shoulder. None of us had noticed his approach, even though the path and area we were standing on was covered in deep gravel.

  The man was deeply upset and crying and I asked what was the matter. He asked us to follow him through the churchyard, which we did, then he asked us to go and read the inscription on a tombstone and return and tell him what the inscription said. The inscription read: “Here lies the body of Harold James Bell of Silloth, Cumberland. Born 21 June 1815. Died 21 June 1865, Aged 50 years.”

  On repeating this to the stranger, he broke down completely and after a while told us of this coincidence: he was Harold James Bell of Silloth, Cumberland. Born 21 June 1915; that day, 21 June 1965, was his 50th birthday. He was a sales rep for a Cumberland company, and had been asked on that day to travel east into this area where he had never been before. Five miles from here some unknown force took over control of the car and brought him off the main roads through a narrow country lane to this place. He had been pushed and shoved by something invisible until confronted by the tombstone.

  He was convinced that the event was a way of showing him that he had come to the end of his natural life, and we could not convince him otherwise. My wife was really upset over the affair, and I decided we would leave. I escorted Mr Bell back to his car, noticed various credentials, carpet samples etc, and left.

  Next Monday, I told the story to my manager at work. A week later he came to me with a laugh and complimented me on telling such a good story. He and his wife, walking in the area, decided to go and see the tombstone, and couldn’t find it. I was amazed at this, as it really couldn’t be missed. That evening after work I returned to the graveyard, and sure enough there was no gravestone, nor sign that it ever existed. My wife and I have revisited the site many times out of curiosity. I always wonder what became of the unhappy Mr Bell. Did he and his car really exist that day? Our conversation, the atmosphere and the unreality of it all made this the strangest happening in all my life.

  Ron Parker, Middlesborough, Cleveland, 1980

  SHE’S BEEN SLIMED!

  One night in August 1994, a fellow police officer and I were patrolling the Queens Park area of Brighton in Sussex. Around 2am, we were asked to attend an incident outside the park gates. We found paramedics attempting to resuscitate an elderly woman who was lying by the roadside.

  We were told that when found, the woman was covered in green slime, which appeared to have drowned her. There was plenty of this viscous ooze in evidence, both all over the woman and the attending medics. There was also a large amount in the gutter running some 20ft (6m) down the road. The old lady was taken to the nearby A&E where further attempts were made to revive her, which sadly were unsuccessful. When the lab examined the substance it was found to be “algæ-like” and apparently had been ingested in sufficient quantities to cause the woman’s stomach to explode.

  One theory bandied about was that the victim was a “hydromaniac” who had been drinking from the pond in the park and had staggered away only for the algæ to “ferment” inside her, expand, and cause the injury. However, her family denied any history of this type of activity, and were obviously distressed at this suggestion. We noticed the water level in the lake was low, and she would have been obliged to climb into the muddy shallows and drink the stagnant water from the edge. There was no mud on her feet or hands, and no muddy footprints; and the slime didn’t smell stagnant, but had a soapy smell not unlike detergent.

  Mark Novell, by email, 2003

  Outlandish apparitions

  DISNEYFICATION OF TERROR

  When the papers carry reports about people who claim to have seen creatures from space, I can accept the sincerity of those claims because of an experience I had when I was about five or six, almost 60 years ago. My grandparents lived in an old house with a very dark basement reached by a steep flight of steps behind a door. That was probably why my twin brother and I were forbidden even to open that door in their absence.

  This was just what I did one day. Facing me was a very real, very solid figure filling the entire doorway. It gave me the fright of my life. I was looking at Mickey Mouse! When I was not much older and wiser, I knew that I couldn’t possibly have seen a fictional character, but at that time - and to this day - the figure was very real.

  Stanley Shoop, FRSC Elstree, Herts, 1992

  RAPTURE OF THE DEEP

  As well as being my birthday, 23 August had a special significance for me in 1971. I was serving with the Royal Air Force in Malta and most of my spare time was devoted to the excellent diving club, run strictly to British subaqua rules.

  I was one of four instructors in the club of about 140 members and my immediate boss was an experienced diving officer called John, known affectionately as ‘the old man of the sea’. An expedition was planned for a six-week period to explore the coast around Gozo, a small island off the coast. One of the sites chosen was a small inlet in Xlendi Bay, searching for Punic and Roman wrecks.

  The initial dive on the site by myself and another instructor called Bob revealed that we would be diving at depths often in excess of 130ft (40m). As there was no decompression chamber on Gozo, strict diving procedures would have to be followed. We were testing out an Italian decompression meter which John thought was unreliable.

  The descent to 130ft was uneventful and all was going to plan when Bob’s demand valve started acting up, restricting his intake of air. Against all the rules, he indicated to me to stay down while he surfaced and sent down the standby diver to keep me company. I swam around for a while looking fo
r anything of interest on the rocky ocean floor. I saw a light ahead of me and was drawn to it both by curiosity and by what seemed to be an unknown force.

  Over the next ridge and much further down, I saw a very beautiful young woman, tall and slim, with a lovely figure, standing at the entrance to a large cave. She was dressed in what looked like a white Indian sari; she wore sandals, her hair was plaited, and her wrists were adorned with various bracelets. The incandescence of the surrounding area added to the serenity and calm of the sight before me.

  I thought that I must be suffering from ‘the narcs’, nitrogen narcosis, described in the early days of diving as ‘the rapture of the deep’, a feeling of euphoria, closely resembling drunkenness. As a very experienced instructor with more than 200 deep dives under my belt I realised that I was in deep trouble, deep being the operative word.

  A look at my depth gauge revealed that I was 230ft (70m) down. The Italian decompression meter strapped to my wrist had long since given up as it was full of water. Fascination at what I saw overruled my training and my immediate need for an ascent and decompression procedures.

  Then she spoke. “Hello, I have been waiting for you. o not be afraid, I mean you no harm, with me you are safe”. I backed away, but she smiled, walked towards me and held out her hand. It felt warm, sensual and safe, and my fear disappeared.

  “When you return to me I will be waiting for you, then you will stay with me forever. I have a gift for you”. She handed me a small jar about 5in (13cm) tall, shaped like an amphora, which I took from her with my other hand. “Now you must go. You will always be safe for your return to me,” she said. As I ascended, I saw her waving as she slowly faded from view into the azure depth. After a very long decompression stop aided by a spare set of air cylinders it was explanation time: the needle on the depth gauge registered 235ft (72m).