Poltergeist
In the run up to Halloween, here is another true and strange tale of the paranormal. I will post a new strange true story each day so don’t miss them. up in my house was on the whole, pretty good. We had great parents, almost every weekend we were gone camping somewhere, we had two proper holidays each year and I have no complaints at all. Just a bunch of heartfelt thanks to my parents and a growing sense of awe as to how they did all that with three small boys and not a lot of money. When I was eleven, we moved. It was a good move to be honest from a terraced three up, two down in west Hull to a rather nice semi-detached outside of Hull.
Read More »Just A Game?
Another short story taken from my book – My Haunted Life. If there is one game that most certainly is not a game it is the Ouija board and I have avoided that board like the plague most of my life. However, one night, in my late teens, my friend and I went to visit an ex-teacher of his. Well actually, we went on the pretext of visiting her but actually, it was her daughter we really went to see but that really is as they say another story. It was quite late by the time we arrived. We had already been for a beer at the pub and then had the idea to visit as we drove home. Their house was a huge home in a well to do
Read More »Family Bible
“Come and look at this,” my father said with a tone in his voice I recognized as meaning it was something interesting. I walked over to our kitchen table curiously. He had a book. It was actually a huge book and leather-bound. “It’s a bible,” explained my Dad. It was a large and heavy, black, leather-bound bible. It looked quite old too. “It belonged to neighbors of mine when I was a boy,” explained Dad leafing through some of the pages. “Here, look at this.” The inside cover of this huge family bible was written in and once I got used to the old fashioned hand writing, I realised it was a four generation family tree. Did it mark the path through the family that this bible had taken? As
Read More »The Voice
Thinking about the haunted jacket incident has brought back a few other memories and, in the run up to Halloween, I think I will develop a theme of ghostly experiences over the coming days. In that vein, here is today’s true scary story. It was the summer of 1981. Bryan Adams was playing on the radio, the sun was shining and I was driving a brand new Ford Mustang. I was in Nova Scotia, Canada where I was doing my first season of fieldwork for my Ph.D. thesis. Things could not be better. I had applied for a couple of Ph.D. programs earlier that summer. The one at Strathclyde University in conjunction with the British Geological Survey in Leeds was the one I wanted for all sorts of reasons. Firstly,
Read More »The Haunted Jacket
Many years ago I was just a poor broke student at a UK University. At least back then, research students got grants that allowed them to subsist and which could be supplemented with a bit of teaching or other part-time work. I was quite lucky in that I was teaching a geological mapping class to non-geology students for the amazing sum of ten pounds per hour in addition to a subsistence grant from the NERC (if such a thing exists anymore). However, I can tell you life wasn’t easy financially! Like most students then, I also kept an eye on the second hand clothes outlets for any bargains and one day, I spotted a beautiful tweed jacket that looked like it may fit me. I forget how much it was
Read More »Who Am I?
Try so very hard to be me The one you think that you know A persona imagined passively Minor differences in take Patterns in my speech It’s not about the things you make But about the who that you are And doesn’t that vary, be wary I can be anyone I want to be I can be anyone that you want to see Image is like clothing for the ego Nothing is certain in make believe Nothing has real solidity Floating variations in psyche Revolving interpretations inside me I project and you receive But the me that I want to be May not be the one that you perceive Am I real then? And are you? Imagined shadows hurtling Through some forgotten plane Like some silly Computer game I digress
Read More »Ghost Stories
As many of you may already know, I had a strange and psychically troubled childhood some of which is documented in my book Inner Journeys. along the way, I bumped into a few ghosts too…. We lived in a typical semi-detached house on the outskirts of Hull. So far as I know, it was built in the 1920’s and had little history that might make you think it could be haunted. I recall my first impressions of the place though as a young boy. It was cold with no central heating, felt damp and gloomy and the bare floorboards and old wallpaper added a certain creepiness to the place. Of course, my Dad was an amazingly resourceful man and very soon, the entire place was redecorated and central heating added.
Read More »Fame Seeker
How fitting To see your name in print Fame always eluded you Now you are a household name A life lived in vain How very apt To see you truly succeed To have all those things You chased and fought for daily How bloody erie What a shame Your fame came too late Posthumous recognition Are you watching from some other place? Is there a smile upon your ghostly face?
Read More »Reality Really is Weird
I am reading a book about the nature of reality. It has an interesting way of working its theme as it has you conduct experiments. This last two days, I was doing one of the experiments where you simply look everywhere and expect to see something. In my instance, I decided on a pink car. Don’t ask me why. It just seemed like something fairly rare…. I actually finished reading the instructions on my Kindle riding a bus to pick up my car from service on Friday. I decided, pink car and looked up. As my eyes refocused on the view through the back window of the bus I noticed another bus. It was white but…. it had huge pink stripes on it. I thought to myself “OK, thats not
Read More »Am I Alone?
I must confess that I often wonder if I am in fact alone. I mean, are any of YOU actually REAL? Much more likely, you are all figments of my furtive imagination. Think about it. The only thing that can really be real to us are our own experiences. Those experiences are second hand since if I touch you, it is in fact something in my brain that interprets what that touch should feel like and hell, what is ‘feeling’ anyway? Its something in my consciousness and in my brain and nothing to do with the atoms and molecules of my hand brushing against the atoms and molecules of you. Our entire experience of OUT THERE is ….. INSIDE OF US. You do not exist people I know it. I
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