A Meeting with God
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. A few weeks into my college days, as I made my way from the Students’ Union building to my student flat on the 19th floor of a campus building, I noticed a rather suspicious looking character who seemed to be following me around. As I entered one of the elevators in the ground-floor of the building, he followed peering sideways at me but looking away whenever I tried to catch his eye. As the elevator arrived at my floor, I was hoping it was all just my imagination and that perhaps he would continue up to the top floor above
Read More »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 »It’s A Mystery
There is so much that we do not know and probably can never know. I have to be honest and say that that pisses me off! Among the first thoughts that I can recall thinking were things like who am I? What am I? and things have not changed. I still ask such questions on a daily basis and I am still frustrated in the knowledge that I may never know the answers. I know that I am something – I think, I feel – I am. But what am I? Will I die and simply cease to exist? What is at the end of space? What is it all for? Is there a reason for all this – the out there – what is it anyway? It’s pointless I
Read More »The Devil Rode Out
When I was a teenager, I was experiencing all kinds of strange things that really scared the hell out of me. I have documented a lot of that in my book – Inner Journeys: Explorations of the Soul including the poltergeist-type activity and the visitations by some ghostly presence. It’s all in that book! However, I remained really interested in magic and the so called ‘occult’ at the time devouring many books on the subject. In the midst of the activity and the interest, I watched a film on TV one christmas that both enflamed my interest but also scared me very deeply. Looking back on the movie now the effects are pretty poor by comparison to modern movies but back then – wow! More important though was that in
Read More »Fall – My Favorite Season
To me there is no more beautiful a season than Fall or Autumn. Even as a young boy, the beginnings of winter always appealed to me when we used to go to the banks of the River Humber to celebrate Guy Fawlkes night. There is something about it – the colors, the smell of dampness and the coming cold, the leaves heaped in piles and blowing in the wind, the fog that often occurs at this time of year….. With that in mind, we set out this weekend to tour a bit of south Bohemia here in the Czech Republic with stops in Jindrichuv Hradec and Ceske Kromlov being particularly spectacular. We were blessed with almost perfect weather – foggy mornings and sunny days – and sitting on a boat
Read More »Utterly Overwhelmed and Angry
I know that I have written about this before but I really am now totally overwhelmed by US taxes as I think are many overseas US citizens. US citizens living overseas are treated like criminals by the USA and heavily penalized in the form of a growing web of complex rules and reporting requirements that even the IRS doesn’t actually seem to understand and that now required specialist tax assistance (i.e expensive). When you add to that filing in the Czech Republic – which is actually relatively simple – it is just too much. Tomorrow, I head to Prague where I will review and file tax returns for each year from 2009 – 2013. I will also file a whole array of other special tax forms and reports to the
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