Reality

A Quandary of Existence

Stillness A quiet so loud I am deafened by the nothingness Brightness A light so bright I am blinded by its’ darkness Inside is outside Life is just a dream Inner worlds reflected To the outside deflected Sanity in my madness Light in my darkness An upside down world Or am I the hanged man? Voices that talk to me They say I am not alone That I am connected To everything I rejected All is me just reflected In a word – redacted Where is the edge to this? Is my head hanging beyond? I am so small, so very tiny Just a speck in eternity I am though at the center And yet I don’t remember This is all simply just me Yes, everything that we can see

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An Old Man in Scotland

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.This will be last until next Wednesday as its a long weekend public holiday here…. We were touring the west coast of Scotland for a day or two. We had set out from Glasgow that morning and fully intended to go back there that night but the day had been fun with lots to see and do and so by the time we entered Inverary it was already quite late. In fact, we had already visited Inverary jail that morning before motoring a bit further up the coastline so the idea of staying the night there seemed a good one and would give us more time to

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The Last Supper

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. At the beginning of my second year of college, I moved into a flat in West Bromwich. It was quite a distance from the University but it was the only thing I could find that I could afford. There was a bus ride into Birmingham and so I just had to get used to the idea of commuting. At some point I had acquired a very large paper poster of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper. I really liked the painting and would often spend time studying the detail of the picture. It hung proudly on the main wall of the

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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.

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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