Listener Supernatural Experiences Part 1

If you believe the movies, supernatural experiences are big, brash and bold – or they’re just so bone-chillingly terrifying that you’re completely unable to do anything. I’m looking at you, 1963 version of The Haunting.

But in reality? They can be far more subtle – but no less bizarre, scary, or unsettling, getting under your skin and taking root as a peek into another world that overlaps with our own.

Let’s hear about some of these experiences, direct from listeners of Fabulous Folklore…

The Fox Spirit

This one comes from Clare who lives in Gtr Manchester but the experience happened in her grandparents’ house in Northumberland in the Middle of the night in December – it doesn’t say the year. And here’s what Clare said:

“I was 5 at the time and staying at my grandparents house. They had a family room and we stayed at their house at Christmas. The house was in a tiny village in Northumberland. I was an only child.

So one night I woke up in the middle of the night. Usually it would be dark but oddly there was a tinge of light and it came from the bottom of the bed. Sitting up, I saw a pale light on the wardrobe, about half way down. I moved the curtains and looked outside but there was no light coming in (my bed was next to the window).

Just then I looked back and the light in the centre was changing to orange. Climbing onto the bed, I saw the face of a fox coming through the light. It was odd. I remember being really excited like ‘Oh wow, look at this!’, crouching on top of the bed. I even tried to wake my parents and I leant forward and touched the fox. I’ve not seen this since though that house could be spooky. I’ve always felt as if foxes are my spirit guardians because of this. “

Mum’s On the Stairs

Our next one comes from Simon, originally from Worcester and now in New Hampshire, USA. His experience happened in London in the 1980s when he was dating a young woman called Samantha. Simon says:

“We had been living with each other in my home town of Worcester and would often visit her parents in London. On this particular visit, Peg, Samanatha’s mum, came downstairs to let me in from the street level front door. (Sam was already there, having gone up the day before.) Peg opened it, let me in, and began walking up the stairs with me closing the door behind myself, and skipping up after her.

Peg suddenly stopped and swung her arm over my chest pressing me against the wall of the staircase. A cold chill passed me by. Peg turned and walked on up the stairs as if nothing had happened. As soon as I was alone with Samantha that evening, I asked her what that was all about? The arm, and the cold and all that. Apparently, Peg’s deceased mum would visit occasionally and if anyone was on the stairs and Peg was with them when the grandmother made her visits, she would press folks against the wall so her mum’s spirit could pass.”

Moving Your Stuff

Our next one comes from Ryan, originally from Sunderland, whose encounter occurred in a spare room in his friend’s grandmother’s house about seventeen years ago. Ryan says:

“Me and my friend would go around to his grandmothers every Saturday having food and playing on PlayStation for a few hours. Nothing strange or weird ever happened except for this one event. It started like any other Saturday, it was in the afternoon and his grandparents were out of the house and it was just the both of us, which wasn’t unusual.

I always remember him pausing and the both of us not saying anything to look behind us, it felt like someone was right behind you. I remember the entire room feeling like static electricity from an old tube TV, but it was at a level I have never experienced before or since. The CD player we had on was a Boots Radio (yes they apparently had Boots branded electronics at one point) started to skip, which it never did. We got up and started to have a look at it, we couldn’t find anything wrong and we heard a noise of something hitting the floor. We turned back around and my friend went white. He pointed at the CD on the floor that had been on the TV, but he then told me it was between a book and a pen was resting on top. The pen and the book never moved.

In hindsight it felt like we were being mocked. Yet this entire episode only happened in a matter of minutes. We told his grandparents about it; they had lived there forever and never had anything like this happen.”

No Face Man

Our next one comes from Holly, whose experience happened in her home in Calgary, Canada, although I’m not sure when in terms of what year. Be warned, this one is very creepy. She says,

“When my oldest son was just about two years old I found him playing alone and chatting with his Thomas the Train characters, which was typical of him. One day, he kept lifting his trains and talking as if he was showing them to the wall. I asked him lightheartedly who he was talking to. He said he was talking to the little boy. I thought nothing of it since he was a kid with a huge imagination and a vocabulary to match.

Over the next several months I’d ask him about his imaginary friend, thinking it was kind of adorable. He described him as a little boy with no hair and pants that had a front and belts on top. When I showed him a photo of overalls, he lit up and said “Yes!” While I thought it was weird he conjured up an imaginary friend with a style of pants he was unfamiliar with, I didn’t think anything more of it.

Over time, he stopped referencing the little boy and playing with him. When my middle kid was around 2, he was in the bath and looked at the open doorway and said “No fank you. Go.” Then my oldest (who was almost 5) said “Oh that’s just my friend. He goes ‘vizbull’ (invisible).” My middle kid replied “No wike it.” (I don’t like it). That freaked me out a little so I asked my middle kid what the little boy looked like. He wasn’t as much of an early talker as my oldest so couldn’t offer as much detailed description. His response: “No hair”.

Next, he pointed to the doorway and said “Scary man. No face.” I was home alone with the two boys and heavily pregnant with a third. For the next several months my middle boy would randomly yell “Go ‘way” and look toward his closet. One night as we snuggled in his bedroom reading a story he started freaking out saying “scary man. Mommy fix it.” I often let him sleep in my bed after that.

At that point, my oldest boy said he couldn’t always see the boy and said he never saw the No Face Man. Once the third baby came, our middle boy had to move into a bedroom with his big brother. He continued seeing the little boy and the No Face man. He said sometimes there was a “Sad Man”.

The incidences of weirdness escalated at this point. Before we had kids, we sometimes experienced things like balloons moving around, photos falling off the wall, thinking we heard a little kid running upstairs, and other things. We always explained it away. When I told my husband about what the boys had been seeing, he refused to think it was anything other than their imagination, even when the third kid talked about a little boy with no hair and overalls when he was around two years old without having heard his middle brother talk about it.

By the time the youngest boy was two, my oldest was 6 and didn’t seem to remember ever having the little boy with overalls and no hair. I wish I had taken a video. The youngest boy learned to speak early and could describe in full sentences what he saw. It almost always happened at night, and was usually just the scary man with no face. He saw the boy a few times, but stopped talking about him after a few months. My youngest was a terrible sleeper, which made me terribly crabby.

One night, my middle boy (who was now 4 years old) calmly walked in and said “Mommy just turn on the big light. Then you can’t see them.” He proceeded to turn on the ceiling light and went back to his own bed. I don’t remember exactly what my youngest boy said but it was along the lines of “All fixed.” My middle boy continued seeing the No Face man, who would wake him up in the middle of the night sitting on his bed just looking at him. Sometimes I would get mad at the No Face Man because I blamed him for my lack of sleep.

I was desperate. We had the house blessed, I saged the house, asked them to leave, looked up anything I could find on the house’s previous occupants. I came up empty-handed. An Indigenous man lived two houses down and had lived there for 40 years. When I asked him about who had lived in our house, he shared that we had been the longest inhabitants which was unusual because most people on our street were elderly and had raised their families in those homes. He said no one really ever stayed longer than 2-4 years. Then he chuckled and asked what I thought was wrong in the house. I told him only the basics, to which he replied “I’d just move away.” He said no one had died in the house, very few kids had lived there, and he didn’t remember any crimes or police presence ever there. He also told me to nurture my middle boy’s ability to connect with the unseen world and validate that his ability was a gift from Creator.

Eventually I convinced my husband to move. Once we moved, one of the first things my youngest baby said was “Phew no ghosts.” Fast forward to now: my middle boy can still see spirits and isn’t afraid of them, my youngest still remembers the scary ghost in his old closet and my oldest isn’t fully convinced he didn’t imagine the whole thing. “

Don’t Antagonise Them

Our next experience comes from Kaigypsy from California, whose experience happened in Victorville in around 2014. Here’s how the story goes:

“So hubby and I knew a group of semi-professional Paranormal investigators who were going up to a high school in Victorville, to do an investigation. it was windy up there, so you had to take any encounter with a kind of a grain of salt. However, what happened in a classroom is the thing that stands out. Hubby and myself were sitting in this particular classroom. He was separated from me and I was just across the way from him had the lights out. Because of course, that’s the way you want it at night. He had one of his old recorders out to record any encounters, and in this classroom, there was supposed to be a particularly nasty sort of spirit that would do rotten things to people you know, pushing things off desks, pulling hair, moving things.

So someone antagonized it, like you’re not supposed to. The reaction from this spirit about 2 minutes later, was it knocked my husband’s recorder off the desk. Now I thought it was him playing a joke, but he swore up and down that he never touched that recorder and everyone was like, what the heck. The guy was scolded for antagonizing it which may have caused potentially breaking someone’s item in retaliation. But it was vicious. It just slapped it off the desk and it crashed to the floor. It never recorded anything, it never worked again, and that was the same item he used when he worked as a security officer so it wasn’t a piece of junk.”

What’s That Noise?

Our final story for this episode is from someone who wants to remain anonymous, and it goes like this:

“When I was in my twenties I went on holiday to north Wales to stay in a cottage high up in the mountains. I’d stayed there before and had a lovely time. This time however the cottage had an awful feeling from the moment we arrived. The room a family member stayed in had the most awful feeling of all, a sort of ‘Get out, you’re not wanted here’ feeling.

Anyway, about two or three nights in I was awoken by the very loud sound of what I can only describe as the sound of a rolling pin being rolled up and down the bathroom floor. I listened for long enough to know I was definitely awake. I called out thinking maybe it was someone poorly in the night. This caused the rolling to abruptly stop and then it sounded like the rolling pin was dropped from a height onto the floor, quickly followed by heavy running footsteps out of the bathroom, down the stairs and across the stone floor downstairs. I called out to my father who said he also heard some of it. He went downstairs to check we didn’t have an intruder only to find no one there and all doors and windows closed and locked.”

Ghost Hunting in Jedburgh

All very creepy stuff!

Now, I did tell you that I would add some of my own supernatural experiences as I have done before. I had hoped to be able to add some things that happened at the ghost hunt I did at Jedburgh Castle and Jail on Saturday with Rob Kirkup from the How Haunted podcast.

The Jail only dates to 1823, although it stands on the site of the old Jedburgh Castle, which was demolished in 1409 to stop the English from seizing it from the Scots, so some of the building materials were reused in the jail. It had blocks for men, women, and debtors, although children would also be held there in both the women’s and debtor’s blocks.

It Kicks Off Early

We did have some strange auditory phenomena. So when everyone present, including the team leaders, were in the upstairs corridor of the men’s block, we could hear what sounded like banging on the heavy iron doors downstairs. As far as we knew, everyone was present and accounted for upstairs. One woman began shouting about feeling angry, dropping F-bombs and C-bombs until she was led outside by a team leader. This then seemed to spark a flurry of people announcing random bodily sensations, while the woman beside me announced “It’s Henry, Henry’s here”. Who ‘Henry’ is, is anyone’s guess.

K2 Activity

Once we broke into teams, we again heard the banging downstairs while we were upstairs. The team moved downstairs, and the noises moved upstairs. Rob went up to see if there was anyone up there, and while he was upstairs, the noises stopped. We were having some interesting responses with the K2 meter, which detects changes in the electromagnetic field. Electricians would use them, or EMF meters, to check for wiring and so on. The EMF meter makes sound as it measures these changes, while the K2 meter is silent and uses a system of lights, from green up to red. In theory, if you’re standing still in a space with no sources of electromagnetic radiation, and the lights suddenly light up, then something has disturbed the electromagnetic field.

Personal Experience

I had the K2 meter, and it was responding to questions through changing the lights. Interestingly, I was experiencing waves of pins and needles across the front of my legs and torso, and each wave corresponded with the lights going up to red. Now, I can say that I was standing maybe a metre and a half away from the rest of the group, and my phone was on flight mode. I also don’t think there was any power to the men’s block, so there was no reason for the K2 meter to be flashing up to red, especially since if you didn’t ask a question, it stayed on green. It only changed colour in response to a question, which rules out random fluctuations.

Who was I talking to?

We did try to seek some information as to the identify of the presence, although the reliance on the Ouija board and alphabet did seemed to muddy the waters a bit. The phenomena stopped when we left the men’s block, and I didn’t experience that again for the rest of the night. What was really weird is that I felt a sense of familiarity when the pins and needles were moving across my skin, as if I’d encountered this presence before, but there was also no feeling of threat or danger. Did I encounter a spirit in Jedburgh Jail? Who knows, but it was certainly a strange experience!

What do you make of these supernatural experiences? Let me know!