Stitch on 28/10/2008 at 18:55
Yeah, see, here's the thing: I'm an utter skeptic. I don't believe in ghosts, gremlins, or god. ESP is a fictitious delusion and your soul is merely a genre in your record collection. My great-grandmother's ghost could appear and wheezily reveal tomorrow's lottery numbers and I'd merely write it off as dinner not sitting too well. I'm a bit of a doubting dick.
But at the same time, nothing quite converts me into a temporary believer like a good ghost story. I can wield my shield of science to explain away the universe and yet tell me a creepy experience late some night and the moment stands still and the temperature drops and the shadows get closer. I may write it all off in the harsh light of morning, but while the yarn is being spun I'm sucked in like a grade schooler playing Bloody Mary.
And so, as we gear up for Halloween, I ask that any fellow TTLGers who have any creepy or unexplained personal experiences of the supernatural sort to roll up their sleeves and spin that yarn. I don't really have any to share myself, unfortunately, so I'll just kick things off by linking to (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=91349) the last thread we've had vaguely in this vein.
Okay, now you go.
Random_Taffer on 28/10/2008 at 19:26
Hey, good thread idea.
I don't really consider it to be a supernatural event, as I believe the creatures to be real and quite natural (though extremely rare), but last November I encountered what appeared to be a sasquatch on the roadside.
To give a little background information before you read about my sighting, I would like to say that, first of all, before that night last year, I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in Bigfoot or Sasquatches. I'd always passed off the films and stories as clever hoaxes and didn't think twice about them. That all changed, as you'll soon read.
Since my experience, I've become a sort of an amateur researcher and started reading all about other sightings, watching famous sighting clips, and going on hikes with a camera in tow (fruitlessly). So whether or not my mind was playing tricks on me, I'd say that what happened to me was most certainly a good thing. (Got me back outside in the fresh air anyway.)
To read my submitted sighting, click (
http://www.bfro.net/GDB/show_report.asp?id=23489) here.
Queue on 28/10/2008 at 20:23
I've had only one rather "odd" experience. There is an old movie theater (withholding the name and exact city) around the Detroit area that I have done some work for in the past. It's one of the really old ones, dating back to the time when the projection booth had firedoors that would slam shut in the event of the film catching fire (it was far better to cook the projectionist instead of the whole cinema). Anyway, it's a creepy old place.
Now, it was normal for me to go in at night and do my work after the last show--usually around 11:30, or so. Because of the length of the drive, I would leave my house earlier than I probably needed to do so in case of traffic problems, and would arrive at the theater while the shows were still going on.
On this particular night, I arrived close to 11:00. The house I needed to work in was still running, and had another twenty-eight minutes to go before the end of the film. This wasn't the last house to get out that night, so I could have sat in there and watched the show, and gotten an early start on the evening. But, the picture wasn't anything I was interested in watching, so I sat in on a show in another house--which was the last show of the evening, ending at 11:44.
After the movie I was watching let out, I gathered my equipment and went into the house to do my work. I was working up by the screen on a ladder, and had not paid much attention to the seats, when I heard a voice behind me ask, "How did the movie end?" I turned my head, looked down, and there was a little girl, in a thin olive-colored dress, sitting in one of the seats. I'd say she was around seven or eight years-old, with sandy colored hair. I looked around, and didn't see anyone with her. A thought crossed my mind that she had somehow gotten left behind (maybe had fallen asleep), or that her parent(s) was/were in the restroom. In any case, I really didn't want her hanging about while I was doing my thing, plus I was kind of annoyed because who would have a kid this age out this late at night. So I asked here where was her mommy, or daddy. She didn't say anything, in fact she didn't even act like she had heard me. Instead she got up, and left the auditorium.
Well, I thought the best thing to do, since it was after closing, was to go find the manager on duty and tell him that there was a little girl that may be lost.
The manager was still around, and he asked me which auditorium it was. I told him, and he gave a funny look and said, "We did sell any tickets for the last show in that house." I joked that I could have gotten my work done early and been on my way home. Then he asked me what she looked like. So I described her: sandy hair, olive dress, about seven or eight. He got a really strange look on his face, and then asked, "Was she sitting in the front row?" When I replied yes, he looked at me and smiled, then said, "I don't think she has any parents." Then he went on to tell me about a little girl that had been killed in the front row of that auditorium around sixty-years ago--some sort of accident, of which he was fuzzy on the details. I guess something either fell from the ceiling, or maybe the masking riggings came loose (who knows). In either case, he said that there has been "sightings" of this little girl every-now-and-then.
Well , of course I laughed at this little story, and told him nice job at trying to give me a scare, and went back to what I was doing.
I've always thought he was yanking my chain, and still do--but...
Gingerbread Man on 28/10/2008 at 23:53
It would appear that when I get lost in the woods (like, actually lost and starting to frown a bit), a peacock happens by and I forget about being annoyed at being lost and I watch the peacock for a bit and suddenly notice I've wandered back to some area I recognise and I'm not lost anymore. And while I'm realising this, the peacock wanders off again and I feel a bit like there's a gap in my recollection except I don't find it strange that there's a gap. I do find it pretty strange that there was a peacock, but it doesn't bother me.
The even weirder bit is twofold: they are real peacocks (seen by others except in one instance), and peacocks do not belong there. There aren't even cottages where someone might have had an exotic bird for a pet and it ran away or something like that. Not for at least dozens of miles. These have been utterly random, wild peacocks out in the middle of nowhere. One time it was an albino peacock.
Not particularly chilling or freaky, I know. But I think it's kinda weird.
Of course, there's always the possibility that there are colonies of non-indigenous wild peacocks in weird places and that people can get lost near them and there are soldier-peacocks who have the job of escorting mesmerised interlopers away from the perimeter before wiping their memories.
I wonder who their king is. I bet he's a mighty peacock indeed.
demagogue on 29/10/2008 at 00:51
I took a course on advanced AI, and one of the projects was programming a robotic arm with a camera to identify an orange ball laying in front of it, pick it up, identify a nearby blue box, then move the arm over the box and drop the ball into it. Then we could move the ball and box a little and let it do it again. And it was a neural-net sort of set up, so it would do dozens and dozens of trials, learning with each trial. Not so eyebrow-raising so far, I know.
So then one smart ass guy wanted to play a prank on it. He picked up the box and moved it on the other side of the counter, far from the arm's reach but still in the camera's sights ... So it could see the box, but it had no way of getting the ball into it. And then we let it run. It moved the arm first right, then left, stretching its arm trying to do the impossible, almost yearning... I could hear the gears grinding, wrrrwrrrwrrr, as it struggled to push its arm just one ... more ... millimeter closer. But after a while it seemed to slow down, hesitating, as if it was slowly realizing the awful awful truth, that it's ultimate purpose in life was now utterly unachievable.
And of course everybody laughed at it, "stupid robot", especially the smart ass who laughed the hardest, with an edge of derision. But still the motors yearned. By now class was over, and rather than turn the system off, we let it be, in its eternal struggle to do the impossible as we turned off the lights and closed the door behind us.
The next day we went back for lab. And since lab was first thing in the morning, we opened the door for the first time since the day before, and turned on the lights (although the room had been softly lit by windows overnight).
The robot was now sitting beside the box, on the other side of the counter. The orange ball was inside the blue box.
There was a chilling moment as we all looked at each other and the robotic arm, peacefully sitting there, arm motors now quiet, the camera still periodically scanning its surroundings.
Did one of the students come back and move it?
Did a maintenance guy come in and do it?
We quickly ran to the computer to play back the recording of the camera's input over night. We watched as it continued to flail its arms side to side in anxious futility for almost an hour. Then suddenly, on the video, we saw it flail a little too far so that the arm hit the limit of its joint, and the momentum budged the entire platform the arm was sitting on ever so slightly to the right. The arm paused. The camera looked around, reassessing its situation. It slowly moved the arm back, hesitatingly, then pushed the arm to the limit of its joint again, and again the platform hopped a little off the ground. It paused again, as if deep in thought, and we could almost literally see the significance slowly dawning on it (remember this is a relatively very simple program that has no concept of "outside world" or "physics"; it only understood three things "orange ball", "blue box" and "turning arm gears"). Slowly we watched the arm take progressively bolder and bolder flails against its joint, as the platform began hopping more and more dramatically with each flail. As the box appeared to move left, the arm started moving left to compensate, and it figured out hitting the joint left bounced the platform left. Inevitably, it began 'walking' the entire platform forward, first by left flails, then right. It was "learning" inertia, as the arm began to flail back and forth, walking the entire platform step by step towards the box.
We looked at each other and the video in stunned silence, and as it walked, we could see the arm getting almost greedy, giddy with excitement as it inched closer and closer to the box and the flailing got more excited. After about a half hour of rocking back and forth, it finally arrived and triumphantly dropped the ball into the box before finally resting its motors in what must have been relieved ecstasy.
It was at that moment that I looked back at the arm, as the camera scanned its surroundings, and saw the camera slide its lens slowly towards me until I SAW IT LOOK AT ME. And it paused, the aperture narrowing, watching me as I watched it. AND IT KNEW.
For a half-beat, it was chilling. Scared the living shit out of me.
crunchy on 29/10/2008 at 01:55
That story should have ended with the robotic arm flipping the bird at the guy who put the box out of it's reach. :cheeky:
Random_Taffer on 29/10/2008 at 04:59
Wow, demagogue. That was something straight out of a Bradbury story.
Chilling, indeed.
Oh, and I've decided that GBM has most likely been abducted by The Grays, and been forced to watch short nature films about peacocks while they run their tests.
doctorfrog on 29/10/2008 at 05:25
Quote Posted by crunchy
That story should have ended with the robotic arm flipping the bird at the guy who put the box out of it's reach. :cheeky:
I would have preferred the box to be missing entirely, with the cheeky dude found later that day with a box mysteriously stuffed halfway down his trachea.
henke on 29/10/2008 at 11:02
Great story demagogue! :)
Just to clarify, you are making it up though, right? Heh? :erm:
SlyFoxx on 29/10/2008 at 13:50
After college I shared an old (about 80 years) house with a few friends. All of us being musicians the basement was the popular spot to hang out since that was where all the gear was.
We all noticed soon after moving in that if you were down there alone you would get the feeling of being watched and then look to see what was there. Of course there was never anything to be seen. The odd part was you would always look to the same spot in the room, that spot being the area at the bottom of the stairs.
Now for reasons that are not important to the tale there was a single bare light bulb that almost never got turned off that hung at the bottom of the stairs. At night it cast a glow on the wall in the dining room at the top of the stairs...a roughly 3 foot square patch of light.
One night after the whole house was asleep I awoke with a thirst for a Coke so I went to the kitchen to grab one from the fridge. As I passed through the dining room I went to head left for the kitchen when something to the right caught my eye. In the patch of light on the wall was a silhouette of a head and shoulders and on the head was what appeared to be a fedora. (You know...the kind of hat that Indiana Jones wears.) Knowing I was the only one in the house awake and having full knowledge that no one who lived there owned a fedora I froze in my tracks as my blood did the same. I stood there absolutely terrified for what seemed like ages but was probably 20 seconds or so. After that time the image appeared to turn and then vanished. After my heart resumed a steady beat an investigation of the basement revealed nothing. The only way in and out of the basement was that single flight of stairs.
Sixteen years later I still get a chill when I recall the memory.
