The Traditional Fisherman's Forum

There’s an awful lot we don’t understand…I’ll never discount anything… I know what I witnessed and I was in the company of two others who were as spooked as me…we often talk about it even though it happened 45 years ago…..

Crucian wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2024 4:18 pm Not sure about this really, perhaps we’re a bit too willing to condemn that which we don’t understand or have proof of?…

I’m with you Crucian, but there have been places I’ve fished where I’ve sometimes felt a sense of unease and was always pleased to leave or when dawn broke ! At home I walk daily through a green lane which was the entrance to a Bronze Age enclosure, if it’s at dusk or when it’s dark, my mind tends to imagine the inhabitants at the time living there. I live in an old cottage and when we moved in there was a small broken gravestone in the garden which we were told by the elderly lady’s daughter who we bought from was where her late mums terrier was buried, it was called Pat, the same name as my wife ! But we have never sensed anything in the cottage which was spooky ! despite it being about 300 years old and would have seen many deaths and possibly tragedy’s in that time.
Dave

I'm not saying I believe in ghosts and such but I had a strange experience at one of boltons older pubs (the golden lion) when I was a teenager, and my then stepdad was witness to a very strange happening at the very same venue. We both worked at the pub.

Thanks
BB

RBTraditional wrote: ↑Wed Apr 10, 2024 1:34 pm I like a good ghost story… particularly a Christmas one…

Don’t those three ghosts visit you every Christmas Rob?

Bobthefloat wrote: ↑Fri Apr 12, 2024 6:57 pm

RBTraditional wrote: ↑Wed Apr 10, 2024 1:34 pm I like a good ghost story… particularly a Christmas one…

Don’t those three ghosts visit you every Christmas Rob?

Yes! I love a Christmas Carol…. what a story, Dickens was a genius……

In my trade, or at least the current one, the first thing I have to do whenever working on a piece of electronics, is to verify the instruments I’m using are doing their job. So the test equipment needs to be calibrated, the test leads need to be working properly and if I’m using more than one of something, I expect them to measure the same thing to the same accuracy. Some of these items need daily verification otherwise one ends up debugging phantoms.

In the case of ‘ghosts’, or ‘ghostly happenings’ the measuring instrument, that is, ‘people’ are:

(a) not calibrated to any objective standard
(b) no two perceive the same thing in the same way
(c) No two recall the same event in the same way
(d) No two memories of the same event are unchanged over time
(e) No two recollections of the same event even change in the same way over time.

Before jumping off into the wonders of the unknown, I’d suggest that it’s worth looking the other way, at the measuring instruments and how they work.

I saw a ghost once. Here's what happened, so make of it what you will.

I once worked on the second floor of a four storey office block. The open plan office suites were arranged on two sides, connected by short corridors with a stairwell and two lifts.The office photocopier stood just outside the door in the corridor/stairwell to the office I worked in.

Around 11 o'clock one morning, I opened the door to take a copy of a document - and a short, balding, late middle-aged man, wearing a grey suit took the last few steps up the stairway in front of me and walked towards the copier.

"After you" I said to him, cheerily, as I glanced down for a second at the paper in my hand.

When I looked back up - he was gone!

There was no possibility that he could have gone into the lift, back down the stairs, or across to the offices opposite in that one second. I would have seen him do it! But he was no longer there.

I shrugged, took my copy, and went back to my desk with a growing sense of puzzlement - in fact I was so distracted that my colleague June who sat opposite asked me if I was OK. I told her what had just happened.

Much to my surprise, she simply said "Phone Dave in the Post Room".

When Dave answered, I wasn't quite sure what to say, but he cut me off after only a few stumbling words.

"You've seen him, haven't you!".

". . . .Who?" I replied.

"The little man in the grey suit" Dave said. "He wanders the building day and night. He used to work in the basement metallurgy lab. Everyone left him still working one Friday night - and when they got to work the following Monday he was still sitting at his bench - stone dead".

He'd died fifteen years previously!

That’s an amazing, thought provoking story John.

Crucian wrote: ↑Sat Apr 13, 2024 3:25 pm That’s an amazing, thought provoking story John.

Apart from the obvious, what surprised me Crucian, was how utterly ordinary it all was!

Not midnight in a Tudor castle or beside a mist-shrouded lake, no clanking chains or head tucked under his arm - just an unremarkable looking man, just before lunchtime in a busy 1960s office building!

Not in the least bit spooky - just inexplicable.

I would love to encounter a 'ghost or spectre' or whatever you call them. But, there is no proof that they exist other than from distracted people or folk that were in poorly lit areas where the body is naturally in a heightened state of awareness ie in the dark, an old and often badly lit building, creepy lane, dense wood..... you see the connection.

However, the talk of an office printer has reminded me of a tale recounted to me by a chap who repaired them. He was in an office building where there seemed to be a fashion competition amongst the female workers, he enjoyed his calls there. Anyway, one day he was crouching behind a machine
fixing it. He heard the door open and a beautiful young lady breezed into the otherwise empty office. She stood for a moment and looked around, then she grimaced slightly and expelled the longest, loudest fart he had ever heard a woman emit. He immediately stood up and stone faces said 'It's just a minor fault, I'll be clear in a minute' and, according to him, she looked at him as though she had just seen a ghost.