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I once went to Pride and saw about seven people all dressed up as Nana Mouskouri. Thta was bizarre. 🙂
Two very strange things have happened in the two years I've been living in a bungalow on a cringeworthily well-to-do estate in textbook surburbia (this has made things even more surreal).
One Sunday afternoon I was standing at the sink doing the dishes. The kitchen's at the front of the house and there's a window in front of the sink that looks out onto our cul-de-sac. A cow runs past at full tilt.
(It later turned out that it had got on to the busy dual-carriageway nearby and had to be shot by a police marksman. Kinda spoilt it a bit.)
One evening last winter, I came home from work, in the dark, and my bike light picked out a body behind the wheelie bins on my drive. There's a middle aged man slumped against the fence. I approached him cautiously, talking to him calmly in a friendly voice but got no response. I could see he was breathing fine and just seemed to be asleep. He was reasonably well-dressed and didn't seem to smell - pretty certain he wasn't homeless.
Since the street was quiet and dark and I was the only one home, I went to let my neighbour's know what was happening in case things turned nasty.
I went back and tried to wake the fella up, but I didn't want to start shouting or moving him. Still had no response so went back to my neighbour's and called 101 to ask them to send someone round if possible and to see whether they had any more of a clue what to do than me (they didn't).
After a few minutes on the phone and trying to think what to do next, I went back to see the guy. He'd disappeared.
I was beginning to think I'd dreamt the whole thing, and I'm pretty certain my (retired) neighbours think I made the whole thing up since they never saw him - I didn't want to get them into any danger.
The following morning I found a packet of fags with one missing and a lighter on the floor by the bins. That's the only thing convincing me I didn't imagine it.
I think the guy must have just been drunk (though he didn't smell of booze) and walking back from the pub thought our driveway was a good place for a little snooze. Woke up with me shining a light in his face and talking to him but managed to pretend to be asleep until I'd gone and scarpered. Still doesn't quite add up though.
On a night out once, a girl was walking towards me in a corridor to / from the loos. A bloke appears from behind her, stops us both and says to me "here, you take the right I'll take the left", pulls her top down to expose her bare naked breasts, we both have a quick "nomnomnom", he puts her top back and we carry on our separate ways.
This was in St. Anton as a seasonaire, so not *that* bizarre. but also at the time, stuff my (wet) dreams were made of. Later that night, a friend "pulled" said girl - she was sick all over his bed.
I had a completely bizarre jinxed "holiday".
Myself and two friends were going to Peru for a fortnight to do the usual tourist things such a Machu Picu etc about 6 years ago now.
We should of known things weren't going to go to plan when the taxi driver that picked us up from Lima airport was clearly coked off his nut and had white powder along the dashboard.
The next day we were lying in the hostel, when an almighty earthquake shook the building and the back wall fell down, causing lots of brits, americans and aussies to spill out on to the road.
Randomly in coversation with one of the aussies, he recommended we get a coach to Bolivia and ride the "Road of Death", supposedly the worlds most dangerous road ridden on MTB. Typically, that didn't go to plan, and i crashed after 62km with 2 km to go when the back wheel fell to bits, I came round literally with my legs dangling over the edge and looking at a series of crosses on the side of the road and a lorry in the ravine below. I'd dislocated shoulder,snapped of the head of the humerus and put brake lever into my leg. Cue an 8 hour journey back to the capital La Paz, where i underwent surgery for my shoulder where they put metal pins in, but they didn't pick up on the bleed in my leg, so i woke up in the middle of the night dosed up on Bolivian anaesthetic, with the sheets red with blood, at an altitude of about 3000m above sea level to Baywatch overdubbed in Spanish on the TV thinking i'd gone to a very weird version of Heaven!!
Then flown back as a medical emergency, first put on an American Airlines business class flight, first plane had an electrical fault and couldn't fly, got on next fly, only for the co-pilot to hit me square in the back of the shoulder i'd had pinned days earlier with his metal flight case, finally got as far as Miami, where i was put on a BA flight first class and between the free champagne and the Bolivian painkillers, i babbled nothing but ballcocks at Sophie Ellis-Bexter before passing out.
To finish off the most disastrous trip ever, coming back through customs at Heathrow, customs asked "where are you flying from?", i replied Bolivia, "did you pack your own bags?", truthfully i answered no, that a nurse had, i was then clearly in a very badly injured state, strip searched and had my rucksack contents emptied everywhere!
I've got one that's not crime or drugs related, might've told this before.
Me and a mate walked up to Llyn Idwal late one night to camp by the lake and do some climb or other in the morning. We got there around ten I suppose, lay in the tent chatting as you do. Weather was still and clear. Around midnight we heard a long way off a roaring noise approaching very fast. We had enough time to stop and look at each other before it slammed into the tent. There was only a shockwave, a sort of slab of heavy wind, and it then roared off down the mountain. What you'd expect if a plane had flown very low overhead perhaps, except there was no other sound, no engines, nothing. After that, there were a few other gusts of wind, which got gustier, then more wind, then within an hour it'd turned into full on gales and howling rain. We lay there until the first signs of light at 4am then packed up and went home in what was now appalling weather, being in no mood to climb.
Googled it many times over the years then finally found a candidate. Turns out that when conditions are still and cold a layer of air in contact with high ground can become cooler than the surrounding air, creating a dense layer. If this cold slab of air gets disturbed somehow it can slide down the mountain, rolling like some kind of cold avalanche, picking up quite a bit of speed. I found a page but forgot the name of the phenomenon.
I reckon the start of the changing weather had disturbed the cold air that had been pooling in a cwm.
Sitting on a bench at a bus station in Delhi, waiting for a bus to Manali.
I become aware that the Indian bloke sitting next to me has one of those little wooden coffee stirrer things and he's sticking it into my right ear, very carefully. I remain perfectly still and he removes it with a flourish and proudly displays the piece of earwax that he's just removed for me.
I thought the only fitting response was, "Thank you very much."
I've danced with the devil in the pale moonlight.
molgrips, [url= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katabatic_wind ]katabtic wind?[/url]
Yeah, quite possibly, but googling that seems to bring up consistent winds, rather than a rolling sudden shockwave. Persistent katabatic winds seem to start up in stable conditions, but seems in this case the change of prevailing weather caused this sort of flip of cold air.
on our recent bike touring trip through europe. first night in slovenia (fantastic country that is worth a visit). wild camping as we did every night just off the main road down a gravel track, just off to the side on a smaller dirt track that leads to a dead end. we are sleeping at the dead end, my mate in a tent me closer to the road just in my bivvi bag. about midnight a range rover pulls up, engine off, doors open, people come out. foot steps getting closer and closer. my heart pounding not really because i think its dangerous but because i will scare the living daylights out of them when they bump into me. anyway they stop just short. two guys one girl. they each smoke a cigarette (very bright in the pitch black) they then proceed to noisily crack on with what they came for, and i assume paid for, with the young lady. each smoked a second fag and off they went. truly bizzare at the time and quite uncomfortable, they will never know they had two english guys about 5 or 6 meters away from the action.
I've been thinking about this thread for a couple of days now, I took, like many other posters it seems, a lot of drugs between about 1996 and 2001, some later too, but with less enthusiasm. Lots of very strange and wonderful things happened during those days, partly because if you don't already know, strange and wonderful things [i]seem[/i] to happen quiet often when you're on drugs, and if you do like drugs you do tend to spend time with people in situations which are strange, but rarely wonderful, but the truth is that I can't for the life of me remember any of these things, just that they happened.
One this that DID happen though, happened during 2001 when I was blind sober for almost a year. I was working in an Internet Cafe in Sydney roughly 10k miles from home, I got chatting to a Lad who walked in looking for a certain hostel - it didn't take long to work out that we had similar accents - "So, where you from" "Britain, well Wales to be exact" "I'm from Wales, Cardiff, or Small-Cardiff-suburb-town to be exact "Me too!".
So there we were, 10k miles from home in a city of 4 million - which is unlikely, but we fancied not too unlikely - as we were both in the 'backpacking' age group and Sydney was a popular port of call for the terminally short of imagination like us - but what was strange was that when we boiled it down - we were from the same housing estate, the same age group in school (but went to the opposite secondary school to each other - there's two in our town) we lived in adjoining streets, knew lots of the same people, actually 'knew of' each other, but to the best of our knowledge had never met before - we'd lived in the same estate for most of our lives too. We had a laugh and off he went to find the hostel, and I finished my shift and went home.
3 weeks later I got a call in work from my travelling mate, or ex travelling mate, we wanted different things so he'd moved onto Melbourne and finally into a tiny little ghost town where he worked knocking down old abandoned wooden buildings - his firm were advertising for another hand, and low and behold this guy had walked out of train station that morning to take the job - he called me "Do you know Dave Something or other?!" I replied - "I do! I met him 3 weeks ago".
Never set eyes on the guy since, I checked with my travelling mate to make sure it had really happened, and yes it had. I'm told he met a girl and never came home from Oz.
Not so bizzare, but surreal. New Years fireworks in Manila - an Asian country with a latin culture that felt like Colombia. Never, ever seen or heard such a barrage of explosives in my life. Close your eyes and it could have been WW1.
That went on at that intensity for hours. I reckon more people died from accicental deaths that night than civilians did in the opening airstrikes of the Iraq invasion.
I once bought a Kitkat and discovered upon biting
Into it that it was all solid chocolate right the way through.
No wafer!
I know, freaky, right?
@P-Jay:
but went to the opposite secondary school to each other - there's two in our town
Was it St Illtyd's vs Rumney, or Cantonian vs Bishop of Llandaff?
Whilst spending some quality time with the OH in bed I turned arround to see a small girl stood in the doorway. Rationalised it as new house, extreme tiredness, a couple of beers, and a ridiculously hot curry. But still weird.
Bivying on a beach, dog walker from nearby campsite comes past at about 8am "do you live here".
@molgrips, I've had the same whilst camping in the Llanberis Pass, quite freaky.
Many magic mushroom stories mostly funny rather than weird.
In the pitch black
Me "Theres a man with a bike right there"
Mate "Where?"
Me "Next to your face"
Mate "[rude word]"
Poor man on a bike.
@molgrips, I've had the same whilst camping in the Llanberis Pass, quite freaky.
Very interesting - that's the first time I've ever heard anything similar...
A few years ago when my cousin worked in the signalbox I'm in tonight he told me when he'd been lay down trying to get a sneaky bit of sleep (on more than one occasion this is), he'd had all the lights off in the box and could have sworn he could hear someone (other than himself) breathing. Since then he left and I took his job in here and I've also had quite a few moments when I've been asleep but woken up from the feel of someone brushing past me.
I'm a pussy when it comes to stuff like that anyway and being alone in a signalbox in the middle of nowhere doesn't help!
Whilst living in Toulouse as a student, a group of us went off on a weekend on the piss in some beach town, possibly Biarritz, although could have been somewhere in northern Spain (bit hazy).
We never booked accommodation on these jaunts, just took sleeping bags and blankets and found somewhere to crash. On one occasion we found a nice patch of short grass and soon fell asleep/passed out. At some point we all woke each other up to shouts of “oh shit it’s raining”, but just as soon as it has started, it stopped again. Then started again. Then stopped. Took a while to work out that we were on a golf course and the sprinklers had come on…
So we decamped to the beach, in the dark. In the early hours of the morning we were woken up by a car which came and parked nearby on the road at the top of the beach. Big Merc Sedan, all the doors open, stereo on, Eiffel 65’s “I’m Blue” on repeat very loud. Four oriental blokes in suits got out, and came down to the beach about 50m from us, followed by a boy who looked about ten who was holding towels. The blokes stripped naked, had a quick swim/splash about in the waves while the boy stood on the beach with the towels and clothes. Then they got out, dried, dressed, got back in the car and drove off.
As it got light in the morning we all started waking up (realising that if you sleep on a beach you end up quite damp in the morning). One of the group, Big Dave, pointed out a bloke in the distance, walking along the beach and looking furtive. He sidled up to a wooden beach hut and spent a couple of minutes apparently cracking one out (his back was thankfully to us), then walked off.
We weren’t even on drugs that night, just beer and Pastis 😯
More recently, I had my melon twisted by an optical illusion. A guy at work mentioned one he’d seen on facebook which was a picture of a brick wall, and the question “Can you see anything unusual?” I spotted “it” strait away, and we discussed the varying lengths of time it takes people to get it. He’d been stumped for a couple of minutes, but once he’d seen it, couldn’t un-see it. His wife, even after having it pointed out, still struggled, but had seen it. (I won’t explain more in case anyone wants to have a go).
Anyway, I mentioned how it was like The Dress that did the rounds a while back. He’d somehow never heard of it, so off we went to his desk to google it. Looking at the image on Wikipedia, it was exactly as I remembered it, very obviously white and gold (although shot in light with a blue-ish hue). Over the course of a few minutes of discussing it I noticed that if I viewed his monitor from above the image seemed to be more clearly white and gold. So I checked it from a low angle looking up, and it looked blue and black. Weird, but I put it down to how LCD monitors are made/operate as I’ve noticed colour shifts due to observation angle before.
And then, as I was in the middle of a sentence, I was looking at the screen and time seemed to slow down, just a fraction of a second in slo-mo, and the dress was now blue and black. I was properly discombobulated. Real slack-jawed, open-mouth speechless. The dress now looked black and blue from all angles, and the idea that it could ever have been white and gold seemed ridiculous, it was a real cognitive dissonance moment. I was in a bit of a daze for the rest of the afternoon, it really shook me up (but not in an unpleasant way, I was just a bit spaced out).
I just googled the image again now, writing this, and it’s white and gold as it was originally…
Both of us wide awake as someone is moving around downstairs, then slides clothes off rails before finally (just me awake at this point) a female voice says 'good night'.
A few more similar. I'd like to say I know her name but it could be one of two
I've also had surreal moments at work.
@Nickewen this could have been your flash, I live in the alps and we get it all the time, just huge flashes (like lightning) without any sound... [url] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_lightning [/url]
Not the most bizarre, (I'd need more time to think) but last weekend I was on the way (driving) over to my parents place, about a mile from my home, on a fairly well used B road.
On one corner there's a rented house, weirldy the tenants have an old (knackered) series 2 landy, a shagged out horsebox and some sort of wood carving/totem pole outisde all chained together. Anyway, I spot the guy and his dog heading towards the garden gate onto the road. It was fairly early, guy appeared to be in t shirt and pants having just got up. Guy then bends down to take something off the dog I think, before opening the gate.
I don't know why, but looked again as he was at 3 o'clock to me, very close, now on edge of road. Turns out he was only wearing a t shirt, a pink one at that.
I'm a software engineer. I was at work, working on some code. Then I looked at the code on my screen and thought "What's this I'm looking at? Why am I looking at this now?" Not in a sudden "I am wasting my life" sort of realisation, more a "I don't think this is what I was doing a minute ago" sort of feeling.
The feeling applied to everything. I hadn't forgot anything, I could still remember where I was, who the people around me were, what I did for a living, etc. It was more like my memories of what had been going on moments earlier were in fact memories from a few days ago, a bit fainter and not associated with "now". It felt a bit like my brain had rebooted itself and had to restore its pre reboot state.
I had a short break, refreshed myself about exactly what I was working on and got back to work. It was not externally weird but as an experience it did feel truly bizarre.
I think I may have had one similar experience in the years since, but it was less acute, possibly simply because I wasn't doing anything much when it happened anyway.
finally got as far as Miami, where i was put on a BA flight first class and between the free champagne and the Bolivian painkillers, i babbled nothing but ballcocks at Sophie Ellis-Bexter before passing out.
crying 😆
I've raved in one of the towers of the tyne bridge
I've raved in one of the towers of the tyne bridge
Aye? Why, man? 😉
WillH's tale (no pun) reminds me of a time me and two pals camped in Swanage and went to the beach in the morning to cook breakfast in the dunes (not sure why). As we did, an old chap came along with his dog. He stopped by us and bode us good morning while he took in the sea view. Then dropped his pants and walked on. NOW we know its a nudist beach.
...so anyone remember the guy who used to wander round Marlborough Rd and environs in the heart of Sheffield studentville, in the mid-80s, in small hours, dressed in what for shorthand I can now call Victorian steampunk style, which then didn't exist of course. Black suit, white shirt. Can't remember if he had a hat or slicked back hair. But he did have a strange lopsided leer on his face, and a white rat moving from shoulder to shoulder and, basically, ran a major line in freaking folk out. What was the story there?