Paranormal Discussion

[Peter Mugridge]

Yes, but I'm afraid I haven't got time at the moment to write it down. Gimme a few days...

 

[geoff10]

And BR must have had some reason for renumbering 47216 to 47299 for no conveivable reason: That it was on the advice of a clairvoyant predicting a future collision has now passed into folklore, whether it's correct or not: It doesn't matter if that is the real reason, it's a great story anyway, like many others on here!

As a relatively new member browsing old posts, I was interested to see the above. I worked in York Control in the 1980's so it probably ok now after 30 years to tell the story now as I understood it. Apologies if the full story has already been posted on the site & I've missed it.

We got strict instructions from management to get 47216 (I thought it was 47222) back to Immingham without fail for renumbering on a certain date, which would correspond to its overnight renumbering on TOPS. No reasons given for the top priority, above other jobs.

Only much later on did the reason come out: a medium had contacted the railway about a dream they had had of a train crash and a fire. The details they revealed were quite specific : the train consisted of 'circular carriages' and the engine number was 47216. So specific were the details (eg were the circular carriages, 100T tanker wagons that 47216 would haul as an IM loco?) that railway management decided to take action to renumber the loco, but not disclose the reasons in case it encouraged every aspiring medium to phone their dreams in.

Anyway everything went well (as I understood it) but for one thing = there was a collision between a dmu and an oil train on S. Humberside some time later (I believe 1 passenger was killed), and the loco involved - 47299! So you can't circumvent fate.

Or had the medium merely seen an oil train hauled by this loco in their day -to-day life, registered the details subconsciously & it was all a coincidence?

 

[Madge Wildfire]

Has anyone actually GOT! any stories?

It is not railway related, but when I was a teenager I used to go and stay with my grandma for a week during school hoildays. My grandad had died a few years earlier and I think she was lonely and I liked being spoiled.

One night I had a headache so went to bed early with a couple of aspirin, but woke up sometime later when the bedroom light came on and my grandad poked his head around the door and said "are you alright?". I dont remember being scared, or even to question that he had been dead for 3 years. I just said "Yes" and he went out of the room and I drifted off to sleep.

I woke up the following morning and remembered this event, thinking that I must have had a strange dream brought on by the headache or the aspirins.
I just dismissed it until I went downstairs for breakfast, when my grandma asked me if I had been ill in the night.

"No", I said, "Why?"

She replied, "Because when I came up to bed, your bedroom light was on - so I switched it off because you looked fast asleep".

I know the light was off when I went to bed, because I have great difficulty sleeping unless the room is really dark, so who switched my light on before my grandma went to bed? Could it really have been my grandad's ghost?

I never mentioned any of this to her, as I didnt want to upset her. I presume she thought I had sleepwalked and switched it on.

 

[berob91]

Very interesting Madge Wildfire. My father died earlier this year in Febuary and had a strange addiction to hats. Bought different varieties all the time. Once we had cleared his home it was deceided everyone in the family could have a hat. My couin put hers high up her curtain rail end. She had picked a tricorn (typical pirate hat) and hat forced it onto the rail to hold it there. However... one day she was in her room and the hat fell and hit her head. Window was closed, no draft coming up the stairs and the hat had been forced onto the rail so it was firmly held.

I laughed because my dad had told me he would haunt me and my brother but I don't know. I am only 19 so it's all been a bit weird, I swear I feel his presence sometimes as he was a big burely bloke.

RIGHT anyone got anymore railway related ghosts stories/sightings/ etc? I am keen to know about a certain 'Bridge 173' which is mentioned in two chapters of W.B.Herberts Railway Ghosts & Phantoms. Any info is greatly appreciated.

 

[Xenophon PCDGS]

RIGHT anyone got anymore railway related ghosts stories/sightings/ etc?

As far as I am concerned, I bought "The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories" in 1987 and this was published by Oxford University Press.It is in hardback and is 510 pp in length. It covers, in chronological order, stories written from 1829 The Tapesterial Chamber by Sir Walter Scott, through to 1981 Soft Voices in Passenham by T.H.White. There are a total of 42 stories in the book.

Two of my favourite ghost stories are in this book:-

Oh, whistle, and I'll come to you, my lad by M.R.James (1904)

The Judge's House by Bram Stoker (1891)

The ISBN code for this book is 0 - 19 - 214163 - 5

 

[Peter Mugridge]

OK, I've been a bit lazy and C&P'd it from an old pupils' forum for my old school where I first posted it; the context is that someone else posted about seeing the same ghost in the same room, but 11 years earlier, so that is why the quote below reads like it's part of a bigger discussion - it was!

Bingo!

At last I know I wasn't the only one! Now that you've said that, here's my story:

I saw the monk in there late one night in autumn 1978.

I had the bed against the windows by the wall backing onto McKenzie, so when lying down in bed I was facing towards the stables block direction.

On one particular night, which would have been late September 1978, maybe early October, I found myself awake for some reason. It was quite dark, though not completely dark - just enough light to make out the outlines of where the windows, wardrobes and other beds were but nothing more detailed than that.

Rather quickly, I became aware that there was a tall dark figure by the end of the bed; after a few seconds I became aware that the figure not only looked like a monk but was also apparantly standing two or three feet above the floor level!!! Just standing there quite still but I had the distinct impression that it was looking at me...!!

At this point, unfortunately, I lost my nerve and instead of watching to see what happened I ducked my head under the covers and shut my eyes and kept them shut even though [ as is almost always the case with me no matter how tired I am ] it took me ages to get to sleep.

Now, Ian, this is 11 years after your year were in that wing and I have certainly heard other rumours of that room being haunted, so I am sure that myself and your year cannot be the only ones to have seen something there.

Does anyone know of any more claims of sightings in that room?

Do any of these sightings match mine in terms of position in the room, for example? Any other details?

 

[berob91]

Sounds very similar to something I heard about at my boarding school.

The ghost I encountered as a child was in the farm house I grew up in (not un-common for somerset folk). When we first moved there we were told the house was haunted by a lady but I don't know about anything else other than that. She visted my step dad in his office by walking through the doors and visited me when we had a power cut. She didn't go for me but she certainly came at me menacingly....

 

[Barton Keyes]

"The Signal-Man" by Charles Dickens is well worth a read.

 

[Clint]

My family and friends have had a number of experiences, none of them railway related though.

My friends used to run a pub where an unseen entity pushed the landlord off a barrel he was sitting on in the cellar.

The landlady saw an old man with his head in his hands on the bar and walked around the bar only to find he wasn't sat on a stool but had no legs and was hovering, then promptly vanished.

The landlord and a customer saw glasses flip one by one off the bar onto the floor.

The dogs would bark and follow something invisible moving around the ceiling.

And the landlord let his two daughters in from a night out in the early hours only for the three of them to see a standard lamp fly from one end of the pub to the other.

Also, when my Dad and Mum split up, my Dad was in his bungalow alone one night in bed when he heard 3 deliberate knocks on his bedroom door. He said "who's there?", then heard a clatter up the hallway. He jumped out of bed, there was nothing up the hall. He then went from room to room as he thought there was a burglar. When he found no-one he then checked all the doors and windows - all were locked.
On returning to the hallway he found his small Elvis mirror on the floor. This was usually hung on the wall by means of a metal circle on the back of the frame, which slotted over a nail which was hammered into the wall at an upward angle.
The only way for it to have dropped to the ground would have been for either the nail or the metal circle to break. Neither was broken.

My father never told me this while he was still living there, as he thought it would scare me from visiting him.

 

[LE Greys]

I can tell you one directly.

Back in January 2002, I had a dream about climbing a flight of steps, which I took to be a French escalier. It turned to the left, and I looked right over a low hedge and a flat roof to see a Soviet submarine in a harbour. I then backed up the steps, raised my camera, took a light reading (f11, 1/125), took a picture, then turned round to see what looked like a street in the London suburbs. About a month later, I went to Folkstone . . .

Now having never been to Folkstone, how was I to know that there was a Foxtrot-class submarine in the harbour, or that there was a flight of steps with a flat roof that looked like they belonged on the Cote d'Azure? Also, I used f11 1/125 but did not take a light reading. How come the resulting photograph, the picture I took twice turned out so well?

This sort of thing happens to me so often that I thought it was perfectly normal when I was growing up. Now, I want to understand it, especially if I could control it. If I could target a specific date and time, for instance the exact moment they read out the Lotto numbers, I could be incredibly rich.

 

[90019]

This sort of thing happens to me so often that I thought it was perfectly normal when I was growing up. Now, I want to understand it, especially if I could control it. If I could target a specific date and time, for instance the exact moment they read out the Lotto numbers, I could be incredibly rich.

Sounds very much like déjà vu.
I get it all the time, though not so much recently. And since I've not been able to remember dreams for the past few years, it feels a bit more wierd when I do get it nowadays.

 

[LE Greys]

Sounds very much like déjà vu.
I get it all the time, though not so much recently. And since I've not been able to remember dreams for the past few years, it feels a bit more wierd when I do get it nowadays.

Not entirely. I could usually remember which night the dreams happened, and occasionally modify what was going to happen. In one of these, I was able to stop, close my eyes, turn through 180-degrees and remember precisely what I was going to see before I saw it. It's literally like watching a video before you record it.

 

[Bittern]

Only heard about this one quite recently.

No train has run from the Isle of Wight's main town, Newport for some 40 years, so when Kay Liggens
of Freshwater, caught a glimpse of an old locomotive with three carriages, steaming towards
the town of Cowes, it was a ghost-train she was seeing. She explained, "It was only there for a few
seconds. It seemed to be crossing an old brick viaduct near where the Newport to Cowes road is
now. I heard nothing at all; the train was totally silent. It was as if it was in mid-air above me. I saw
the steam train and two or three carriages but it was all so quick that I could hardly believe it." Kay
and her husband had been walking down Holyrood Street one lunch-time and were standing by the
brewery depot when she saw the apparition. "I just stood there, open-mouthed. I asked Roger when
the last steam trains ran in Newport." 'Not since the 1960's," he replied. It was then Kay knew for
certain, she had just glimpsed something which reason told her was impossible. A ghost-train.

http://www.lutonparanormal.com/newsletters/pdf/issue44.pdf

Seems to fit in with the other descriptions I've heard of this train. Silent, floating and on the Newport - Cowes line. Would love to learn more.

 

[newbie babs]

I have to say that I don`t believe either way but sadly since being 12 I have encountered several incidents where I have heard unusual sounds , footsteps, door handles moving with no chance of anyone being on the other end.

Then 2 years ago I saw two in the space of 2 months while working nights as a receptionist in a hotel that has 12 floors and the 13 being the heating and air conditioning equipment.
I was doing my checks at 3am on floor 5 and as I was going down the main staircase I saw a child about 9 or 10 sat on the stairs dressed in grey shorts, tank top and grey shirt, I walked past him and started to walk downstairs when I realised we had no children in the hotel and the door could only be accessed 5 floors down by key card or the other receptionist letting someone in.

I went down and discussed what I had seen with the other receptionist, later that night we heard running water coming from the main toilets behind the bar on the same floor we had been sat at out desks for the last 2 hours, we walked in to see running water coming over the sinks, no one had been in as access could only be gained by walking past use.

As morning was just breaking I had gone down to the bottom floor to open the main doors as I walked back into reception, sat at one of the dinning tables was a man who was very tall, very slim and dressed all in black, the other receptionist walked in and I told them a guest was sat waiting for breakfast, she looked and saw no one.

Ever since then I see shadows of more than one person at the side of me, not all the times just certain times and hear conversations when no one is in the building.

I have been told by a medium those that have past are trying to contact me, I am still unsure but I know I am not mad so something must have occurred that night.

By the way how do ghosts or apparitions get 5 floors up when the building that was there was a two story workers house originally.

 

[Grantham]

Ok, starts with a disclaimer: I believe it's possible that supernatural things happen, although it hasn't happened to me that I know of, except for the odd bout of deja-vu.

But I do have a good story: This really happened to me...

Enough years ago to start making it a long time ago, about the mid 1990s, I was a member and fairly junior fireman at my local tourist railway, the Zig Zag Railway in Lithgow, Australia (I'm still a member). Many of us lived quite some distance from the railway, so we stayed on site in very old sleeping carriages used as member's accommodation, and it was a fairly common occurance that those staying on site would sit around a bonfire and drink (shock horror!) alcoholic beverages. (Ever noticed how much better a fireman you can claim to be after six stubbies of beer?)

So this particular night, there were four or five of us perched on milk crates, holding a beer and chatting around a fire, when we heard a steam locomotive working slowly (as they usually do around here on the 1/40 grades), with a leaky piston packing. After a certain amount of looking at each other, and a quick check to make sure the service loco was still sitting over the pit, we all swore we'd heard the same thing.

And we all looked at each other...no trains around, was it a ghost train?

Some swore off strong drink forever! I was tempted to write to Spike Milligan to ask for advice, but that's just me! (He was still alive at the time, living in WoyWoy, NSW)

So the next day, I was firing. As we steamed uphill (with a leaking piston packing) for the first trip of the day, I saw a lyrebird...

Lyrebirds are about the size of peacocks, and are the best mimics ever. Quite capable of doing a good mimic job on a steam engine...I never told the others. They have a good ghost train story, I only have a lyrebird story!