Yesterday as we went to take Mary to a friends birthday, we pulled up to part in Gloucester but the bits around were we normally park where full so he tried to pull down to the bit that always has parking. I feel a slick in my mind, it is an unpleasant sensation - I do not want to go there. It is a silly feeling so I am quiet we are only parking.
Mary on the other hand starts wailing, "I don't like it here!!!!"
Without thinking I say, "yeah Mary I don't like it here either." Al turns around and drives the little way up where a space is now avaliable where we'd originonally looked - lit a on the same street.
As he is turning he mutters, "yes I know why that is."
I go, "er?"
"For many it was the last place they saw."
And then I remember... there was a house there once, but it is gone because a couple where enticing kids/young people in and killing them and hiding the bodies.
Now I knew this because it came up last year when a similar thing happened but I had blocked it out. I kind of forget this bit of Gloucester exists.
So I never looked up where the family lived but I knew about them and when we were buying our house I told Al to make sure that we didn't buy somewhere they had been. That was pretty much my only proviso with buying a house.
Where the house was is a short cut, I spent almost a decade here not knowing that that was where the house had been. But I had somehow also spent most of a decade not using the short cut or venturing anywhere near there. If I think about it, it is just a shadow there in my mind, not a place, a thick greasy shadow.
Not long after the head injury Al also tried to park there but I got really distressed, it was just us, he asked what was wrong and I told him it felt wrong. A sense of immense danger loomed at me from that bit. That was when I found out where it was.
It is a silly thing I feel and I tried to ignore it. So there was another time we parked there - this was the point at which Mary freaked us both out. She did not get upset and cry like this time, she was younger... instead she pointed and said, "I remember this place! This is where I died! Before when I had a brother."
Now at the time she was always saying such things but always in uncanny situations so like she'd point to a building site we'd walk past to go to the Climbing Wall and she'd say, "My dad and brother are buried there, they died a loooooooooong time ago." This was the same dad and brother she insisted where on the fresco thing on the same streety bit. It shows Romans fighting. Turns out that whilst they were building they found about 200 Roman bodies.
Friends who have taken Mary out have commented on the fact she says these things and she says them in away that makes your stomach drop, she is so sincere and it sounds true.
No I am not saying we a psycic, we are scientists but being scientists I also what to get to the bottom of the miraide of ghost stories and unexplainables we have.
So I posit that local people all know what happened there, and I knew it was somewhere in Gloucester, peoples body language would tell me that something was wrong. My brain rejestered it as a "bad" place and we are social animals, we learn from each other. I then passed this on to Mary who is incredibly sensitive to how tense I am. I forget that that bit of Gloucester exists because lets face it as a teen it was one of the worst nightmares because it could happen to you and as a parent it is a worst nightmare because you have to let your kids grow up and that means it might happen to them... and though it is low probability that area of Gloucester proves that it can and did happen and it is horrible.
However, it is also not the strongest (nor the weakest) of these sorts of reactions I have to places. I don't normally tell people because... well I went to Imperial College and discovered in my first year that people laugh at you when you tell them about your near death experiences. So you don't mention the road you don't take because it just never occurred to you and that when you followed everybody else it seemed wrong and slow, like the air and shadows where pulling at you. When trying to push yourself through the stupidness coming home late from the Student Union in your second first year you see a Woman in big heavy dress, you see a woman but she has no colour and she is sad, just so sad and scared and you run... around the block to get to the door that was just the other side of the woman looking at you.
Panting you cave and tell a fellow housemate who is like, "yeah the victorian lady, my mum's a medium don't tell anyone. I researched it and I think she's a Ripper victim." Then another house mate appeared, he didn't like being in his room alone, he was worried... turns out he kept seeing a woman in some sort of filly old formal nightgown in the garden from his window. When we looked it was the other side to where I'd been so if a real person had been standing there we would have both seen them.
I'm blaming mass hysteria for this one, because we used to sit and talk about ghosts and magik and all the taboo things in the science world late into the night.
Then there was the way back to Alaric's flat in Ealing, it was like hitting a wall of dense air, (in Kenya I found there was a name for such things and they were thought to fire/sand demons? because yes me and another girl had a terrifying experience which I think was actually a natural phenominia of a warm air vortex causing air pressure changes resulting in us being trapped in different rooms, a scary noise and the doors refusing to open - this would also fit with the locals description of what the demons where). It was a short piece of path, but to me it felt like something jumped on my back and was weighing me down, like the shadows were pawing and dragging at me.
In the end I caved and asked if we walk the other longer way, through the scary alley way. That was when I found he didn't like the same bit of road, that he always felt watched there and that it somehow seemed to take forever to walk that one small bit.
Then I saw an Elephant, a white elephant but I am not sure now if it was late night or a dream, I told Al, "when ever we get to this road and look at that tree I can't help but imagine an elephant here!"
Turns out there is an actual elephant buried there - WTF??! No seriously in London there is an elephant buried. I must have over heard something about it in a pub or something. Still no idea what was going on with that stretch of road.
I could go on, I feel I should write them down, they make good stories but I think they are also important for understanding how the human mind works, how we pick up ideas for each other and also - as a good scientist I have an open mind, I think it unlikely that I've been seeing ghosts but I don't think it's impossible, but even if it is impossible I and many others are seeing, hearing and feeling things so what is actually going on? If we don't share our accounts for fear of being seen as nutters then we as a species will never get to the bottom of what is going on.
And so I am going to share with you the most powerful experience of this kind I've had as a grown up, dubbed The Marble Arch Incident.
I went off to university with plans to see all the landmarks and museums I could... I found money and time where a barrier but I still motored my way through a fair few. One which was right there, one which everyone else went to and I somehow had just avoided including taking longer to get to places was... Marble Arch. I did not do this knowingly but I managed it.
As some of you know Alaric had an uncoventional upbringing with this sort of stuff, his dad is Chaos Magician and his mother was heavily into the Occult. Issue I had at the time was trying to be a good scientist but having come from a Christian background that believes in mediums and ghosts and fortune telling as well I was very edgy about occult things. But people I met at parties would come up to me and just announce I was psycic or a seer and so on.
Alaric observed this. Alaric is a scientist (though his degrees engineering). Alaric decides to run an experiment on his new girlfriend. Alaric is a git.
From conversations with his friends he decided Marble Arch would be a good test. I knew nothing about this but wonder if I picked it up via his body language.
Anyway, we are out on one of our little explores - Marble Arch. I didn't like the area but didn't want to ruin things, we went through a tunnel, I got sick, he had to help me walk. I was being crushed, like the pressure above me and increased drastically, despair, so much despair and cruelty, it seemed to stretch up and up and up and all of it was pouring onto me and it made me ill, Al thought I passing out. Maybe this was just my first migraine because yeah I have migraines now.
But the key factor for his experiment was that the point this happened was where the Tyburn Gallows had been. It was the point at which many many people had died, executed and jeered, I've never been back.
So not particullarly impressive ghost stories because it's not really about ghosts - what's frustrating me is that I kind of loose places. Like that bit of Gloucester, like marble arch and so on. My mind edits them out as if I am a sat nav with a very specific setting.
Sci/Tech, Society | sarah | 
Tue 21st Feb 2017 8:03 am | 
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