A friends anomalous experience

My friend once told me a story that is just down right bizarre. Now first of all, my friend is quite the skeptic, along with being rational. He is not the type of person to make up anything and he has good attention to detail. Whenever we would talk about the big questions, or even things that I've seen, he would be the first to be critical of them and me. 

So, this story. 

He was out camping on an island not far from the UK mainland, say about 20-30 nautical miles. Not surprisingly, this island does not have many people living on it, only around 5000 say. The area where he is camping is quite isolated and you have to walk across terrain to get there - you cannot drive to this location. He has one tent, and the person who is with him has their own tent - so 2 tents in total. Having pitched their tents right next to each other, it turns to night, and my friend is in his tent, along with the other person. They are talking and enjoying themselves, drinking a little wine. As you do when you drink, one needs to break the seal so to speak! For our American friends, that's going for a pee! But they were not very drunk at this point. Still quite aware.

So my friend goes outside the tent and immediately becomes aware that something is wrong - his tent is missing. He looks around and off in the distance, about 40 feet away, is his tent. It is completely pitched up and set up for the night.

When he was telling me about this story, he mentions at this point his mind went into overdrive to try and explain this.

1. There was no wind that night, so sounds should be easy to hear, especially because it was a rural location.

2. They both did not hear anything at all, nothing outside their tent or any noise from someone maybe playing a prank on them and perhaps dragging the tent away from them. Nothing is heard.

3. If someone had wanted to play a prank, they would have had to walk a considerable distance for doing just that because of the isolated location and that is something that would definitely put most people off. If it was someone being serious and sinister, like a criminal, you would still hear the sound of someone moving your tent away, including all the items in that tent AND bearing in mind that their tents were RIGHT next to each other.

4. He did ask his friend if one of their friends were playing a prank and they said nope. He said he believed her as she looked terrified.



I don't remember what exactly happened after, but I think they left the next morning and didn't talk about it at all. He only told me after we got into a juicy conversation about how I'd found out about David Paulides and his Missing 411 stuff. 


Definitely strange.

This is the kind of anecdote I like because it is so totally unlike anything anybody would make up.

I was going to say thanks Brian, though I don't know if that's the best word to use, but I'll say it anyway! 

Yeah, it was a straight up strange event. My friend was speculating that it could have been something out of the 'many worlds ' theory perhaps. 

I honestly don't know what else could explain this 'normally'. An interesting data point however is that the person he was camping with, whilst at a party some months/years before this event, my friend had witnessed her face turning into some sort of demon after partaking in some 'relaxing tobacco'! A hallucination perhaps, but he never did forget that moment, as he told me, and it stuck in his head for some reason.

Now, I know I said my friend is quite the rational, skeptic type, but he is open minded, and that may be why he has 'had' these experiences, contrary to the hard-nosed closed minded skepticism that all of us are familiar with and that seems to 'shut down' any paranormal activity. 

Having thought about all this, it seems that parts of this story have similar elements as in Skinwalker Ranch. There's quite a good thread on ATS that goes beyond the familiar theories about the phenomena involved, regarding  'The Trickster'.

Here's a wee link if anyone is interested.

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread1204259/pg24

Now, I know I said my friend is quite the rational, skeptic type, but he is open minded, and that may be why he has 'had' these experiences, contrary to the hard-nosed closed minded skepticism that all of us are familiar with and that seems to 'shut down' any paranormal activity.

Yeah, my experience is that the more open you are to these things the more they seem to happen around you and you can increase that by increasing your interest and involvement in such things.  It's almost like it is a step forward in evolution after all survival needs are taken care of. (I'm not a great believer in evolution by the way, or at least not by random mutation but I do believe it is a model we should bear in mind)

Thanks for the link.

Yeah, my experience is that the more open you are to these things the more they seem to happen around you and you can increase that by increasing your interest and involvement in such things.  It's almost like it is a step forward in evolution after all survival needs are taken care of. (I'm not a great believer in evolution by the way, or at least not by random mutation but I do believe it is a model we should bear in mind)

Thanks for the link.

Indeed, I tend to agree regarding idea that it may be the next step in evolution, or something along the general idea of that. 

My friend involved recently told me that on the particular island that this happened, that faeries were big part of history and legend there and I was wondering if the two could be connected? I had a look around and faeries from what I can tell, don't really move objects, but they do 'transport' people into their 'dimension' and keep them there! Fascinating, the stories of faeries and how many people probably secretly believed in them, only a hundred or so years ago. I'm thinking there has to be some truth in there, no? So many tales and folklore in the British and Irish Isles of this thing.

 I'm thinking there has to be some truth in there, no?

Seems very very likely.

Another tent related story. After college my wife and I did the typical treck and Europe and the UK. One of our stops was Ireland. We rented a car in Cork and proceeded to drive about visiting stone circles and castles.

I'm guessing it was the first or second night out, we pulled off the road in the late afternoon and hiked into a field to pitch our tent. We were on Old Head of Kinsale. I'm guessing it was twilight before around the time we had the tent up and were inside for the night. The wind picked up and started to howl and the fog-horn from the light-house started to bellow. 

For some reason we lay awake the entire night utterly terrified, but of what, we didn't know. It was simply a shared feeling of sheer terror. We assumed it had something to do with the sound of the foghorn, but when it quit some hours deep into the night, the lack of that familiar sound make it even more terrifying. 

We'd slept in tents many nights before. There was something uniquely different about the many hours we spent in terror that night.

It was years later when I looked up the Old Head of Kinsale when I found out it is the nearest bit of land to where the RMS Lusitania was sunk in 1915.