1.

STRANGE CAR LIGHTS HAPPENING.

Around the year 2000 I was driving at night along the B835 road between Buchlyvie and Gartmore in Stirlingshire Scotland, when my lights suddenly went out and I was plunged into darkness around 40 miles per hour. Pretty scary. My first reaction was to flip the switch that changes between high and low beam, and they came on again.

A few days later the same thing happened within around fifty metres of the first instance. More scary.

Within a couple of weeks the same thing happened 5 times, all within a 150 metre stretch of road. Very scary.

One time it happened with my girlfriend in the passenger seat. I had told her all about it before, but she was just laughing as she thought I switched the lights out myself. Very scary (and frustrating too).

I owned that car for a few years and, at that time was driving over 500 miles a week. The lights only ever did this on the short straight shown below.

(About halfway along this stretch of road there was a single power line that was hanging lower than it should be. This incident happened around 2001, but researching on the internet in 2021 I found out that "High voltage transmission lines generate magnetic fields which can induce currents in parallel conductors like fences and interfere with magnetic devices").

So there's a good chance that was the cause, but it is weird that the effect of the magnetic field was only to turn off the lights allowing them to turn on again and not affect anything else electrical or cause permanent damage etc.

It was still a very strange and scary happening whatever the cause.

Coordinates (paste into google maps) : 56.114889, -4.333528

2.

PSYCHIC HEALER.

I've had lower back problems for a lot of years and around the year 2002 I had recently been to a health clinic that told me I would need months of physiotherapy to fix my back pain.

My back can sometimes be misaligned by doing things like turning while lifting. This can cause anything from slight pain to being hardly able to walk as any movement causes bad pain.

When my back was out of alignment I was told maybe years after this by a chiropractor who was looking at my spine from behind that it was like an S shape from the top, curving to the left then to the right then back to the centre at the bottom.

I met a guy who, at that time, called himself a psychic healer. He also did reiki which I have done courses in up to level 2.

I booked an appointment with him specifically to help with my lower back pain which had been going on for weeks at that time.

I'm not a religious person and I don't beleive in the paranormal or ghosts, but I decided that, going into this session with an open mind, would be better than going in with a negative, non-beleiving attitude.

I personally think if you go into a session like that thinking it is all nonsense then nothing will happen, but if you keep an open mind and just allow anything to happen then you might get results similar to reiki sessions where I think your own body's built in repair system is allowed to work.

(You could say the same for other therapies like hypnotism where it could just be yourself that is making any changes to your own body eg. giving up smoking, which I did through hypnosis cassette tapes in 1992).

The session was similar to a Reiki session with relaxing music being played in a room with a massage table/bed with a hole for your face to go through. He told me he has a small woman (a ghost) who comes in to do the work for him.

After maybe half an hour he told me he wanted to try the 5 point technique. So I was face down and he touched my spine with his finger in 5 places starting around the back of my neck down to the base of my spine, then he just stood back in silence.

I was thinking "This is really weird". Then after about 10 seconds the muscles in my back started to tighten up by themselves. There's no way I can consciously tighten those muscles the way they were tightening. I could then feel my spine being straightened with a lot of force.

I mentioned the S shape earlier and I could feel the top half of my spine being pushed hard from left to right and the bottom half from right to left making it straight. Then, after only maybe 5 to 10 seconds (not sure as I was amazed at the time), it just stopped.

Then, the instant that it stopped and my back muscles relaxed, the guy said "Right, that's you". I was absolutely stunned by what had just happened, but he was perfectly relaxed about it all. The first thing I said was "How did you know it had finished?".

He said something like "Oh I just know". That was definitely the craziest thing I've experienced in my life and my back was fully fixed and carried on like that for maybe a couple of years..

I prefer to look for a scientific or realistic explanation to what happened so some options could be :

As I mentioned, it could be my body's own repair system being put into action by the situation. Similar to hypnosis and reiki where it could simply be put down to the power of suggestion or the strong belief that something will happen.

This can be reinforced by statements like "When you leave here today, you will feel amazing and your problems will be sorted". This healer did say statements like that.

Faith healing in churches could work in a similar way. If there is a very strong belief that you will be healed, then you could just be healing yourself.

When talking to someone about my own experience they said, somewhere in your brain there is a memory of the exact position that your spine was in before the misalignment and your muscles are used to put it back into shape.

Another remote possibility that I thought of myself is, when the healer stood back and waited for something to happen, there was a strong feeling of awkwardness and maybe I felt obliged to do something to stop that awkwardness.

A bit like unexpectedly being put on stage with a spotlight on you and an audience waiting for something to happen. You would force yourself to do something to stop the uncomfortable feeling.

It was maybe a few years after this that I started using a chiropractor to fix my back. I have used quite a few different chiropractors and they mostly did the same thing.

I would lie on my back (on a massage table/bed) with my left knee lifted up then over to the right as far as possible. The chiropractor would climb on top of me and push hard down on my left knee and at the same time push hard down on my left shoulder.

This twists your spine over its whole length and most times would result in a crack or pop noise. This took a massive amount of force and a couple of times a younger girl just didn't have the strength to do it.

So, knowing how much force is needed to twist the spine, this just adds more amazement to what happened with the psychic healer when my spine straightened itself using the muscles either side of my spine.

I spoke to a woman who used the same psychic healer for long term problems she had with her sinuses and she said the next day she woke up feeling like she had been operated on in a hospital. Her sinus problems were fixed.

2A.

PSYCHIC HEALER PART 2.

When my back has been fixed like it was in the chapter above or when I have had it fixed by a chiropractor, all the pain and stiffness in my lower back is gone and I sometimes get tingles up my spine.

It feels really good and I sometimes feel like I am walking bolt upright almost holding my head upwards.

But because I have had lower back problems for a lot of years, I know that any time after being fixed, I can put my back out again when not paying attention, like working on my car or lifting something heavy while turning my body.

I had back pain again so decided to try the same psychic healer. This was at least a year but maybe a few years after my session above which happened when I stayed in that area. I was no longer staying there but I was travelling up there every Friday for a music session.

He had also moved house, but was still staying only about a 5 minute drive to my music session. So I booked an appointment for the hour before the music session started.

One of the first things he said was "Does the name Hamish mean anything to you?" I said no as I didn't know anyone by that name then we carried on with the treatment. He tried the 5 point technique used above, but this time nothing happened.

It was still an enjoyable and relaxing experience like all Reiki or hypnotism sessions are and we spoke for longer than expected so I ended up having to rush the short drive to the session which had maybe already started.

I got myself a seat round the table with the usual of around 15 to 20 people there and the session carried on as normal.

About half way through the session, a guy who stayed about 50 miles away who was only at the session about 3 times in all the 15 years I went there, was talking before playing a song and he said "I was just saying to Hamish" then he carried on his sentence.

I then said "Who is Hamish?" and the guy sitting next to me said "I am".

So, immediately after leaving the psychic healer session where he asked if the name Hamish meant anything to me, I drove 5 minutes then sat next to a guy called Hamish for the rest of the evening.

(This could have fitted into my coincidences page, but the fact that this was from a person calling himself a psychic healer puts it into the weird category).

3.

BIG CAT SIGHTING.

On 10/1/2003 at about 5:30am I was driving to work. You know when you're going along the road and you think to yourself "Oh, there's a buzzard" or "Oh, there's an osprey".

Well, I thought "Oh, there's a cougar". I then immediately thought "THAT WAS A COUGAR!!!". I carried on being totally amazed and thinking "I'VE GOT MY CAMERA WITH ME, I CAN GO BACK AND TAKE PICS OF IT!!".

This feeling of wanting to turn back carried on for a couple of hundred metres, but I was already borderline on being late for work and had about another 45 miles to go, so I couldn't stop.

But, thinking back on it, stopping to take pics of a cougar is maybe not a sensible thing to do as I imagine I might be tempted to get out my car or at least open my window.

I could see its head and shoulders sticking up just above ground level to the left of the pavement and, as I drove past, it watched my car and slowly lowered its head down into its shoulders.

Its head was very large, much larger than any domestic cat and only similar in size to a very large dog. I was close enough to see it clearly and I know what cougars/pumas/panthers look like.

I had no doubt that this was a big cat. It was only about 3 metres away from me so it's not like other big cat sightings where they see a cat far away at the other side of a field etc.

I later went back to the exact spot where it was crouching and it was a very steep hill with just soil as it was too steep for any bushes or grass to grow. It was far too steep for me to stand where the cat was.

So it must have been almost lying flat against the ground but using its claws in the soil to stop it from sliding down the hill. My car headlights lit up the cat and I was sure it was a light brown colour.

I told a couple of people at work obviously knowing that they might well think I'm a complete nutcase but I didn't care. Also when home I had the very strong urge to tell as many people as possible.

I was renting a room in a house at that time. My landlord was a very narrow minded idiot and the last person in the world you should tell that you have seen a big cat, but I couldn't help myself.

I'm absolutely certain he would not have believed a word I said but, about a couple of weeks later, he knocked on my door and showed me a newspaper article (I never buy newspapers).

This is the article :

I still have that cutting from the newspaper in my wallet in 2024 and I have written on the back "daily mail 24/1/03".

The Scottish big cats website have that article mentioned on this page, but they mention the daily record and they have another report of the same incident from the herald newspaper.

I also reported my sighting to the big cats website which at that time was bigcats.org but is now scotcats.online.fr

The sheep farm at Keillour is about 15 miles away from my sighting and that sighting was about 1 week after mine. There was alsoanother big cat sighting about 1 month after mine and just 9 miles away.

Because the newspaper article mentioned there had been no sightings in the area, I phoned the wildlife officer Allan Stewart who is with the police and told him about my sighting. His first words were "Oh god they haven't put it in the newspaper have they?".

He wasn't interested in my report at all and just carried on being annoyed that it was in the paper. I did think later, I know it's a long shot that there could be a big cat in a country where they are not resident.

But, there were a few houses not too far from where I saw it so what about kids playing outside or people taking their dogs for a walk? Would it not be of interest to the police to at least check out for safety reasons?

A lot of people mention when it became illegal to own exotic pets like big cats in the UK, that a lot of owners just let them loose. And they could survive easily on their own for a lot of years always hiding from humans.

The following photo shows the exact spot I saw the cat just behind the fence. This was very similar lighting to when I saw it and was taken from almost the same spot I was in my car. So you can see how close I was.

The next day I spent quite a while walking around that area in daylight. I took pics of things like paw prints and scratches on tree bark and droppings etc., but I didn't really know what I was looking for.

It's a very quiet area in the countryside and I was there on my own in this small patch of forest then I suddenly heard a loud crack from above. A large tree branch fell down nearby giving me a fright.

Not long after that I heard something very large moving around in bushes not far from me. There was more movement then a large deer jumped out and ran away. I got a massive fright.

I then thought to myself "What the hell am I doing? I'm actually searching for a cougar totally on my own with no way of defending myself if I found one". Also, when the large branch fell I realised I hadn't considered it could be above me.

I got out of there quick. The photos I got of paw prints and tree scratches were not really much use and I suppose, like a lot of big cat sightings, it ended up being left as a situation which can only go by my word which is frustrating.

Not too long after that I was in my car with a woman who has stayed in that area for a long time. We were driving past a large castle/hotel on the way to the queens view and she told me this :

She was doing a course where they had to stay for a few days at that hotel. She couldn't sleep and looked out the window about 4 am and saw a panther walking across the lawn outside.

I hadn't mentioned my sighting before that so it was a surprise to hear her story. I'm sure there are a lot more sightings but most people will feel the way I did. You just know people are going to think you are crazy, so a lot will go unreported.

4.

GHOST PHOTO.

I'm creating this weird stuff webpage in 2024 and it's a big coincidence that I chose to add the story about this photo right after the big cat story. I wasn't aware till I looked at the photo dates that they both happened within a month of each other.

This story actually started on 5/1/2003 which was just 6 days before the big cat sighting. On that day an aquaintance told me they had seen a glowing orb of llight just outside the very old cemetery that was just across the road from where I stayed.

They said they watched it for quite a while close up then it disappeared. I don't believe that happened, but at the time I said "Let's go out now and take some pics".

The "Date created" time on my images are wrong as I remember doing this in the evening though I checked historical sunrise/sunset times for that area on that day and sunset was around 15:44, but the pics we took were in total darkness.

The guys wife was with us and she took some pics too. We went over to the exact spot of his "sighting" and just started taking random pics in all directions. I took 11 pics in around 6 minutes.

I can't remember how long we stayed there, but right after one shot I put my hand down by my side and just noticed white light showing from the lcd screen on my camera. It was very dark so there was no reason for the image to be white.

I looked at the image and we all got a massive fright seeing that it was almost full of white and an earlier image also had white shapes in it. I can't remember, but we maybe left at that point through feeling scared and went back in to view the pics on my pc.

I don't know how long we took to realise, but it was a freezing cold night and it was just our breath being lit up by the camera flash. It was still bloody scary though.

So most of the photos turned out like this :

But 2 of them came out like this :

In the photo above you can almost see the shape of the breath swirling out of my mouth which would be just under the camera lens. It's normal to try and find human faces in these kind of images, but this is definitely just breath.

One month later on 9/2/2003 I went out again on my own to the same spot to take more pics. Again, the time on my camera was set wrong but it might have been around 9:30pm. It was pitch dark and freezing cold as before.

I took 55 pics that evening and like before, most were just pics of how it looked that night being dark with not much to see, but this time I got 11 pics of breath. I've actually deleted almost all of the dark shots as they were no use.

Here are some of the breath shots from that night and as before, it is natural to try and find faces in the shapes of the breath.

These ones have a more unusual colour and shape to the breath.

And this one has a weird giant nose shape very visible.

But, this is the image that this chapter is about. It looks like a typical ghost having a body, head, arms and even eyes and a nose and maybe hair or a hat. And it looks like it is flying.

You could think of it as a massive and very strange coincidence that I was there for the purpose of trying to catch some kind of supernatural spirit on camera and my breath formed into the shape of a "Ghost" and I caught it at the perfect moment.

In 2009 I sent this pic to the UK magazine "Take a break, Fate and fortune" which covers things like horoscopes, psychic readings, supernatural, ghost stories etc.

It's very typical of newspapers/magazines and annoying to me that they took the information I sent them with the image and changed that information to whatever suited them.

I sent a letter saying I was definitely sure it was my breath but it was a coincidence that my breath formed the shape of a ghost as I have mentioned above. But they printed a complete lie making it look like I asked "Have we caught a ghost on film".

Then he (His name is Craig also) took what I said as his own words saying "I have little doubt" and "Is indeed caused by your breath". I was angry when I read that as once printed it goes down in history that way.

It makes me feel that anyone reading that article will think I'm a stupid idiot and he is a university lecturer on ghost photography.

I've not had a lot of dealings with newspapers, but a handful of facts relating to my KX when it was in some magazines were also changed from the truth either deliberately or by mistake.

I know pretty much nobody in the whole world cares about these articles apart from myself, but it's still annoying that it is set in stone and there's nothing I can do about it.

I can't imagine how it must feel to someone famous who constantly has stuff written about them in the press. I've thought a few times if the KX is going to be featured in the future to ask if I can proof read the article before print, but that probably wouldn't happen.

I think I got 50 GBP for my photo and story being used here.

5.

GHOST SIGHTING?.

In 2004 I was asked to help a friend of a friend with their computer. They stay in an old farm house in the countryside which is like a long bungalow. It has an open plan kitchen/livingroom at one end and 3 bedrooms with a long hallway at the other.

That hallway runs along the front side of the building with the bedrooms towards the rear. When I arrived it was just me, my friend and his friend with his wife and young daughter. They all stayed in the livingroom chatting and I went into the bedroom nearest to the livingroom.

I was sitting facing the computer desk which was against the rear wall with my back facing the door. After a while, for no reason, I turned my head round to look at the door.

I watched an old lady walking very slowly past the doorway. She was hunched over with her head facing down. She was wearing a long, thick, woolen, winter coat and a black, Russian style fur hat.

She was shuffling forwards taking very short steps so took a while to pass the doorway. After that, I just thought "I wonder who that was?" and I remember soon after getting a shiver down my spine but I immediately thought "Don't be silly".

So she would have been walking along the hallway to one of the other bedrooms or, there is also a door to the outside at the end of that hallway. A while later the guy came in to see how I was getting on.

I told him what I had been doing with his computer then I said, "Who was that old lady that walked past?". He instantly shook his head and said "There's no old lady". I said "I just saw an old lady walking past the door".

Again he said "No, there's no old lady here". I looked straight at him, smiled and said "Yeah right". As if to say "Ok the jokes over, you can tell me now". But he carried on denying there was an old lady in the house.

That's as far as it went. I was left wondering if he was so quick thinking that he would, in a millisecond decide he was going to wind me up. Or was there another reason he would deny that an old lady was in the house?

I later asked my friend to quiz him the next time he saw him. I asked him to ask about the old lady and who it could possibly be or if he just said there was no woman as a wind up.

He told me the guy said that his daughter sometimes dresses up in her Mothers clothes which seemed like a very unusual answer. And, why would she walk that way? That makes no sense and is too ridiculous to be true.

But, the most important part which I am also realising more when writing this in 2024, is this :

My friend spent the whole time during that visit, in the livingroom talking to the guy, his wife and daughter. So he would have definitely without a doubt seen an old lady coming into the house. The main door opens straight into the livingroom.

And he would have been introduced to the old lady by the guy or his wife. And concerning his answer about his daughter dressing up. She would have had to dress up in the livingroom while my friend was there so he would have seen this happening.

It has carried on being left totally unexplained. I like to try and find perfectly reasonable explanations for things like this and my thought is this. The guys wife was from maybe Poland or somewhere near there.

So it could have been his wifes mother who maybe stayed there with them or was visiting. But there is no reason for the guy to deny that, unless he was unbeleivably quick thinking and decided to wind me up.

And, as mentioned, my friend would have seen her and would have immediately told me that when I first mentioned what I had seen. It's a strange situation whatever the truth was.

6.

VERY CLOSE CALL WHILE FISHING.

When I was maybe around 12 or 13 years old, my family were on a caravan holiday in Coldstream which is on the border of Scotland and England.

We went with another family who stayed further up the road from us as their father worked beside my Dad.

I was into fishing at that time and was fishing on the north side of the river Tweed. In Coldstream, the river is the actual border and I decided to try fishing on the England side.

The youngest girl in the other family (around 10 years old) was watching me fishing and she followed me over the bridge to the England side. I was about to do my first ever cast in England and she was standing behind me.

I told her to move back a bit as I would be moving my rod in her direction before casting but I think I remember her saying that she was ok or similar. I cast the rod back then forwards and immediately felt the line get light.

I looked back in horror to see some of my fishing line curled round in circles in front of her face. My hook was actually in her lower eyelid. I remember her being very calm about it and she even laughed when I said I had lost my worm.

We walked back over and my parents went to a doctor with her. Amazingly, the hook had not even scratched her eye. I remember, because of the barb on the end of the hook, the doctor had to cut the hook and push it through.

That was a freak occurence as I remember that girl normally wore glasses.

7.

NIGHT FRIGHT.

When I stayed in my campervan in Portugal, at one point I was doing classes in yoga, Tai-chi, meditation and archery. The instructor who did the yoga and Tai-chi sometimes invited pupils up to his house at the weekend.

This was for a full day of lessons including martial arts and stopping for food etc. I was invited up for a Saturday/Sunday lesson and given directions to his house which was up in the hills in the middle of nowhere.

I headed up in the late afternoon on Friday but couldn't find the turn off to his propery and it got dark quick so I decided to find someplace nearby to park overnight. I found a sort of layby next to a curve in the road.

This is a photo I took of the place where I stopped (arrowed) and this is the exact location which can be pasted into google maps 37.280763,-8.607802. It's about half a mile outside Casais, Monchique which is a tiny village.

Around 3 or 4 in the morning I was sound asleep then I heard BANG!!! BANG!!! BANG!!!. Someone had banged very hard on the outside of my campervan. I sat up instantly. My eyes were open but I could see absolutely nothing, just pure black.

All I could hear was my heart thumping very loud inside my head. I must have sat motionless, very scared and listening for about 10 minutes. I didn't hear a single sound from outside.

I realised at that point in my self built campervan, it was impossible for me to get into the front of the van from the rear living/sleeping area without first going out the side sliding door. I decided I wanted to either start the van engine or put the head lights on.

I managed with a massive struggle, to squeeze my body into a tiny gap past the driver seat headrest just enough for me to reach the headlight switch, so I turned them on.

I must have stayed in the back of the van for about half an hour more before I built up enough courage to open the side door to get into the front and start the van engine.

Like the ghost sighting story above I try to find a reasonable explanation and it could have been the owner of that piece of land not being happy about me being there, but they must have tip-toed away after banging on the van.

It was very scary.

8.

SCARY DOG STORY.

When I was about 18, I was walking home after a night at my local disco. It would have been after 11pm. A friend had recently mentioned his next door neighbours dog was in heat and it was normal for dogs to be hanging around outside that house.

As I got to the bottom of the hill I instantly noticed a black dog sitting outside that house. It wasn't till a few metres further that I realised with a real fright that the dog was facing me and not the house, almost as if it was waiting for me.

Then, as soon as I realised that, the dog started running at me as fast as it could. Its owner was nearby and started shouting at it to come back and it did after running at me for about 10 metres.

The image below shows where I was when I first saw the dog. It was 110 metres away and it was dark at night so it was pretty amazing that it was looking at me from so far away.

The previous image was zoomed in so the following image gives you a better idea of how far away the dog was.

The dog ran at me 3 times as I carried on up the pavement with the 3rd time having the dog barking right next to me and the owner struggling to control it shouting all the time. It was very scary.

The image below shows the 3 places I was when the dog ran at me and the number 4 in the image was my parents house where I lived from about 1 to 25 years old.

As I got in the house, I had a look outside just as I was closing the door and the dog was right outside running at full speed towards me. I just managed to shut the door before it got to me. Again it was very scary and my heart was racing.

It was normal for me to go through to the kitchen and bring our family dog through to the living room for a while. I did that, but this evening our dog sat upright on the chair opposite me just staring at me.

I was still trying to calm myself down and our dog was making it more scary so I was telling it to stop looking at me and lie down. It wouldn't, so I decided to put it back in its bed.

As I came back out the kitchen door I heard a noise out the back of the house so I looked out the rear window. I could only see darkness because the light was on in the room I was in then our dog walked behind me and its reflection looked like a ghost dog outside.

That was yet another extreme fright and was enough for me so I put the dog in its bed and went back through the living room to go upstairs to my bed. I put the living room light out and went to open the living room door and realised someone was holding the door handle on the other side.

I pulled the door open and was shocked to see this large white thing in front of me. My Dad had heard noises maybe from me or maybe from that other dog and had came down to see what was happening.

It was unbielevably scary and was just one fright after another.

(Our dog walking behind me and my Dad being at the door when I opened it were extreme coincidences so I considered putting this in my coincidences page but it's similar to some stories on this page).