As I sit here drinking my humming along to the theme of The Hitch - Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Courtesy of Prof. C. Tonks 'big C Domain'¹'s Audio page with this cursor blinking at me, prompting me to feed its keyboard with presses of its keys here and there and while I shuffle through my HUGE² Notes, I decide to start off with something I heard from James Whale's Show last night on talkSPORT.

Last night, the night of 15^th January, 2002, there was a caller on James Whale's Show, on talkSPORT, and she was talking about her psychic experiences, one of which she can prove, and one she can't.

The first experience she told of occured when she was laying back trying to get to sleep. She had just relaxed when, not a religious person at the time, she saw before her eyes a frightening storm for a few seconds, which startled her, and made her sit up in bed. The next week, she found there had been a storm in America with pictures in the newspapers which matched what she had seen, and believes that she had seen Satan at work.

The second experience she describes is seeing a show on the TV about 'What a religious text about a mountain could reveal' and, after watching, she says she went into her kitchen and said out loud
'Where is this mountain?!'

She claims a voice replied to her
'Horup - Mount. S...'³


She didn't believe herself until she read up on it. Then again, Would You?

ex - Rambling tell us this story ...

I like the way the articles are set out... they remind me of a story my husband told me. He was an EMT ⁴, and often the first to respond to a call-out. One night he showed up at a road accident between a car and a motorcycle. He saw a man dressed in blue jeans further down the road beckoning to him, and then he disappeared. He went to check it out and found a guy laying in a ditch, and got him to the hospital.

Later, he wished he could have talked to the guy. Both men in the accident were of similar build and dress. One was out of hospital, and the other dead. He didn't know who called him to find the man in the ditch, the apparition of the wounded man, or the ghost of the dead man.

The twist was that he couldn't tell which man was which. Both the wounded man and the dead man looked alike, and the night was foggy⁵. He saw the figure at a distance, and then it vanished. So, either the dead car driver helped save the life of the man he hit, or the motorcyclist saved his own life. My husband thought it was the ghost of the dead car driver helping the man he'd hit, but he just got a 'feeling' that that was who he saw. He never knew for sure, and probably never will.

I like this story; it reminds me, as do most things that will have ever gone into this column, of a quote once made by Albert Einstein -

'What does a fish know about the water in which he swims all his life?'

This section is just a book recommended by FABT called 'The Ghost of Thomas Kempe'.

FABT starts...

The book is supposed to be a kid's book. It is often studied at schools; the kids who like it have sometimes already read it, so they get cross. The kids who aren't into that sort of thing pay no attention anyway. The teachers want the kids to read it because it's a very clever and powerful book, but they have entirely missed the point - that kind of power must be discovered on your own! If it has to be pointed out to them in English class, then are they ever going to get the point anyway?

I feel like starting up a aka's spooky book corner now, FABT! I particularly like the 'Haunted Liverpool' Series of books by Thomas Slemen - who inspired me to write the Haunted World series of articles in the first place - because they focus on spooky goings on of 'things that go bump in the night' in areas that I can relate to. It's kind of like an A-Z map book of where you live... if I have to use slight analologies here - Just think, if Mr. Slemen hadn't have wrote that series of books, who's to say I'd be here in the first place? Funny how life works, isn't it? - Ahem... Now, before I start dribbling about my theories of life and the rest of it ... Moving Swiftly on!...

Your mind is the most wise part of you, especially when you consider the things it can do for you. What your sub-conscious or unconscious mind can do when you're asleep is more imaginative and surreal, shall we say, than what the most surreal, vivid writer can come up with when fueled on the best thinking food and fully awake!

It is now, that I ask you, reader to give me a short summary of one of your dreams - don't be simple - the weirder the better. If you have a particularly weird dream you'd want to see analysed anyway, then I'd recommend submitting that one Here. I want to know what you dream about, and I will analyse your dream for you. I am planning to write an article on dreaming, and the analysis of them. If you have, say, a Degree in Psychology for instance and would like to help or add your own piece of wisdom to the entry and my own knowledge - Go ahead, please, do!

All input greatly appreciated (and as a little incentive - your name will show up in the 'Written and Researched by' column at the right of the entry when and if it is edited. Also it will appear in the Edited entries section on your personal space!

Story One - The Terrible Tale of Helena Blunden (6^th Sept. 2001)

Helena Blunden was 16 years of age when she started her job in the spinning room of the linen mill of Belfast's old markets area. The older daughter of a Tyrone woman and a Kilkenny man, She had been born in Ireland but brought up in England.

In 1911, the Blunden Family returned to Ireland and settled in Belfast at a time when the Parliament in Westminster seemed likely to placate one group of Irish politicians only to provoke the wrath of another. With the reform of the House of Lords in 1911, the Lords' power of veto over Home Rule was limited to a delaying tactic. The passage of a Home Rule Bill through Westminster was assured, which would grant Ireland a domestic parliament and allow a degree of political independence from England. Anyway, an ardent Home Ruler, Helena's father would have preferred to settle in Dublin but Helena's uncles on her mother's side had already arranged jobs for the Blundens in Belfast. They moved into a small terraced house in Raphael Street about a few hundred yards from the linen mill.

Helena was a diligent, popular worker in the linen mill. A loud, cheerful young woman, her head was full of the romanticism of Yeats' poetry, the wit of Shaw's plays and the raucous songs of the London music halls. Her grand uncle had been a wandering Irish dancing master in Kilkenny. Helena had inherited this talent for dance, but she was more interested in singing. When she was younger, she had sung in a school choir in England. Since returning to Ireland she had danced at Feiseanna, Dublin. Her father encouraged her aspirations to the stage but Helena's mother frowned upon the notion. Helena had grown up among the immigrant Irish in London but invented a peculiar English accent which impressed her fellow workers. Her aspirations and songs, her accent and memories of London always guaranteed her a captivated audience and she enjoyed this attention.

Work in the spinning room was arduous and repetitive. On warm days in summer when it was hot, children and women often fainted. The atmosphere was always so damp, condensation settled on the walls and floors of the mill. Margaret Maxwell was a tough woman who, in her youth, had brawled with men and women in the street. No longer fit to fight or work in the flax room, Margaret was employed in the afternoons to mop and clean the condensation from the stairs. Pride made her resent the work but necessity made her stay. She was content to complain fiercely and scold anyone who dared to walk on the stairs while she mopped. The young children were scared of Margaret, but the adults only scorned her threats. She clashed often with Helena, deriding the young woman's songs and hope.

Helena worked 60 hours a week. On Saturday the working day was supposed to finish at 12 noon, but the workers always stayed late if an important order needed to be prepared. The linen company's first order had been to produce double damask linen tablecloths. These tablecloths were on the tables in the first class dining room on the Titanic.

The new company sometimes brought the workers in on Sundays to ensure orders were ready on time. On Sunday 14 April 1912, the workers, including the half-timers in all departments, came in to finish an order for Argentina. Helena had a concert she was to go to in the Grand Opera house that evening. At 2pm, Helena realised that her work would not be complete by 6pm and that there would be hardly any time between finishing in the mill and going to the concert. She kept those special occasion shoes on all day, ready to leave the minute her work was completed.

Margaret was tired before she even began. She stooped over the mop and half heartedly dabbled it along the top flight. She stopped to chastise a young half-timer who had only started and had not been warned about Margaret's stairs.

At 7pm, Helena was finished. Already exhausted by excitement, heat and fasting, Helena tripped on the discarded mop, fell over the banister and down to the ground floor. Margaret heard the shrieking, screeching, screaming Helena and looked up to watch Helena falling. Margaret let go of the young boy and staggered down to the ground floor to discover that it was too late.

Helena was dead.

Helena's intention had been to leave the linen mill forever and become a singer. Of course she may never have succeeded and may have been destined to stay in the spinning room for years, reminiscing singing on stage. Her young early death dashed those aspirations. There are reasonable, sensible people who believe that Helena still walks in that building.

Story Two - Haven (30^th August 2001)

As most people will know, the OOBE is where people leave their physical being and transport their spiritual self through any matter possible; even time. The NDE is where one may be close to death, see what we commonly call, 'The Afterlife' and then return to their physical self. Please do not confuse the two!

Our story begins in the Autumn of 1997. John, an army doctor, was posted to a small unit near the Himalayas. One of his first cases was a little girl of five years old, who seemed to have an advanced meningitis. The girl fell unconscious under his operation, and so he administered a respiratory stimulant to her mouth, but it didn't help and the girl's heart beat gradually slowed until it came to a sudden stop.

By now the understandably worried mother was sobbing, holding on to the child. About ten minutes later the doctor pulled her back from the child gently, but the mother quickly regained her grasp and poured the bottle containing the breathing stimulant into a plastic cup and tilting her daughter's head poured some into her mouth, Repeating, 'Please come back' over and over again, in the hope that it would bring her child back to physical life. John was very angry at this and pulled the mother away again.

The girl's eyelids flickered and she awoke, having been unconscious with a still heart and no breathing for 15 minutes. When brought around properly, she reported to the two adults she had just visited a place called 'Haven'. She continued on to say that to get there, she travelled through a black space and white, bright stars to get there, until the dark eventually turned to a friendly welcoming white light⁷. In the girl's own description, Haven had strange flowers and trees that glowed. The grass also gave off a greenish light. She said she had met people who had been dead for thousands of years and also had a chat with her 'Gran' who had died seven years before the girl's birth. She spoke of a man who called himself 'Playtoe' (Plato the philosopher, we assume) who had a droopy moustache. The Girl claims to have met 'Godde' who she describes as funny, blue, 'like the sky when the clouds go home', warm and friendly with no face. Then she remembered being told something by 'Godde' and being somehow pulled backwards as she heard her mother's call, and then the next thing she remembers, in her own words was being 'back at the Doctor's house'.

After the experience, the girl suddenly developed an ability do draw and crayon complex images of this place called 'Haven', and the people that she had met there. Perhaps when she is older, we will finally see what heaven, or 'haven' actually looks like.

Any stories you may have, Clubs, Societies, interesting links, information or otherwise anything you feel fitting to 'World of the Paranormal' to be submitted to the box below please. Thanks! All contributions gladly welcomed and, as I say, don't be put off arguing with me if you're a tad skeptical (I've said it before and I'll say it again - you'll find the people who make ratings so BIG for columns like this one, TV shows and radio programmes are actually Skeptics!), I think I'd quite enjoy that, to be honest .

Hi aka (",) !

Here's the thing...

If you have already submitted something to me before this issue went out, then Please, Please shout at me. And then please accept my apology and I will include it in next week's issue, I promise; Look, I'll even write it on a post-it™ note!

aka (",)

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