It Defintely Didn't Happen to Me

Back in the days when I used to read crackpot nutrag Fortean Times, one of my greatest pleasures was the 'It Happened to Me' feature, where various readers related their 'strange' experiences.  The fact that so many of them were so obviously made up, riddled with inconsistencies, inaccuracies and contradictions, just made the column all the more entertaining.  A good indication that it was all a fabrication was when an item started along the lines 'This didn't happen to me actually, but to my sister/brother/cousin/neighbour/some bloke at the bus stop, who told me about it.'  Many of them were really simply stories about coincidences, sorry, strange coincidences, although why any coincidence should be stranger than any other is the real mystery.  Coincidences, no matter how unlikely they seem, are simply a matter of statistics: even if the odds of them happening seem remote, the laws of statistics dictate that they must happen at some point.  There were also a fair number of ghost stories, UFO sightings and strange creature sightings, none of them very convincing, not to mention plenty of conspiracies.  My absolute favourites, though, are the ones that involve such exotic entities as 'shadow men' - quite literally shadows with a life of their own - which seem to spend a lot of time scaring young children in their bedrooms.  I think the key to these is the fact that what are being related to us readers are decades old childhood memories of things that supposedly happened as they were drifting off to sleep.  While dreams, especially vivid one, can, at such a distance in time, can be confused with actual memories, the fact is that even memories of real, recent, experiences can be highly unreliable.  I speak from the experience of twice having to give witness statements to the police within a short time of an incident and finding myself questioning my recollection of the events, the order in which they occurred, even the timescale.  So, not surprisingly, I don't give much credence to these sorts of stories.

A variation on the 'shadow men'  are the 'stick men', which are, yeah you've guessed it, quite literally life sized figures looking like the stick men which we are often drawn to represent human beings.  Once again, these stories always seem to be relating events from many years ago, which immediately renders their veracity suspect for the same reasons as outlined above.  Sometimes these 'stick men' are abnormally tall and have a habit of chasing people who see them (apparently even to their front door, according to one particularly barmy story).  I find these accounts impossible to take seriously.  Not just because I'm a natural born sceptic, but also there is something inherently ridiculous in the idea of giant 'stick men' running around, unnoticed by anyone other than drunks coming home at dawn or people driving on lonely roads - the usual types of witnesses to these supposed events.  But some of the strangeness involves apparently regular people, rather than 'shadow men' or 'stick men', encountered by the contributor, who turn out to be somehow 'weird' in vaguely defined ways.  Some of my favourites amongst these involve encounters with strangers while out walking in remote places.  Strangers who seem to appear out of nowhere.  Sometimes they simply walk past the author of the piece, sometimes they stop and speak, quite normally, to them then, after they've walked on, the author turns to look back at them - and they've vanished again!  There were no turnings or paths they could have taken, the writer assures us - which, as someone who spends a fair amount of time out walking in the country, is nonsense: there are all sorts of paths and routes which can be taken off of the established paths, but which don't seem immediately obvious to the casual walker.  

What all of this comes down to is that it is clear that, at some level, we all need a bit of mystery in our lives.  In the past, religion was the go to place for mysteries for the average person.  But with religion's hold weakening, especially here in the western world, people are forced to turn elsewhere for mysteries: UFOs, Bigfoot, mysterious big cats, lights in the sky, 'stick men' and so on.  Some can even find mysteries in their everyday lives in the form of 'strange' coincidences or encounters with 'vanishing' people while out on a walk.  I'm glad they do and even gladder that some of them write their experiences up (or even make them up) to publish in places like Fortean Times as they provide me with endless entertainment.