I have never thought I have any unusual degree of extra sensory perception, but I did sometimes hear two women discussing their embroidery when I was in a particular part of the garden when I was small. I told my mother about it once, early on, but she was so horrified that her child might be thought to be hearing voices (her brother was a psychiatrist), that she just said "No you didn't, dear", and that was the end of it. And I just then avoided what was obviously an unwelcome subject. But I went on hearing those same two women occasionally for years until we moved away when I was about 11. The only other time I ever referred to them at all, as a child, was once when running across the lawn one day. The conversation was so clear that I was stopped in my tracks and called my friend back to ask her where she thought the voices were coming from. But my friend didn't know what I was talking about.
Since then I have had two very specific experiences as an adult that have not been explainable except as paranormal experiences in my opinion (for the record I have registered my dob on this site as 1889, but that obviously isn't when I was born, it is just nonsense because I find the question unnecessary and offensive). And one of those incidents was in Southampton, here in the UK, and I am going to tell it here. I understand it isn't an unusual type of story of the genre, but it is absolutely genuine. It was years ago now (1994 or thereabouts), and although I remember the incident clearly, I don't actually remember what I was doing there otherwise. I know it was a Sunday because I remember thinking I wouldn't have minded stopping at the department store I was heading towards if Sunday trading has started already. I don't remember what time of day it was exactly, either, except that it was daylight, the weather was fine and dry, and there was very little traffic on the road.
I was driving along the road that's nearly parallel to the High Street in Southampton toward the department store at the end there (Palmeston Road, I think it is), a little way behind a medium sized white van. The road there is very open with just grass and a few scattered trees some considerable distance away beyond the pavement, and it is a long straight road so that I had a long view of what was ahead of me. And as I was looking ahead, beyond the van, I was aware of a woman walking away from me along the left side of the road on the edge of the pavement. It was odd behaviour, it was a wide pavement and she was too close to the road when she clearly didn't need to be, and it slightly unnerved me even from a distance. I actually had time to register criticism of the van in front for not slowing when approaching her. Then, horror of horrors, as I watched, just as the van was about to pass her, she suddenly lurched off the pavement straight into its path.
I knew in that fraction of a second that she couldn't have survived, and in horror and panic I put the hammers down on my brakes like there was no tomorrow, so as to make sure I wouldn't make an horrific situation even worse by hitting what I thought would be the tragic crash scene. So then there was me, sat in my car stopped dead in the middle of the road, with smoking tyres (thank God there was nothing behind me), while the van (that I thought had to have surely just killed someone)... Drove blithely on! It carried straight on as if nothing had happened. And the woman whom I had seen lurch into the road had completely disappeared. There was no dead body. There was no live person. There was nothing that could be hiding her. There was nowhere for her to have gone. She just wasn't there. And I was left sitting in the car in some shock contemplating what it was that I had actually seen.
I had heard of crash re-enactment stories before, but it never occurred to me that I might experience anything of the kind. And I would be extremely interested to know if there has ever been any similar experience on that same road.
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