It Happened to Me...
The offerkast
Maud’s Elm [ FT406:44-48] got me thinking of the Swedish
offerkast, a pile of sticks thrown by the road to ward off bad luck and being chased by ghosts. In Ekerö, close to Stockholm, there used to be a very old offerkast,
where people threw sticks and other things, to ward off the evil spirit residing there. There are several stories about people being chased by evil spirits, and horses refusing to pass this
offerkast.
There are two different folktales about how it began. One was of a woman being accused of kidnapping a small child, the other about a woman having killed her husband. In both cases the woman had to run to church, while having people throw stones at her, to prove
her innocence. In both stories, a stone hit her on the head and killed her. After that, her spirit started tormenting passers-by, so in order to stay safe from her anger, people threw sticks and other things onto the grave (she was apparently buried at the site) to pass by safely.
In 1947 the road was widened and the pile had to be removed. Archæologists examined the pile before removal and found coins from the 16th and 17th centuries, so the custom must have antiquity. At the bottom of the pile, they found an Iron Age barrow, and in it the remains of a woman buried between 550 and 100 BC.
So did people see the barrow and decide to honour whoever was buried there by leaving sticks and stones, and the story grew from there? The strangest thing, though, is that it is called Fantan’s pile, and Fenta is an old Swedish word for young girl. After the pile had been removed, the custom kept on, so even today there is a pile close to the site.
Cecilia Orning
By email
No direction home
What contributes to a sense of place? For months after I passed my driving test I could not travel anywhere in my home city without first motoring to a branch of Tesco that was some miles from my home. I could not orientate myself, could not begin to work out how to get from my house to where I needed to go, without first placing myself at this supermarket. I could ‘see’ where I wanted to be in my mind’s eye, could visualise key features of my destination, yet could not work out the route straight from my home, however simple it was.
In the 20 years since then, little has changed. Routes to new places need to be travelled over and over again before I can navigate them without getting completely disorientated. This applies also to journeys on foot and to very short trips within a confined area. I have worked in a small building of three floors for five years and still find myself stumbling around in a search for the loo if I approach it from a less familiar starting point, or if my mind is elsewhere when I begin the short walk. After moving to a new office, it took me over two years to work out the spatial relationship between where I park my car and my room, despite them being only around 50 feet (15m) apart. I am very embarrassed about my issues, and few colleagues know that the real reason why I am often late for meetings is that I have got lost on the way. I also cannot recall faces or names easily at all.
I know my left from my right very well, have an excellent memory for how places and landmarks look, and have navigated systems like the Paris Metro on my own because I can follow logical sequences with ease – it’s just that I seem to lack the internal compass that would get me to station B from station A above ground. Perhaps counter- intuitively, I dislike using sat-nav systems as they seem to disrupt this compass even further; I feel unsafe when using them as they remove any remaining sense of where I am in space. Often I think I am in place X – it looks and feels so much like place X – but, to my surprise, I am instead in place Y. My partner will sometimes ask, “Do you know where you are yet?” in awe that I have no clue whatsoever. He says he would hate to feel quite so lost for so much of the time. I know I’m far from alone, however. ‘Topographical disorientation’ is something of interest to scientists, and various theories of the neurocognitive underpinnings of navigation exist that seek to explain why I come out of a shop through the same door I entered and have absolutely no idea where I am.
My brain registers a sense of place, and an emotional response to an area, but never a route to it. So the atmosphere of a space is extremely pronounced for me. It is much more that simply whether it is pretty, or noisy, or dark, or pleasantly scented: rather than merely using my senses, it’s a total ‘sense’ of being there, a depth of feeling for a place. I find it hard to put this reaction to the entirety of it into words.
It is disconcerting when it happens, but sometimes a certain ‘atmosphere’ of a place that I know extremely well can change, and it can seem as though I am encountering it for the very first time. This happened yesterday [5 June 2021], while out on a walk with my family through woods that are close to my home. We took a slight detour up a steep path that we’d never walked before, through an area strewn with bluebells. Although I knew we were travelling along a route that was parallel to our normal path but a little higher, once we had moved into the new part of the woodland my wider reaction to the whole place changed completely. We followed this overgrown path for about 15 minutes, and when we climbed back down to the normal route the whole wood seemed completely new: not in terms of being unrecognisable (I knew the bridge, the steps and so on), but of carrying a new atmosphere for me. They simply felt different; almost a feeling of being there for the very first time.
I was intrigued that I seemed to be able to control this by not concentrating on my memory of the place and by just being in the present. This feeling of the familiar as unfamiliar continued for a considerable time after. It remained even as we walked home, back through places that we travel through several times a week ( including our little town centre) and contin
ued for at least 10 minutes after we got home. Even my garden and house felt oddly different. After being home for a short time there was then a point when things seemed to slide back into familiarity. This has happened on more than one occasion, and I have to admit that the slip back to normal is always rather disappointing. These are times when I seem to find being ‘lost’ enjoyable rather than frustrating or horribly embarrassing.
I also think that these events evoke unusual experiences that I had regularly as a young child. I recall, very clearly, being able to take myself ‘out’ of a place so as to feel a complete detachment from my surroundings. It included people too. With a kind of non-concentration I could achieve this altered awareness at will, and the end result was rather as though I was ‘looking down’ on myself in a scene (though I could not see myself) and other family members in it. I remember that I enjoyed the very strange sensation, and also remember how sad I felt when I realised I couldn’t do it anymore. I think I was around eight or nine when I could no longer reach this altered state. I have never been able to summon this sensation since, but in recent months I have realised that my occasional, entirely accidental, moments of feeling completely unsure in very familiar places evoke rather similar sensations.
I have been thinking about these ‘place slip’ events and whether other people experience them. They are the exact opposite of déjà vu moments, in that I have a feeling that I have not lived through a situation before. For those of us who seriously lack wayfinding capabilities, I wonder whether our sense of the here-and-now, of the totality, of a place may be much more pronounced than it is to others who are less geographically/ navigationally challenged. We know where we are, but often not how we got there, after all. I also wonder whether this might explain why the well-known can suddenly feel enjoyably novel should a new route in or around it be taken, as any tiny remnants of the already poorly functioning internal compass would be damaged. I would be interested to find out if others experience similar sensations.
Kate Firks
Ashburton, Devon
Voice of authority
Quite a few years ago, probably around 2007/8, I was in Germany, visiting my brother and his wife who were trying to start a family. Sitting at the breakfast table one morning, I watched my sister-in-law doing stuff in the kitchen, and thought idly “they’re going to make such great parents”. Immediately, a male voice in my head replied: “It’s not going to happen, you know.” This was not my usual internal ‘thought’ voice, which is similar to my own speaking voice, but an unknown, unfamiliar and very authoritative man’s voice. It felt louder than my own internal voice. I asked it/him why not, and he explained that my brother was infertile (I don’t remember the exact wording of the response, but I think it included the phrase “his sperm’s no good”).
I told my husband and daughters about this odd episode when I returned home, so I know that I did not manufacture the memory later, when we found out that both my brother and his wife had severely reduced fertility. They went through a few rounds of IVF, but never had a child.
I am sharing this because it would be interesting to hear if anyone else has had this kind of “voice of God” without the religious conditioning!
Linda Duke (pseud)
Reigate, Surrey
Missing time
In 1993 I moved from Cheltenham in Gloucestershire to Kent. About six times every year, I went back to visit or collect friends. I always drove along the M25, the M4 and the A217 and the journey took two and a quarter hours.
Sometime in the early 2000s, I was driving a friend back to Cheltenham. We left just after 10am so we would get to her house about lunchtime. We drove without any interruption, traffic jams or hold-ups and stopped at Membury Services (pictured below) for coffee and a comfort break. The coffee shop was empty apart from one other person, which surprised us, as it was a Saturday with plenty of traffic. Consequently we were in the area only about 20 minutes.
When we arrived at her house I commented that I was starving hungry, which was odd because we had had a late breakfast. When I looked at her kitchen clock it said 3.30pm. Thinking it was wrong, we checked our watches – but it was right.
In after years we often discussed the event with amusement and called it the ‘alien abduction trip’, although neither of us had any odd feelings about it. We confirmed we had not been held up by any traffic at any point on the journey. My friend had checked her watch as we entered the M4 and it was 10.45, the correct time for the usual journey. So somewhere between Windsor and Cheltenham we had lost over three hours. There is no explanation we can think of. I have often driven the same journey since but it always takes two and a quarter hours.
Elizabeth Lloyd-Folkard
By email
Rat-a-tat-tat
Alan Murdie’s feature ‘Haunted Pages’ [ FT406:2225] has reminded me of something I witnessed in 1984. I was living in a threestorey terrace house in Tufnell Park, north London, which I was in the process of doing up. Alone at home one evening, I had gone to bed early and was deeply engrossed in reading Alan Gauld’s and Tony Cornell’s 1979 classic Poltergeists
when I heard what I quickly took to be the sound of brass drop handles loudly rat-atat-tatting in unison against the brass back plates of a Victorian chest of drawers in a room on the floor below.
Could I be experiencing an entry-level poltergeist phenomenon of the sort I had just been reading about? I immediately jumped out of bed to investigate, but as soon as I got to the top of the stairs, a sudden fear of what I might discover got the better of me and I slunk back to bed. I continued to hear the rat-a-tat-tatting sound for more than long enough to feel sure that it came from the chest of drawers.
I am still sure of this. I remember the whole episode very clearly. I was fully wide awake – not in a hypnagogic state or any other non-normal state of consciousness – and I am not given to imagining things. Who or what caused the handles to rattle? Was it my unconscious mind through the power of psychokinesis ( PK) or was it a discarnate agent of some sort (such as a poltergeist as traditionally understood)? I find the discarnate agency alternative by far the more plausible.
In his book The Poltergeist
(1972), William G Rolls says that, if you want to know what people really believe, watch what they do, not what they say. However open I might have been at the time to the idea that I caused the rat-atatting myself, through PK, my freezing at the top of the stairs suggests that deep down I didn’t believe this to be the case. I wonder what I would do now if I had the same experience again.
Ted Dixon
Highgate, London