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Back in September 2012 I was collecting information related to a strange incident that occurred in the L'Amoreaux neighborhood of North York in metro Toronto, Ontario.
On the evening of July 26, 2012 a girl in her late teens and her boyfriend were returning home after seeing the film 'Men In Black III', which had been released on the same day. As they approached her home they noticed a strange looking woman with long black hair who was dressed in a long black dress and high-heel shoes walking towards them as they pulled into the driveway. Even though the vehicle had dark tinted windows, the girl stated that "the woman made eye-to-eye contact with me." Alarmed by this frightening stranger, they immediately backed out of the driveway and pulled away from the location. The boyfriend decided to circle the neighborhood and then return back to his girlfriend's home. As the girl looked back, she was shocked to see that the woman was "walking very fast and following us." They increased speed and eventually lost their pursuant.
The girl call home to warn her brother about the strange woman. While on the phone her brother looked out the window and the same woman in black was standing directly outside the window wildly waving her arms and staring at him. He looked away...then looked again. The woman had vanished. But...he promptly noticed something else. A man dressed in a black dress suit and wearing ear plugs was walking in the street past the front of the house. The man looked straight ahead and was swinging his arms as he walked...almost like he was controlled somehow. The man proceeded down the street, still in sight of the witness, then unexpectedly vanished!
The girl and her boyfriend soon arrive at her home. The strangers were not in sight. After the witnesses detailed their experiences to each other they looked out the window to see if either of the strangers had returned. What they saw was a large black cat with bright eyes staring back at them. "It (the cat) almost seemed to know what we were saying and thinking" stated the girl. As they watched the curious feline it started to slowly walk toward the vegetation along the driveway...then it simply vanished before it reached the bushes.
Both the girl and her brother submitted audio statements to me...on separate days and apart from each other. Both statements were very similar in the description of specific details. I had made inquiries to investigators in the Toronto metro area as well as local officials. There have been no other similar incidents reported. I initially received this information by chance since it was brought up during an interview with one of the girl's relatives on an unrelated case. The relative noted the incident and I followed up on it.
The fact that these 'strangers' appeared on the same day as the movie release and that the witnesses had just seen the movie is interesting. The anomalous manner in which these series of sightings transformed seems to suggest that this was more than just a prank. The sensations experienced by the witnesses when the woman stared at them, as well as the atypical speed in which the high-heeled stranger displayed during its pursuit of the vehicle indicates possible supernatural traits.
I received the following email on Thursday 1/3/2013 in reference to a recent 'black-eyed children' encounter:
Mr. Strickler - I was listening to your radio interview with David Weatherly because I am seeking information concerning black-eyed children. I hope it is OK to direct my concerns directly to you.
I am a widow with a teenage daughter in Casper, Wyoming, an area west of the city near the county airport. The property had been in my husband's family for many years. I recently purchased an adjacent home and property after the owner passed away. This is where the story actually begins.
I settled on the new property just after Thanksgiving. Since it was purchased 'as is' it was fairly inexpensive but requires a lot of work. I hired an auction house to come in and remove the contents for future sale. The auction was scheduled for next week, but there have been a few odd things going when the items were first listed for sale.
I received a phone call from the auctioneer a few weeks ago. He wanted to know if I had any knowledge concerning the contents from the house. I told him that I didn't know the owner that well but that I did know that he had lived on the property since the 1950s. The auctioneer said that a young woman came into the auction house and told him that the property and contents were stolen and that it belonged to her family in North Dakota. She didn't give her name but assured him that she had documentation to prove her assertions and that she planned to take legal action if the sale continued. I contacted my attorney and the realtor who verified that the property sale was legal and that there were no prior claims to it.
The young woman, who was described as 'very plain, thin with long black hair', has not been heard from since. It was decided that the auction would continue as scheduled.
Then this past Tuesday, New Years Day around noon, someone rang the doorbell. I was in the kitchen and I knew my daughter would answer the door. I heard the door open and the voice of a young girl. My daughter soon yelled loudly 'Mom, come here'. As I walked down the hallway toward the door I noticed 3 girls standing on the porch. They stood without movement staring directly at me. As I approached, I was shocked when I soon noticed that their eyes were completely black in color. I asked if I could help them. The tallest girl asked if they could come in to talk about the house and property I had recently purchased.
I immediately replied that we were busy and that I would give them the phone number to my attorney if they had any inquiries. They just turned and walked away without saying anything else. Each of the girls had blonde hair and wore heavy winter clothing with boots. They seemed to be in their early teens. I watched as they walked toward the highway and eventually lost sight of them.
Since then we have not been contacted by anyone concerning the property. The auction has been postponed for other reasons and has not been rescheduled. My attorney continues to research the property records for any other information.
I supposed the most important question is - who are these children? Do I need to be concerned? I look forward to your comments. SA
NOTE: I contacted SA by telephone and plan to followup with her. Honestly, there isn't a lot I can tell her...this phenomena has few answers. I have asked her to document any strange activity and to contact me if needed. These incidents have been increasing according to David Weatherly and Jason Offutt who we interviewed recently. You can listen to the podcasts at BTE - Stitcher Radio or BTE PodoMatic. Lon
During the troubled reign of King Stephen of England (1135-1154), there was a strange occurrence in the village of Woolpit, near Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk. At harvest time, while the reapers were working in the fields, two young children emerged from deep ditches excavated to trap wolves, known as wolf pits (hence the name of the village). The children, a boy and a girl, had skin tinged with a green hue, and wore clothes of a strange color, made from unfamiliar materials. They wandered around bewildered for a few minutes, before the reapers took them to the village.
Because no-one could understand the language the children spoke they were taken to the house of local landowner Sir Richard de Calne, at Wikes. They both wore oddly-colored clothing that appeared to be metallic. Here they broke into tears and refused to eat the bread and other food that was brought to them. For days the children ate nothing until the villagers brought them recently harvested beans, with their stalks still attached. It was said that the children survived on this food for many months until they acquired a taste for bread.
As time passed the boy, who appeared to be the younger of the two, became depressed, sickened and died, but the girl adjusted to her new life, and was baptized. Her skin gradually lost its original green color and she became a healthy young woman. She learned the English language and when asked about her origins she stated that her and the boy were brother and sister, and had come from ‘the land of Saint Martin’ where it was perpetual twilight, and all the inhabitants were green in colour like they had been. She remembered that one day they were looking after their father’s herds in the fields and had wandered into a cavern, where they heard the loud sound of bells. Entranced, they wandered through the darkness for a long time until they arrived at the mouth of the cave, were "struck senseless by the excessive light of the sun and the unusual temperature of the air." She was not sure exactly where her homeland was located, but another ‘luminous’ land could be seen across a ‘considerable river’ separating it from theirs. They lay down in a daze for a long time, before the noise of the reapers terrified them and they rose and tried to escape, but were unable to locate the entrance of the cavern before being caught.
She later married a man at King’s Lynn, in the neighbouring county of Norfolk, apparently becoming ‘rather loose and wanton in her conduct’. Some sources claim that she took the name ‘Agnes Barre’ and the man she married was a senior ambassador of Henry II.
As if this were not strange enough, the same thing happened again almost 700 years later in 1887 in Banjos, Spain. A boy and a girl with green skin were found abandoned near a cave. They did not speak Spanish and wore unfamiliar clothing. Their eyes were described as Oriental in appearance.
As with the first account from England, both children refused to eat at first. The boy grew weak and died, but the girl survived, learned Spanish, and explained that she and her companion came from a sunless land. The account differs from the first as the girl was reported to have claimed they had been caught up in a whirlwind and found themselves in the cave. The girl died in 1892.
The children's true origins were never discovered. Scottish astronomer Duncan Lunan has suggested that the children were transported to Earth from another planet in error by a malfunctioning matter transmitter. Others say that they are members of a subsurface human culture, while others say they they were lost children whos green coloring was the result of malnourishment. It's even been put forward that both stories are actually the retelling of one story.
Arsenic has been put forward by some as the reason for the children’s’ green skin, and the possibility that they were real-life 12th century ‘babes in the wood’ which inspired the folktale cannot entirely be discounted.
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Paul Harris' Theory
The most widely accepted explanation at present was put forward by Paul Harris in Fortean Studies 4 (1998). First of all the date for the incident is moved forward to 1173, into the reign of King Stephen’s successor Henry II. There had been a continued immigration of Flemish (north Belgian) weavers and merchants into England from the 11th century onwards, and Harris states that after Henry II became king these immigrants were persecuted, culminating in a battle at Fornham in Suffolk in 1173, where thousands were slaughtered. He theorizes that the children had probably lived in or near to the village of Fornham St. Martin, hence the St. Martin references in their story. This village, a few miles from Woolpit, is separated from it by the River Lark, probably the ‘very considerable river’ mentioned by the girl in account.
After their parents had been killed in the conflict, the two Flemish children had escaped into the dense, dark woodland of Thetford Forest. Harris proposes that if the children remained there in hiding for a time without enough food, they could have developed chlorosis due to malnutrition – hence the greenish tinge to the skin. He believes that they later followed the sound of the church bells of Bury St. Edmunds, and wandered into one of the many underground mine passages which were part of Grimes Graves, flint mines dating back over 4000 years to the Neolithic period.
By following mine passageways the children eventually emerged at Woolpit, and here in their undernourished state, with their strange clothes, and speaking the Flemish language, they would have seemed alien to villagers who had not had any contact with Flemish people.
Harris’s ingenious hypothesis certainly suggests plausible answers to many of the riddles of the Woolpit mystery. But the theory of displaced Flemish orphans accounting for the Green Children does not stand up in many respects.
When Henry II came to power and decided to expel the Flemish mercenaries previously employed by King Stephen from the country, Flemish weavers and merchants who had lived in the country for generations would have been largely unaffected. In the civil war battle of Fornham in 1176, it was Flemish mercenaries, employed to fight against the armies of King Henry II, who were slaughtered, along with the rebel knights they had been fighting alongside.
These mercenaries would hardly have brought their families with them. After their defeat, the remaining Flemish soldiers scattered throughout the countryside, and many were attacked and killed by the local people. Surely a landowner like Richard de Calne, or one of his household or visitors, would have been educated enough to recognise that the language the children spoke was Flemish. After all it must have been fairly widespread in eastern England at that time.
Harris’s theory of the children hiding out in Thetford forest, hearing the bells of Bury St. Edmunds and thus being led through underground passages to Woolpit also has problems of geography. First of all, Bury St. Edmunds is 40km from Thetford forest; the children could not have heard church bells over such a distance. In addition, the flint mines are confined to the area of Thetford forest, there are no underground passages leading to Woolpit, and if there were, it is almost 50km from the forest to Woolpit, surely too far to walk for two starving children. Even if the Green Children originated from Fornham St. Martin, it is still a 16km walk to Woolpit, and as to the ‘considerable river’ mentioned by the girl – the River Lark is far too narrow to qualify for this.
The Green Children and Folklore
There are many aspects of the Woolpit tale which are found in English folk beliefs, and some see the Green Children as personifications of nature, related to the Green Man or Jack-in-the-Green of English folklore, and even the weird Green Knight of Arthurian myth. Perhaps the children are related to the elves and fairies which until a century or two ago, were believed in without question by many country folk. If the Green Children story is a fairytale, then it has the unusual twist of the girl never returning to her otherworldly home, but remaining married and living as a mortal.
Perhaps Ralph of Coggeshall’s slightly enigmatic comment that the girl was ‘rather loose and wanton in her conduct’ is a suggestion that she had retained some of her fairy wildness. The colour green has always been associated with the otherworld and the supernatural. The children’s fondness for green beans does suggest another link with the otherworld, as beans were said to be the food of the dead. In Roman religion, the Lemuria, was an annual festival in which people used offerings of beans to exorcise the evil ghosts of the dead (the Lemures) from their homes. In ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, as well as in Medieval England, beans were believed to contain the souls of the dead.
Though the Woolpit story is included in two 12th century sources, it must be born in mind that the chronicles of the time, though describing political and religious events, also listed many signs, wonders and miracles that would not be accepted today, but were widely believed at the time, even by educated men and women. Perhaps then, the strange apparition of the Green Children was a symbol of disturbed and changing times intermingled with local mythology and folk beliefs of fairies and the afterlife. Whatever the truth of the matter, unless descendents of ‘Agnes Barre’ can be traced, as some have suggested, or further contemporary documentary evidence unearthed, the story of the Green Children will remain one of England’s most puzzling mysteries. - Hidden History
Sources:
-Brian Haughton - 2007 - Hidden History
-castleofspirits.com
-myths.e2bn.org
-weirdsci.com
-William of Newburgh (1136-1198) - Historia rerum Anglicarum (History of English Affairs)
-Ralph of Coggeshall (died c 1228) - Chronicon Anglicanum
-Robert Burton - 1621 - The Anatomy of Melancholy
-Thomas Keightley - 1828 - The Fairy Mythology
-John Macklin - 1965 - Strange Destinies
-Paul Harris - 1998 - Fortean Studies 4
There's something strange going on in Wales – Welsh ghost are on the increase.
Welsh police forces received an unlucky 13 reports of supernatural spirits spooking homes last year, up from only two Welsh ghost incidents in 2010.
Ghosts have been spotted in bedrooms and gardens in Wales, peeping through curtains, and moving objects around their haunted homes.
One frightened caller in Pembroke told police they saw a ghost’s face in a pile of cushions.
A person from Denbigh told police they were assaulted by a ghost, while another caller reported being “grabbed” by a ghastly spirit.
In one spine-chilling report to Dyfed Powys Police, a Haverfordwest caller reported seeing their dad as a ghost.
And one caller’s son in Llandrindod Wells had a touch of the sixth sense after seeing a ghost in their garden.
The spooky sightings were among a total of 34 ghost sightings reported to police forces in Wales since 2002.
Welsh supernatural tour guide Jim Cowan was unsurprised by the sightings, saying Wales is considered one of the most haunted countries in the world.
The 47-year-old, who organises ghost walks as part of Wales History and Hauntings, said: “There are more sightings and reports of ghosts in Wales then anywhere else in the British Isles.
“There are all kinds of theories abounding and there are several leading experts on the whole idea of the supernatural who all recognise Wales appears to be one of the most haunted countries in the world.”
The paranormal activity has been revealed through Freedom of Information requests to Wales’ police forces. Gwent Police did not respond to the request for information.
North Wales Police received the largest number of ghost sighting reports in Wales, with a total of 17 calls between 2006 and this year.
Officers in South Wales Police have been called out to deal with 10 sightings of ghostly paranormal activity between 2007 and 2011.
Those fearing visits from the afterlife may be concerned to learn that officers were called to five ghoulish incidents last year – an increase of two from figures released in 2010.
Among the weird and wonderful sightings reported to the force since 2007, there have been three reports made to police in Cardiff, four in Swansea, one in Bridgend and one in Rhondda Cynon Taf.
Dyfed Powys Police have received seven reports of ghost sightings between 2002 and 2011.
One spooked caller from Llanelli reported seeing a ghost peeping through the curtains, while one person in Pembroke said they saw a ghost’s face in a pile of cushions.
Last year South Wales Police revealed the force had received three reports of zombies and two of werewolves being spotted in neighbourhoods. There were also two sightings of vampires and six sightings of witches.
Superintendent Tony Smith said: “South Wales Police does get the odd weird and wonderful call, but residents and visitors needn’t worry about a supernatural invasion just yet. At the moment, we’re still in the business of keeping South Wales safe from crime rather than zombies or werewolves.” - Wales Online
NOTE: Yes - Wales is a country...one of four in the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland). We've investigated several hauntings in south Wales at SRI...it definitely has a lot of paranormal activity, especially in the Llanelli area. Lon
A Louisiana reporter filming a segment on a haunted house became a part of the story when a 'spirited' guest made a surprise appearance on camera.
Vanessa Bolano, who works for the ABC affiliate WGNO in Matairie, was doing a report this week at the historic Myrtle's Plantation in St Francisville for a story about haunted happenings.
But as she looked over the video of her report in the edit room later, she noticed something strange.
Just as Bolano describes the 12 ghosts that allegedly live on the grounds of the plantation, one appeared to make its television debut, as something can be seen floating behind her.
Neither Bolano nor her cameraman had noticed the object during filming.
Bolano says that strange figure appeared as she was standing in the French Bedroom, which is widely believed to be the most haunted room in the house.
Myrtle's Plantation is regarded as one of the most haunted sites in America.
She would often listen in on conversations she wasn't supposed to, snooping in on her master's private talks.
One afternoon, Chloe was caught. According to legend, her master cut off her ear as punishment.
For revenge, Chloe baked a cake out of oleander leaves, which are poisonous. - Daily Mail
Even they agree, however, that the place is seriously haunted and easily qualifies as one of the "most haunted." These are some of the ghosts that allegedly haunt the house:
Chloe – a former slave who was allegedly hung on the premises for killing two little girls. (Those murders and even the existence of Chloe are in question.)
The ghosts of the two murdered children have been seen playing on the veranda.
William Drew Winter – an attorney who lived at Myrtles from 1860 to 1871. He was shot on the side porch of the house by a stranger. With his life's blood pouring from his body, Winter staggered into the house and began to climb the stairs to the second floor... but didn't make it. He collapsed and died on the 17th step. It is his last dying footsteps that can still be heard on the staircase to this day. (Winter's murder is the only one that has been verified.)
The ghosts of other slaves allegedly occasionally show up to ask if they can do any chores.
The grand piano has often been heard to play by itself, repeating one haunting chord.
Now a bed and breakfast, The Myrtles Plantation has opened its doors to guests who often report disturbances in the night. - paranormal.about.com
"It was a spectacular place to stay, if you keep an open mind. While taking the guided tour, I saw what looked like a heavyset African-American woman wearing an apron walk by the door, on the porch. Thinking it was a worker in period dress, I peeked out and no one was there. We stayed in the children's bedroom, and my best-friend (who was a non-believer at the time) experienced quite a bit of paranormal phenomena. She was held down in the bed and constantly poked all night. She was unable to move or cry out for help. She didn't think the stay was as great as I did. They let you ghost hunt on the grounds whenever you like, but you can't ghost hunt in the main house without an escort. I suggest setting up a video camera in your room and bring a tape recorder to obtain EVP." - Stacey Jones, founder of Central New York Ghost Hunters
