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Posted: 17-01-2012 10:54 Post subject: False Arrival

Anybody here had a False Arrival experience?
Basically you hear somebody arrive home or wherever (front door opening and closing, footsteps in the hallway etc), then there's complete silence and when you get up to investigate you find you're alone in the house.

It happened to me about 30 years ago and I wrote this article about it-

FALSE ARRIVAL by Mick

One Saturday afternoon in the 1970's when i was in my 20's i was home alone while the rest of the family were out shopping in town, and i spent the time up in my room building a plastic model ship.
Around teatime i heard voices in the street outside that sounded like the family returning, then i heard our front gate unlatch, then i heard the key go in the front door, then heard their voices and footsteps come into the hallway.
Then there was dead silence.

I went downstairs to greet them but there was nobody there, i looked in the living room, kitchen, even the garden and garden shed, but nothing, they were nowhere to be seen.
I assumed they must have gone out to do a bit more shopping up the road , so i went back upstairs to carry on with my ship.

After about an hour they came back and i asked my mother if they'd arrived earlier and gone back out again, but she said no, and she hadn't a clue what i was talking about.
So i just put the earlier arrival down to a trick of the mind or a "waking dream" or whatever, and felt fascinated and privileged to have experienced it.
A few years later i happened to learn from a paranormal book that the phenomenon is fairly common, and is called "False Arrival", where somebody hears one or more friends or family members come into the house, or think they hear footsteps of friends running up behind them, followed by silence.

One F.A. was featured in a TV prog about the paranormal some years later, where the manager of a small engineering firm was working late on his own one night doing the accounts in the old control tower on a disused airfield where his firm was renting some hangars , when he heard footsteps plodding up the stone stairs and stop outside his door.
After a short silence he impatiently called out "Well come on in then!", but nobody did. He went and opened the door but there was nobody there.

Okay here's a theory I developed - we're all born with a "psychic shield" or "force field" or "buffer" around our brains to protect it from - dare i say it - demons and other assorted supernatural phenomena.
But if we're engaged in doing something that requires a lot of mental concentration, like me building that fiddly model ship, and the manager concentrating on his accounts, our "shield" is weakened because we're draining power from it to concentrate on tasks that require a heavy mental workload.
Hence, both of us experienced false arrivals or "visitations" by - who knows? Perhaps a whole troop of demons impersonated my family, i just don't know...

Oh, and here's something else - we hear of students killing themselves after prolonged heavy swotting for exams, so maybe they were concentrating so hard on their studies that mental power was drained from their shield and all sorts of nasties got into their heads...
Maybe thats why the Sabbath is meant as a rest day for us to relax and re-charge our shields?

Posted: 17-01-2012 14:49 Post subject:

We have a thread or two on this hereabouts, well, sometimes on the subject of vardogers, where someone seems to arrive but doesn't and then actually turns up later.

Coming Home Before You Get There

Seeing The Living

Doppelganger

Taking to someone who's not really there

Posted: 17-01-2012 15:22 Post subject:

I've had it happen a couple of times, very interesting article, Waymarker!

Posted: 17-01-2012 16:55 Post subject:

I've posted this elsewhere..... so apologies if you've heard it before! It has puzzled me over the years.

In 2001, I had three of these experiences, in daylight, over the space of a couple of weeks. On each occasion I looked up from the kitchen sink to see a family member coming up the garden path (the end of the path and back door were out of sight). Then silence. Nobody came in.

When I saw my husband he was carrying two shopping bags and I hurried to the back door to open it for him. It must have been a very convincing 'hallucination'. Yes, when he eventually showed up, he was carrying some shopping.

I could very well have imagined it but my stepson came up the path with someone I did not recognise, all in black. When he showed up for real, hours later, he'd brought a friend, a male dancer, dressed in a black shirt and black trousers.

Posted: 17-01-2012 23:10 Post subject:

I've had a couple of these experiences at my friend G's house. We have seen her partner's car come up the drive and someone come to the front door, but when she opens it, there's noone there. Of course a few odd things have happened there including the doorbell ringing but noone there again.

Posted: 18-01-2012 00:21 Post subject:

Posted: 18-01-2012 06:31 Post subject:

With CCTV's everywhere nowadays, plus small digicams habitually carried in many peoples pockets, and vehicle dashcams, we live in exciting times because assorted phenomena stands a greater chance of being captured on film than ever before,, Smile

Posted: 18-01-2012 09:09 Post subject:

Might this sort of thing be related to Rupert Sheldrake's experiments with pets that seem to know when people are coming home? The "Jaytee" experiments, stuff like that?

Posted: 18-01-2012 10:38 Post subject:

Posted: 18-01-2012 10:46 Post subject:

further to the above post....... the late wife was buried in the graveyard, how Gothic is THAT!

Posted: 18-01-2012 13:02 Post subject:

I have a [possibly] interesting addition to this thread:

My Auntie Florence is 95 next month and is more or less housebound, however she is very lucid mentally and has no obvious age related degeneration. She is looked after by my parents and a team of carers, as well as a very kind neighbour, Beryl who lives a few doors away, pops in almost daily and has a key to let herself in. My Aunt no access to the internet, has no books and claims to have had no prior experience or knowledge of any strange or unusual phenomena. She normally watches TV in her bedroom, only coming down to receive visitors, make a cup of tea or have some food.

I was chatting to her the other day and she mentioned casually that she has, on several occasions, heard Beryl open her front door, come in and shout 'Florence'. My Aunt has then come down the stairs to find nobody there and the house deserted. It is a normal sized British semi, with an old style glass internal porch door where you can easily hear everything, including the noisy door latch, with the door rattling as it opens. The reason that she mentioned it to me as it had happened that very day prior to my arrival in the afternoon.

She is not a lonely woman, receives a stream of visitors daily and has the mental faculties of somebody much, much younger.

Posted: 19-01-2012 06:56 Post subject:

Posted: 19-01-2012 08:25 Post subject:

Hearing Your Name Called - yup, we have a thread on that too! Laughing

Posted: 20-01-2012 15:54 Post subject:

Posted: 20-01-2012 19:10 Post subject:

Don't be too downhearted, a lot of the time you have to be pretty specific with these search boxes, especially now we have so many threads on so many subjects.