Not outdoor-related but this one definitely changed my perspective on a few things in life.
When I was 19, I used to live in an old hospital that was initially squatted for many years and eventually legalized and converted into cheap living space, communal style. My girlfriend at the time came to see me right after I moved there and we were fast asleep one night when out of the blue she woke me up by gently stroking my forearm. I was about to ask her what's going on, but before I could get a word out, she said "did you just touch my arm?"
I was immediately wide awake, turned on the lights, nobody in the room of course. She's getting freaked out, I'm trying to tell her it was probably a mouse or something even though I knew perfectly well it was a human hand that touched me.
We eventually fell asleep again but this was just the intro to 4 full months of strange occurrences right around the time it started getting dark. Glasses would shake, objects would disappear and reappear in places where I definitely didn't put them, I'd see dark shapes darting around the room out of the corner of my eye, strange pressure in the air, people outside my window disappearing in mid-air before I realized, wait, there's no scaffolding there, etc.
It got so stressful I would chronically stay up all night and distract myself with video games pretending nothing was happening until dawn came and things would always settle down. Thought I was going crazy. One of my friends didn't believe any of this and would just make fun of me so I told him to come over and just sit with me one night. Within an hour he was pale as a ghost asking me what the **** is going on. Eventually started dating another girl and she was very sensitive to this stuff as well, so at least now I knew it wasn't just me.
I found out one of my neighbors had lived in that room at some point in the past so I figured I'd ask her whether she'd ever experienced anything strange there, without going into any details. She said yeah, she'd see dark shapes darting around the room. Well alright that does it. I had another two months on my contract but I found a different room on the other side of the building and got out of dodge. Lived there for another 3 or 4 years with zero issues.
Turns out the first room was in the former terminal ward. No clue how many people died right where I slept but I imagine it must have been in the hundreds.
The place had gigantic windows from floor to ceiling and they were wide open during summertime so I don't think carbon monoxide poisoning explains this one.
I don't know what to call it, ghosts, echoes, energy.. whatever it was, it was real, restless and full of rage. I'd like to go back to that room one day with a different approach, no longer rooted in fear, and see how it feels two decades later.
It's made me realize that when it's time to go, it's probably best to attempt to do so on your own terms and fully at peace with what's happening. In a sense, it's also instilled a certain fear in me that perhaps what comes after this life isn't very good.
Picture from the old days (1936).
