Story Submitted by: Trisha

I was sitting in a hotel room in Las Vegas with time to kill between the end of a conference and dinner plans. I decided to check Facebook, and saw an announcement from my 18 year old brother-in-law that his wife was pregnant. Being married to the oldest of 12 kids, I always felt an undue responsibility to give my in-laws their first grandchild. My sister-in-law was already pregnant at the time, and now another sister-in-law was going to show us up.

I got to feeling really depressed, and upset, and decided to go downstairs and walk around the shops since I had hours to kill before my dinner plans. I walked in and out of stores, not looking to buy anything in particular, just to take my mind off my depression. As I walked into the main mall area, I happened to catch the eye of a woman walking in the opposite direction, and just went about my business to look a kiosk of jewelry.

A few moments later, the woman doubled back and approached me. She told me she was a psychic and that she felt compelled to come talk to me. Not fully believing, I was polite and listened quietly to what she had to say. She told me I had a beautiful aura and that I was putting too much pressure on myself. She told me that I felt things deeply, but I shouldn’t worry about what others think.

I was surprised that she seemed so dead on, but knowing how “psychics” feed off their mark’s responses, I was sure to give her no reaction. She asked if she could give me a hug as she felt I needed one, and I obliged. She gave me her card and said she did free readings, which I took but explained that I was not local & had somewhere to be. It was weird how on-the-nose she was, and until then I thought that most psychics were fake. Now, I’m not so sure.

Story Submitted by: steven

My wife and I had gotten a new dog, named Bodo. He used to race into the house from the yeard and back out to the yard again to do laps. We had a screen door which had been broken a few times by Bodo running into it. The problem was, if we left the door open, Bodo didn’t break it. But then the flies came in. If we closed it, the flies were kept out, but sooner or later Bodo would break it again.

One day, I was working in the living room and I had asked my wife to keep the screen door closed. She walked out to the detached garage to where our laundry room was. I noticed she did not close the screen door. I was filled with a rage for some reason, and in that instance I heard the screen door slam shut. I looked up, sure to find that my wife had come back from the laundry room and angrily closed the door. But no……… I could see that she was still 40 feet away outside in the garage, oblivious to what had just occurred………..

Strange things happen in this universe.

What is the vortex?

A question I’ve been striving to answer for years.

So here’s the story…

A couple years ago, I’m driving (riding, my brother-in-law was driving) down to New York City for this student journalists’ convention Columbia puts on every year.  We’re following a map from MapsOnUs and it’s starting to get fairly dark.  We’re somewhere in Pennsylvania, and I’m getting in an evil mood, so I start talking about how weird everything looks.  How we could be entering THE VORTEX.

The vortex, I say, is an alternate universe made from evil, and the sky is green and the trees are blue.  And if we get sucked in we’ll never make it out.  Not alive, anyway.

The sky is getting darker and so is the mood, because we’ve been on this stretch of highway for awhile and it seems to extend into infinity.  And the map tells us to exit onto a highway whose number I can’t remember, then one mile later get back on the one we’re on.  That seems odd to us, but we follow the map because, hell, we’ve never driven to the City before.

As we near the exit we pass a billboard, blank and low to the ground.  I comment that it looks almost like an empty spot for a sponsor ad in some sort of NBC Miniseries.  And we take the exit and drive through this little town that’s not a highway at all, and we never reach the other side.

We drove.  And drove.  There was no on ramp.  We drove.  And drove.  There were no signs.

We stopped at this gas station and asked for directions from this guy who looked oddly like an ogre.  He was probably just an Oaf, though, cause his directions led us nowhere.

And I swear, in the dark, those trees were blue.

After awhile we turned around and got back on the way we came.  And we ignored the directions and stayed off the vortex highway and ended up exactly where we wanted to go.

I can’t tell you where the vortex was or recommend that you go there.  All I know is it’s a little stretch of road that serves no particular purpose.  The sky is green and the trees are blue and if you’ve got money you may be able to sponsor it.  And if you end up there, say hi to the ogre at the little gas station down the road.

I don’t want to ever see him again.

Monroe Community College. A small college in upstate New York filled with astoundingly cool professors. I did my two years there before NYU, and it’s truly a wonderful place. But something about it’s a little freaky.

This is the outside of MCC.

It looks normal, right? It is, for the most part.

For the most part.

This one day, fairly warm, I’m waiting to meet Mom and the brother. They’re picking me up from class at 3:00. So three rolls around, and I go outside, and they’re not there yet. Mom’s usually (always) a little (incredibly) late, so I go back in and wait.

3:15. I go outside. I scan the parking lot. Nothing.

I wander around a bit, killing time, knowing they’ll be there eventually.

3:30. I go outside. I scan the parking lot. Nothing.

I go inside and wait. I look up at the ceiling and wait. I look outside and… wait, they’re there.

I go out and meet them and they ask me where I’ve been.

Here, I say, waiting for you.

Nut uh, they say, we’ve been waiting for you.

Well I’ve been checking since three o’clock, and you haven’t been around…

Not true. We’ve been here since about ten after. You must just not have seen us.

The view from the entrance to their parking spot.

The view from their parking spot to the entrance. Up there at the top of the ramp.

So here’s the thing… If I came outside and looked right where they were parked, and they were sitting there watching for me, but I didn’t see them and they didn’t see me, then where was I and where were they?

Now it’s quite possible they were lying through their teeth, but when that happens my brother is usually less than adamant. He’s very adamant that they were there. And I know I was there. So bottom line… that’s just freaky.

 

Human beings are sometimes – many times – endowed with a near perverse talent for stupidity.  That much we have established.

Technology, made by those humans who usually consider themselves the sharper knives in the drawer, is often instilled with a mind boggling ability to confuse and annoy.  That we’ve also established.

But what about the very world in which we live?  This place that we call Earth.  This place that many fight to protect from the stupidity of generations passed.  This place that others fight to destroy because saving it is just too hard.  The planet Earth, which we call home.  It has its quirks, too.

What do I mean by quirks?  Well, what’s this page about?  Weirdness.  Weirder than marshmallows.  Hard to explain, impossible to ignore.  In this case, any anomaly that you just don’t get, that doesn’t make sense, that makes you look up and say, That’s Just Freaky.

All right, an example.  I was in, I believe, seventh grade.  The local carnival was going on, and I went with my best friend, Emily.  My sister drove us, then left us to our own accord, with instructions to meet her at 8:30.  We wandered around, played some games, went on a couple of rides.  Then we checked our watch, and it was 8:15, or, you know, somewhere in a five minute span.  Cool, we said, just enough time for one more ride.  We just happened to be passing one of Emily’s favorites.

I don’t remember what this thing was called, but I’ll do my best to describe it.  It was a tall metal pole jammed into the ground with four – let’s call them branches – protruding from it.  Each branch in turn had four mini-branches, each of those housed a cart, which dangled from its end.  When it was going, the main branches turned to the left, the mini-branches swung the carts to the right.  So basically you were turning, at very high speeds, in two directions at once.  It was great.

So, you’re saying, where’s the weird part?  Hard to explain, impossible to ignore.  It’s coming, relax.

We rode this ride, and I can’t stress this enough, once.  Only once.  We didn’t say screw it and go again.  We didn’t have time, we had to go meet my sister.  So we got off after one ride and started to head to the parking lot.  About half way there, we met up with my sister, and boy was she fuming.  She’d just come to look for us, she’d been sitting there waiting forever.  Huh?  We checked our watches.  It was nearly 9:00.  Whoa…

Have you ever been on a ride that lasts forty-five minutes?  It sure didn’t go that long from where we were sitting.  More like five, from my best estimate.  Emily and I just looked at her, dumbfounded, then finally left.  What we should have done is stop, look at each other and say…

That’s Just Freaky.