paranormal at about dot com

okay...

a while back i made a list of some of the weird, wild, paranormal, cryptid, unexplained phenomena websites that i've happened across in my insatiable quest for more weird, wild, paranormal, etc. junk to feed on. i listed several and they're all good, but the one that i keep coming back to is www.paranormal@about.com. and particularly the YOUR TRUE TALES pages. this is the place i go to read stories rather than news reports and/or the latest scientific evidence. i'm a story person; love to read 'em, love to write 'em, love to tell 'em. but the real beauty of this section is that the incidents and experiences posted are written by real people. and you can tell! now, i'm not saying that they're all true; prob'ly not. but in the course of reading each and every submission, you get to choose whether you believe them or not. in some cases the author of a particular piece might come off bad. he (or she) is lying, you'll say. in others, you do that old "well, i believe that HE believes what he saw." and in others still--and they're not as rare as you might suspect--you ABSOLUTELY believe and it's the hairs standing up on the back of your neck that tell you you do.

granted some of them are well written, others passably so, and there are many that are so filled with spelling and grammatical errors that you'll literally wince...but i've found that that doesn't really play into my own psychic litmus test as i try to gauge who is sincere and who is makin' it all up. does the fact that somebody's a poor speller make their experience any less real? that they're really not a very good storyteller mean that something very bizarre didn't actually happen to them?
i think you can tell.

so go check a couple of 'em out when you have a chance. a couple of my favorites are "the dark scribble", "sinister being", and "it destroyed our lives" (this one is kinda long and filled with many of those wince-inducing errors, but i found myself thinking about it/spooked by it long after i logged off).

and while these are a mix of all manner of stories of the weird and unexplained, if you want to mainline on nothing but cryptid stories, check out the WEIRD CREATURES pages. i love "the dump creature" story and there's one in there, can't remember the title of it, but it had to do with three boys in a cabin being harassed by...something...outside.

check 'em out.
and as always, if YOU'VE got a story of something weird to share, send it in. we're dyin' to hear it.

take care~~
todd