We were due for another tale of high strangeness around this place. And as usual, synchronicity provides.
Here’s a headscratcher I was just told yesterday.
A family was vacationing in a mid-sized town in the middle of Florida. While they were driving down one of the main thoroughfares that run through town, the wife had an unusual sighting.
Cryptid fans can settle down. It wasn’t an albino gator or a skunk ape.
It was a teen girl strolling past a convenience store.
What’s so strange about that?
Nothing, in and of itself.
But this girl wore her wavy blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, Walkman-style headphones, and jean shorts. Plus, she was blowing a big, pink, bubblegum bubble as she walked.
To hear it, the account made her sound like a Claire’s ad ca. 1987 come to life.
Again, you could say even that wasn’t too strange. Eccentric, perhaps – like a local going through a retro phase – but not on the order of Mothman or the Kelly, Kentucky goblins.
And you’d have a point.
But this girl’s appearance clashed with her surroundings enough for it to make a big impression on the family. And they saw some pretty exotic stuff on that trip.
Make of that what you will.
If the story ended there, I wouldn’t be sharing it with you.
But I am. Because there’s more.
So this family keeps driving down the highway, speculating about the 1980s valley girl they passed a few blocks back, when a road closure sign comes into view ahead. The wife, who’s navigating, advises turning off the main road to get around the construction. So they delve into this wooded, mixed commercial-residential neighborhood. They go a couple more blocks and make another turn – always heading, bear in mind, away from the convenience store.
And as they make their final turn to successfully circumvent the road block, they catch another glimpse of a blonde girl with headphones and jean shorts ambling around the corner in front of them.
The second sighting only lasted a moment, but the wife is sure both figures were dressed exactly the same and behaving in the same general manner. And they looked eerily out of place in the exact same way, to the point that she identified both as the same person.
Yet the time and distance between the two sightings dictate that for the same girl to have gotten ahead of the vacationers’ vehicle, she’d have to be an Olympic-class runner capable of 30+ mph bursts. And that’s without correcting for the family car’s head start and the fact that she’d have to run all-out through heavy traffic and streets obstructed with buildings, hedges, trees, and other pedestrians.
Maybe it could be done. But the idea of a world-class teenage runner deciding to hang around a gas station in throwback clothes while waiting to freak out the occupants of a random passing car – with no way to know for sure she’d been spotted – has no more plausibility than paranormal explanations.
What about a pair of identical twins who’d recently parted ways after an 80s themed party?
OK, but the timing of the same carful of people spotting both twins at those exact intervals still puts us in Ripley’s territory. And that’s the most Florida explanation, to be honest.
But we’re not in weird territory confined to Florida at all?
What if this is similar ground treaded by Resurrection Mary or the Versailles timeslip?
If there is a Moberly-Jourdain type time warp in the heart of Florida, chances are it would take you somewhere like this …
Who knows for sure? I guess in Florida, anything is possible.
It sure is spooky, though.
If you want a longer-lasting case of the spooks, read my award-winning horror/adventure series:
Reminds me of the Benson & Moorehead films, Resolution and The Endless. They’re acquired tastes, but I like them for their willingness to make offbeat, interesting films. They’re similar to Shane Caruth and his Primer and Upstream Color films.
I like to read high strangeness type stuff for amusement and lately, I’ve seen an increase in stories similar to this and also more Mandela Effect type things, and the unifying factor in many is that we are seeing more of these kind of things since the Large Hadron Collider started and it is causing all sorts of slips in time and dimensions.
We’d feel like we were cheated if turning it on didn’t do *something*.
Reminds me of a moment of minor strangeness I encountered last May: On the way to Mass on a Sunday morning, I walked past a newspaper machine and spotted the headline “Bush Stops War.”
Somehow, there was a copy of the metropolitan paper from February 1991 on display in the machine.
Correction: March 1991
The idea that this newspaper has just been sitting there in that machine undisturbed for 32 years watching the world go by has a strange, melancholy appeal to me. I can’t really explain why.
Does it add to the melancholy if I note that I pass by that machine regularly, and only saw it that once–implying that it’s been stuck in the back of the machine for over 30 years?
It does add to it. And I get the same feeling as CantusTropus regarding the melancholy.
Since the Mandela Effect came up, I should mention that back in 5th grade, I would often help a friend with his paper route. One morning on our before-school rounds, I remember seeing the headline “Nelson Mandela Dies in Prison” – not on one front page, but on every front page. I would ride in the back of his dad’s station wagon and roll the papers for him.
I didn’t dream or imagine it. I could tell you what I had for breakfast.
My memory of Nelson Mandela was my Communist mother waking us all up to watch him released from prison. She was crying. I still can’t believe I escaped the red indoctrination of my childhood. My siblings are still caught up in it.
In regards to the Mandela Effect, the only incidence I have personally experienced was the A-Team van. I watched the A-Team religiously when I was a child. It was the one show my parents allowed me to stay up and watch. I had numerous toys of B.A.’s van, from Matchbox/Hot Wheels type toys to those old friction motor ones that would run after you revved them on the ground.
The van in the show was always black and red. A black van with a red stripe. Same with the toys But the Mandela Effect people tell me it was always black red and gray. Black on the bottom, gray on top, separated by the red stripe. It’s difficult for me to believe.
That’s a new one on me. I love the show, watched it a lot – not just in the 80s, but just a couple years ago, and my childhood next-door neighbor had the van toy. In every instance, the paint scheme was a red stripe on a solid black chassis.