1500 hours. Saturday afternoon. The grocery store is busy. Nothing about the day feels different from any other day. I put some things in my cart, struggling to see the aisle numbers and what’s in them. Eventually I work my way to checkout. There is a line but it isn’t bad. I scan the milling people and Magazine covers as I wait. Nothing is wrong. It’s the same old thing. A routine. Nothing more.

I’m next in line when I notice two women. One is a little bit younger than I but her face has mileage that makes me unsure.

He daughter is a dirty blonde with long, perfect hair. She’s between 12 and 13, too young for me to be taking notice of, but I am anyway. She’s wearing a summer T-shirt with gray leggings, sneakers and a sweater tied by the sleeves around her waist. She is detached, disinterested, unaware of everything else around her. I get no indication that she or her mother, similarly dressed, have in any way noticed me. They are at the self checkout registers. I never see what they’re buying.

I get my turn at the register. I pay them no further mind. It takes a while for my items to be scanned and bagged, yet when I push my cart towards the exit, I’m right behind them, but they should have been long gone. They carry no groceries. As if they bought one item and it was small, yet it took forever to operate the scanner and pay. I wonder why I feel so certain that something is very wrong about them.

I go outside to transfer the items I bought into a green bag for easier carrying, since I’m on foot. I lose sight of them and concentrate on packing six plastic bags to the one. Yet when I heft the bag and turn to leave, they have not gotten past the liquor store I’d last seen them heading for.

This is wrong.

I get an uncanny vibe. I can sense them but the vibe is alien to me. The woman says something to the girl in utter gibberish. At first I think she has a speech impediment but then, as they parallel me on the concourse, as if she read my mind and knew I’d heard her, she speaks clear, unaccented English and finishes by talking about the girl’s father. That’s peculiar, she has a relationship with the kid’s dad. I think this is strange, but then I wonder if she’s the girl’s aunt or stepmother. But I can’t think long on it.

They cross in front of me from my left to my right. The woman tells the girl that “(unintelligible)…they have good ribs.” Again the uncanny feeling that she’s just spoken another language, just not a real one, or one I’ve ever heard. It’s literally dripping gibberish. And their close proximity is very unsettling. I quicken my place to put distance between us. I expect them to cross into the parking lot. With my back to them I continue west toward the footpath.

But the parking lot is not where they go.

Before I’ve gone a hundred feet I hear her again, right behind me. I turn to look, and before I can comprehend their pace, they overtake me and are walking beside me. Not scared but aware that something is very wrong with this picture, I ask, “How are you?” And the woman, as if she knew my thoughts, said in perfect, crisp English, “Good, how are you?”

And that’s a problem. It doesn’t seem right, as if it was an effort for her.

They seem to slow a bit, I push on ahead, and before a minute has passed, I’m on the path, walking downhill and falling into a damned Army cadence! Something’s triggered my training. The very basics of it, and it’s happened before but not because of anything like this. My discipline takes over. Now every sense is heightened and no matter my pace, a middle aged woman and a young teen match my stride and never lose ground.

At the foot of the path I have to cross a street with a T intersection opposite. Fools in cars have stopped and pedestrians don’t have any choice but to stand and wait. If they step off the curb, what will happen? It’s a weird moment that stretches on. Like someone just pulled back a bow but won’t let go of the arrow.

The weird woman and girl are beside me of course. They wait too.

Then the spell breaks and time resumes its natural form and I cross. They cross to the same street but on the other side, again paralleling me. I refuse to look at them and finally get to the stone path and home.

Having had a day to attempt to analyze this truly weird encounter, I’m no closer to being able to describe it any better than I just have.

One thing stands out. The girl was silent. I never heard a word out of her and sensed something almost fey about her. She was on a plane of existence matching everything about ours, but also like one not well suited for her. I could see her but never heard her voice. She was almost like something alien in a humanoid body but was all wrong. Like something I’d never understand was inside a shell. Her mother, or whatever she was, was a bit more grounded and convincing but still tripped my alarm.

I’ve not missed nor neglected my meds so please, don’t think so. I would say it if it were true. I’d even slept soundly on the night of the 1st. I sensed nothing from anyone else going to the store or while in there. Not until those two caught my eye, as if drawing my attention deliberately but able to hide the fact, did the experience begin. It ended with my arrival home, and nothing else happened the rest of the day, that night or all day today.

It raises questions I’m unprepared and unable to answer except that, here is another incident in which I’ve been forced to acknowledge that there are things that we humans don’t understand and, perhaps, weren’t meant to. I’ve considered the possibilities in conversation since, and one answer may not be so farfetched to the celtic people I came from. I mentioned that the girl seemed detached. The woman was all over the place. Was she a mentor, a teacher to the girl? What was she saying when the gibberish came out of her mouth? Was there something fey about them?

I’ve sat and judged stories of strange encounters for decades except for those in my own experience. That’s pretty arrogant, wouldn’t you say?

Bigfoot? No way. Never anything found like a carcass. Not once. The argument is insulting to anyone who made an honest report of a creature in the woods. The truth is, sasquatch sightings have been reported in almost every state.

Aliens? Didn’t I make great sport out of those eyewitnesses? Hell yeah. And because I found out that my condition affects light refraction I’ve discounted my own “sighting” back in 2015. But not every witness has a condition quite like mine. Oh, there’s a lot of us to be sure. They have medicinal drops for your eyes, prescription strength. They have procedures they can do. But I can’t say every UFO witness has something wrong with their eyes, no more than I can say that they’re all lying.

Werewolves? Oh, hell. Physically impossible. Right? But what about witnesses to “dog men”, the descriptions of which are not even close to bigfoot?

Let’s talk about the things, for a minute, that we really don’t like to talk about. In the United States you’ll get laughed out of your shoes for suggesting that goblins, banshees, faeries and horrible things like gnomes or leprechauns can exist.

Not so fast. Go to any part of the UK and try laughing about those things. You know something? They’ll get right pissed at you. But look around while you’re there. Get out of the cities and into the countryside and go to ancient monoliths and castles. Centuries-old cathedrals, and remnants of culture predating written history. See how Hadrian’s wall still dots part of the land.

The people still respect the land and its animals and all that which can and can’t be seen. They don’t generally litter. If a wrapper is thrown down, someone won’t be long in picking it up. It’s how they are.

We American people, we don’t count Latin Americans as Americans. Nor do we count Canadians as Americans. But as residents of North, Central and South America, they are Americans. Just like Norwegians and the French and Swiss are all Europeans. Our mindset about being exclusively American equals our perception that we are superior and we know everything. We are wrong.

One reason we disbelieve reports of strange sightings and encounters is for that very reason: we think we know better. That feral and unknown species can’t exist except in movies, novels and hoaxers on YouTube.

Or the Travel Channel.

But the most uncomfortable thing, I think, to talk about in the realm of what we call the supernatural, is the concept of a species that can appear as anything it wants to.

They’re generally referred to as shapeshifters and belief in them goes so far back I’d suggest it predates written history. Lately I have thought about skin walkers and what witnesses say about them. No story can be proven, but tales passed down for generations have the same typical characteristics. We discount them as folk tales. Wild stories once told around campfires by grown men in hunting parties and trapping excursions. Those “long hunts” were not seasonal. When Daniel Boone went on a “long hunt”, his party could be gone for two years.

What the devil happened out there? And what of the stories told by Native Americans whose roots go back thousands of years? They had specific beliefs and stories of spirits and many nightmarish beings. They also had strict guidelines on behaviour in the wild when trapping, hunting and fishing. There were some things no warrior nor even a chief dared do.

Largely dismissed out of hand are stories of Thunderbird attacks. In the 19th century there were reports that pterosaurs may also have been known.

Today those reports continue albeit with much less frequency; however, sightings of a particular species have been reported in Texas and as far away as Papua New Guinea: pteranodons.

Even considering that most of these were hoaxes or misidentified vultures, not every encounter can be dismissed. Someone saw something.

We’re probably not alone here. And whether those who visit or share our world are coming through portals between dimensions, visiting from other worlds or just know how to stay hidden are friend or foe is a question I don’t particularly care to get an answer to.

Five Years Later: Update 9-2025

I have seen the two people again in these intervening years. Same vibe: not human. Not one of us. And the knowledge that ive never had this exact feeling from anyone else I’ve encountered. Exactly the same except that I knew they were aware of me, but indifferent.

It didn’t bother them. I felt their awareness without any eye contact or speech. They knew I was there. Nobody else has made me feel such a thing. We do have senses that we deny to be real, or there at all.

Psychics piss me off. Mainly because I believe that everyone has at times been very sensitive to something or had some kind of vision or dream or feeling about something that was about to happen. A man was coming home from work. Traffic was backed up. He could picture his wife’s car stuck on a guardrail as if she had just driven onto it at the angle where it meets the ground, but continued on until the car was completely suspended right down the middle neat as you please, unable to move, the drive wheels spinning uselessly in the air.

You’re driving to work. There are two roads leading away from your house. You always take the same one. Never the other one. No reason really, we don’t know why people choose things like that. One morning you feel the urge to use the other road. Later you hear that a tractor-trailer had jackknifed across the road you usually use, at the time you would have been going in the opposite direction. Had that rig hit your car…

And so it goes. Intuition works even on the simplest of things. I take quizzes. If I don’t know the answer to a question, there’s a very good chance that my first guess is correct. If I second guess, I find that I was right the first time. This is remarkably consistent, too. It’s maddening.

I’m just saying that we humans are equipped to survive, not merely with working skills, but before that, to survive wilderness and the elements, to hunt, to gather, then to farm, repel predators, to adapt, innovate and improvise. Part of our presence here today is due to survival using intuition and senses, the likes of which many deny to be real even though they act on those senses thousands of times a day.

Applying what I’ve just had to argue as to the existence of, we would understand that people have, since before written history, seen, heard, or interacted with what is vehemently denied today. We call it folk tales, myths, legends, and oddly enough, fairy tales. A century ago, a mother’s book of bedtime stories were what people today would call “horrific.”

I know. My mother had a very old book that strangely disappeared which was full of weird and frightening things. I didn’t like some of them, but children are allowed to be scared, right? It can be argued that, developmentally, it’s good to experience a bit of fright. It’s an emotional response to things that will be remembered later, when fear will become necessary for survival.

Now, where exactly did those stories come from? Some were from orally passed-down tales from ages past. They all spanned centuries, going through revision after revision. But the core tale remained. And the further back one looks, the scarier and more fantastic the tale. Reading Shakespeare is a good place to see that. It’s all there.

Okay then, what were they?

It’s been five years. I just saw the blonde girl the other day. She passed behind me in the same market, and I knew it was her. That vibe. You can’t forget that. And you know, you know that you can’t stand it, it’s just wrong, it is not on a human level. It may not be so far off that it scares you, but it’s still very upsetting. Unsettling.

She passed behind me, and I didn’t see her face, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she walked away, all the way to the other end of the store.

Questions ran through my mind. Crap that made no sense. Was she really alone? Was she allowed out on her own? Where was the older one, and what if she was watching me?

Not human, my brain said. Not human. Dangerous.

She had not physically matured or grown much in five years. Something wild, feral and hungry, my brain said.

My intuition was to never let her get near me again. Don’t panic, but don’t try to find out anything else.

My knowledge of the Old Kingdom lore, separately or collectively, is limited.

If I instinctively thought of her as something fey before, why did I?

Looking back, fairys or faeries exist in lore all over the world, called different things and given different attributes.

Some say they’re tiny, little pixies who like mischief. Mostly though, the winged ones are more modern. Especially the ones with dragonfly or butterfly wings. Some traditional descriptions say they can change appearance, but that in their natural state they’re hideous.

Still others say they’re the same size as any human, and unless they reveal what they are, you’re not going to know.

I don’t intend to decide for myself what’s right or wrong. I don’t even want to know anything. I’m not going to think about it. Or her.

Misfires in the brain happen all the time. Get dehydrated and you get a brain that isn’t firing on its receptors properly. Mental illness and psychotropics are great reasons not to trust what we perceive or even think we remember. Memories are fallible and unreliable anyway. My posts about the past have to contain errors, although when I wrote them, I was sure of all the main points. There was more that I wanted to write, but my recollection of a certain detail, event or location was incomplete, so I had to leave it unwritten. A story untold.

Unless I have a reason to write more on this subject, I consider it unworthy of another thought.

But be aware of one thing I’ve not said yet: this kind of creature, if I’m right, can turn on and off, like a light, something I hardly understand and hate mentioning. It’s an attraction, wild and sexual. Like that’s the reason behind its hunger.

Lest you ignore such a warning as being raving, I’m reminding you once again that no matter what we think we know, we’re really ignorant. Sure, we’ve sent men and women to space, but of our own planet, we still know shockingly little.

People are seeing things they don’t understand. Hearing things they can’t act on. Feeling things that fly in the face of a creation of God, a supreme being who can create anything he wants. And who knows what else He made?

Should your intuition be affected by anything like what I’ve described, stay away from it.

Do no violence and no harm.

Don’t panic. So long as there’s no contact, everything should be fine.