Before I start, I am letting you know that I am what my grandmother, grand aunt and my late mother described as "Sensitive". I have always been like this, always had small feelings that couldn't be described in any other way than strange. And it runs in my family.
In the city I now live, there are places I won't go near, not because of anything that's happened to me but because I get strange feelings from them. Like a certain house in a small street linking one of the main roads to the beach road, I cannot walk pass it because of the feeling of despair I get from that house, locally it's called the Murder Hoosie because a 6 year old girl was found murdered and raped in the cellar of that building during the 1930s.
My Sensitivity has also made several school trips interesting and on one occassion downright terrifying.
One year, our school decided on a weekend trip down to Edinburgh, to tour certain sites for a report on Haunted Places for Halloween. One of the sites was a graveyard, which has this large mausoleum in it. The mausoleum is said to hold a "Great Evil" and our teacher thought it would be a good idea to go and look at this building... I wasn't too happy about this, voiced my nervousness about it and got told that, "It'll be okay. It's just a building." The class arrives at the graveyard and are slowly wandering through towards this mausoleum, my friend who was holding my hand could physically tell I was getting more and more unnerved the closer we got to it. After two hours, the class arrived, and the teacher wanted to get a photo of the mausoleum with a student leaning on it. She chose me... I clearly wasn't happy about this, but she forced me to lean against the building. I was crying quietly when I leaned on it, next thing the class knew I had PHYSICALLY jumped 10 feet and was running screaming and crying openly from the place. I didn't stop running until I was back in the school bus, hiding in the footwell of the back seats, my friend took a photo just as I touched it. On the wall, some 6 feet behind me was a 12 foot tall shadow and it was clearly reaching for me. The sun was shining directly on that wall, there was no one but me standing near that wall, and my own shadow was cast in front of me...
Another school trip out to a nature reserve just up the coast of the city I live in, I was throughly enjoying myself out there, I love being surrounded by nature, I feel at peace when I am. The ranger is guiding us around, and decided that we'll have lunch in this old broken down kirk (small church), the class file in and he notices that I've stopped at the door, shivering a bit. He comes over and asks me why, I tell him that the inside of the kirk feels wrong and I don't want to go in. He accepts this, and asks if anyone wants to sit outside with me as he's not going to insist I enter, two of my friends sit outside with me, as we eat our lunches. The ranger starts to tell us a local legend about the kirk that we are at, telling us that the minister had been a bad sort and that the Devil himself came and took him away, cursing the kirk in the process...
Later on the same trip, my class are looking a free-standing rock pillar from about 10 feet from the cliff edge (can't remember the proper term for them, you see them a lot in postcards) and I can hear singing. I look around at my class and no-one's saying a word (and we weren't allowed to bring any electronics so no personal stereos, cellphones, whatever), and I mention this to the ranger, who looks a little spooked at that point, who turns to see four of the guys getting dangerously close to the cliff. He basically cuffs them and drags them back away from the edge, and gets the guys in the class to move away from the pillar NOW! He turns to see a couple of us, with the female ranger looking down at the small cave at the bottom of this pillar, and she asks me if I can still hear singing, I could and then pointed out a girl disappearing into the cave, and told her that it seemed that it was the girl down there doing the singing. The rangers shifted the class the instant I said that, to a nearby campground and asked me again, if I could still hear the singing. I told them no, and we get told that the cave I saw the girl go into had sevral legends attached to it, one was a girl had hidden in there, and sang to attract her groom to her so they could elope, he was late and she drowned. Now she sings to attract a groom to live with her for eternity, another one was that it was a lair of a Siren.
When I used to work, me and my friends would always take this same little alley to cut down on how long it took us to get home, it saved us some 10 minutes. We worked at nights, so we'd stop in a little pub for a hour to unwind before walking home.
One night, when we were about to go down the alley, I just froze. I refused to step into the alleyway, no matter what my friends said or did, I simply would not go down that narrow path. My friend who knew me as Witchypoo, realised that I was getting one of my "Sensitivity Spikes" and decided to direct the small group the long way home, I relaxed when we walked away.
Next day, we were walking to work and saw the alleyway sealed with police tape, and a poor young policeman warding people away from it. Intrigued, we stopped and asked. We explained that we'd walked past it last night, he told us it had been a good thing we'd walked past instead of going down like we usually did, as someone had been murdered in the alleyway the night before, about thirty minutes before we would have gotten there. The murderer was caught in the alleyway, waiting on another victim three hours later. I had gone white at this, and had a panic attack.
3 months later, I know this'll sound strange to a lot of you but I went into the alleyway with a small fish supper, laid it down in the alcove the victim was found, and said, "That's for you. Thanks for warning us." I feel a warmth around me, and I swear I heard a male voice whispering, "You're welcome, miss."
And I knew when my mother and grandfather had died, twenty minutes before I got the phone call from the hospital. That was the only reason I didn't break down and cry... I did that later, at the hospital.
I'm going to stop there, as I'm spooking myself as I'm home alone with no one to comfort or calm me.