The Paranormal & Strange Occurrences Sub-Forum

Naturally

Naturally

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Corner of Walk 'n Don't Walk
A quiet corner of the internet called Senior Forums, is a digital haven where retirees gathered to swap stories, debate the best biscuit recipes, and reminisce about the golden days of radio. The site isn't flashy, has no autoplay videos or aggressive pop-ups ... just good, old-fashioned discussion boards. It's owned by a mysterious figure known only as @Matrix , a username with a cat profile picture and a reputation for silently maintaining the peace. Users often speculated about Matrix’s identity. Was he a tech-savvy retired rich grandpa from, say maybe Florida, okay maybe Key West Florida, or some young coder who just found joy in elderly banter?

Despite the lighthearted nature of most threads, one section called “Paranormal & Strange Occurrences” drew peculiar attention. It started when a user named Gertie52 posted about a strange recurring dream involving numbers and static-filled voices. Other members chimed in with eerily similar experiences. Soon, the thread grew rapidly, and posts began vanishing overnight. Rumors spread that Matrix was deleting them. But why? A few bold members claimed that the forum’s servers were located near an abandoned military research site, though they offered no proof.

One day, Senior Forums went dark for 24 hours. When it returned, the “Paranormal & Strange Occurrences” sub-forum was gone, and Matrix posted a rare message: “Some stories are best left untold.” No one dared ask for more. Activity slowly returned to normal and the "Paranormal & Strange Occurrences" sub-forum reappeared, but a hush had settled over the community and neither Gertie52 or Gertie52's thread was ever to be seen again. Still, in off-topic corners and private messages, the old users wondered: had Senior Forums been more than a digital clubhouse? And who or what was Matrix really protecting them from? Hmmm
 

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Wellllll...don't know if your post is a short Sci Fi story or what. But I am the person who is responsible for starting the Paranormal and Strange Occurrences sub category after asking a few members if they would be interested, then hitting up Matrix about it. Wasn't aware of vanishing posts and don't remember Gertie. That being said...if this is the beginning of a SciFi short story...I like it. :LOL:
 
It all started when a longtime member named @OneEyedDiva floated an idea in the “General Discussion” thread. Known for her sharp wit and knack for getting even the grumpiest members to crack a smile, she posed a simple question: “Anyone else here ever see something you just can’t explain?” The replies flooded in. Tales of glowing lights over cornfields, clocks that ticked backward, and the feeling of being watched when no one was there. Encouraged by the interest, she messaged Matrix directly. The response came a day later, short and cryptic: “Sub-forum created. Use wisely.” Thus, Paranormal & Strange Occurrences was born.

At first, it was good fun. Members shared ghost stories, UFO sightings, and memories of dreams that bled into waking life. But gradually, things took a stranger turn. A user known as “TinMan42” posted a photo of a handprint that he claimed suddenly appeared on his attic wall overnight when he KNEW no one had been up there. Then the post disappeared hours later, replaced with a message: “Image removed – corrupted file.” Others began noticing threads vanishing, always the ones with oddly specific details, like peculiar pictures or other-worldly audio files. OneEyedDiva messaged Matrix again, asking what was going on. This time, there was no reply.

Then came the night the forum went offline. A full blackout, There were no error message, no redirect. When it finally returned, the “Paranormal & Strange Occurrences” sub-forum had been heavily trimmed, and several accounts, including TinMan42’s, were listed as “Inactive – reason unknown.” OneEyedDiva posted a thread asking for answers. Matrix replied with another rare message: “Some knowledge burdens those who seek it.” The thread was locked shortly thereafter. From that day forward, a quiet tension settled over the forum. Oh, the conversations went on. Recipes, NO-politics, bad knees, but in the dark corners of Senior Forums, some users still whispered about what they saw, and what they remembered before TinMan42's mysterious handprint on the attic wall just up and disappeared along with TinMan42.
 

Matrix wasn’t just the silent admin keeping spam at bay. Behind his minimal posts and lack of personality was a deeper mission, one that had begun long before Senior Forums even existed. Matrix was a handler, part of a quiet government project known as Sentinel Echo, a digital net cast wide to monitor patterns in anomalous human behavior. The idea was simple: people in their later years tend to speak more freely, with less concern for ridicule or consequence. If strange phenomena were happening, events that skirted the edges of known science or reality, it was the older generations who were most likely to talk about them. Senior Forums wasn’t just a discussion board. It was a listening post.

What Matrix was guarding wasn't the people, but the information. He monitored flagged keywords, geolocation pings, and irregular metadata. The Paranormal sub-forum, though requested innocently by OneEyedDiva, had quickly become a problem. Too many users began recounting similar events tied to forgotten Cold War experiments, lost time during the '60s and '70s, and unexplained installations near rural towns that had supposedly been “decommissioned.” Matrix saw patterns emerging, connections that even the agency had lost track of. And once that happened, he was given the directive: suppress, scrub, contain.

But Matrix wasn’t entirely loyal to the directive. In a locked portion of the server, buried under decoy sub-domains, he archived the deleted threads, images, and user logs just in case. He believed someone would need to know someday, when the veil between normalcy and what lurked behind it finally gave way. Whether it would be OneEyedDiva or another seeker who found the breadcrumb trail, he didn’t know. He only knew that what the world called “paranormal” might actually be the forgotten truth, and his job until now had been to make sure no one found it too soon.
 
And before deleted, some may wonder about the significance of the number 2 in forum users Gertie52 and TinMan42 names.

The number 2, subtle, but it carries weight, especially in a story tinged with mystery and hidden meaning. In the case of Gertie52 and TinMan42, the recurring 2 at the end of their usernames isn’t just coincidence, it’s a clue, a quiet thread woven into the larger enigma of Senior Forums.

In the lore of Sentinel Echo, the shadow program monitoring digital anomalies, the number 2 was a designation used for secondary nodes: people unknowingly tied to primary incidents of unexplained phenomena. In other words, Gertie52 and TinMan42 may not have been the source of the strange events they described, but they were connected to others who were. Sometimes a family member. Sometimes a geographic overlap. Sometimes something stranger, like a shared dream, or a voice heard by two people who had never met. Their “2” status marked them as echoes, ripples from a greater disturbance.

Matrix noticed this pattern early on. Accounts ending in “2” appeared more frequently in flagged content: detailed memories of lost time, unexplainable sensory phenomena, or dreams that matched classified incident reports from decades prior. And yet, these users were never the center, just close enough to brush the edge of the unknown. The number, then, became more than a digital coincidence. It was a symbol. A symbol of proximity, of interference, of being almost the one the phenomenon touched … and sometimes, being the one who survived it.
 
And what happened to Gertie52 and TinMan42 ??

Gertie52 was a retired librarian from upstate New York. Quiet, thoughtful, and known on the forum for her long, nostalgic posts about the Dewey Decimal System and her prized hydrangeas. One night, in the new Paranormal & Strange Occurrences sub-forum, she started a thread titled "The Numbers That Hum." In it, she described a recurring dream she'd had for years: standing in her childhood bedroom, hearing a low mechanical hum pulsing in threes, followed by a string of numbers whispered in what she called "a broken radio voice." At first, it seemed like the ramblings of a dream-prone mind, until two other users chimed in with nearly identical experiences. One even matched the exact number sequence she described.

Within 48 hours, the thread disappeared. Gertie’s account still existed, but all her posts were wiped, and her profile now displayed an unusual tag: User Status: Recalibrated. Matrix never explained what that meant. Rumor had it that Gertie received a private message before she stopped posting, something simple like “You’ve heard too much.” OneEyedDiva tried to reach out through private messages, but they were never opened. To this day, Gertie52 hasn’t logged back in. Her last visible forum activity was her signature changing to a line from an old folk song:
"Tell them I saw it coming, and I didn’t look away." ... but Matrix may have wiped that out too by now !!!

As for TinMan42, his story was more abrupt. A former Air Force technician who spent part of his career near Groom Lake in the late 1970s, he joined the forum under the guise of looking for "other old-timers with rusty knees and good chili recipes." But his posts often veered into strange recollections, things like unauthorized radar pings during clear nights, sealed hangars that didn’t appear on base maps, and co-workers who disappeared after filing certain incident reports. The infamous post, the one Matrix removed, was a blurry photo of a handprint on his attic wall. TinMan claimed it hadn’t been there the day before. It looked burnt in, almost seared. He said it smelled faintly of ozone.

That post, and a follow-up audio clip he tried to upload of the “whispering static” in his house, triggered an immediate alert. Matrix deleted both within hours. TinMan42’s account status flipped to Inactive – Reason Unknown the next day. His final public post was only three words:
"They're not gone."

Neither user was ever heard from again, not on the forums, and, according to OneEyedDiva’s off-forum sleuthing, not in real life. Phone numbers disconnected. Email bounces. It's as if the system around Senior Forums didn’t just observe these users, it reached out and removed them, like infected cells in a much older network.
 
And what about @OneEyedDiva ?? ... oh she appears normal now and even posted in this thread. However comma ...

OneEyedDiva wasn’t the type to let things go. The vanishing of Gertie52 and TinMan42 lingered in the back of her mind like a flickering light you can't quite turn off. She started small, archiving posts, saving screenshots, and using a private browser to search for any trace of them online. Nothing. Gertie’s last known library had closed down. TinMan’s old military unit was dissolved.

But one night, as she dug through a cached version of the deleted “Numbers That Hum” thread, she noticed something strange. A hyperlink buried in a reply and not clickable, but typed out as: hxxp://mirror-echo192.net. It didn’t resolve to anything public, but it gave her a direction: Mirror Echo. That name had never appeared on the forum before. But Matrix had mentioned something once, something close: Sentinel Echo.

She started tracing metadata. Through a contact on another forum who used to be in cybersecurity (a crusty Vietnam vet turned digital bloodhound), she learned about an archived sub-network of government IP blocks nicknamed “The Nursery” by old contractors. Supposedly used for testing psychological containment theories on unwitting online communities. The key phrase that came up? "Controlled anecdotal bleed." A fancy term for what OneEyedDiva now realized Paranormal & Strange Occurrences might have been designed for: letting people talk just enough to see who knew too much. She began documenting everything in a hidden Google Drive folder she titled Breadcrumbs, and reached out to the last user who ever responded to a Gertie52 thread, someone with the handle RedFence23.

They agreed to talk, but only over a burner chat app. That conversation lasted six minutes before RedFence23 abruptly ended it, typing just four final words: “You’re on their map.” That night, OneEyedDiva’s router reset itself three times. Her laptop camera light flickered, even though she never used it. And the next morning, her Senior Forums login didn’t work. The password reset failed. Her account had been locked by admin. No message. No explanation. Only a new profile tag under her name, viewable by the public for a few hours before it too, vanished:
“Category Shift: Observer Status — Elevated.”
 
OneEyedDiva said:
Wellllll...don't know if your post is a short Sci Fi story or what. But I am the person who is responsible for starting the Paranormal and Strange Occurrences sub category after asking a few members if they would be interested, then hitting up Matrix about it. Wasn't aware of vanishing posts and don't remember Gertie. That being said...if this is the beginning of a SciFi short story...I like it. :LOL:
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Yes, my little story has definitely been dipping into sci-fi suspense territory, fictional and dramatized, with a nod to those mysterious forum moments where reality blurs just enough to make you wonder.

It’s interesting how online spaces like Senior Forums can become digital campfires, places where people trade life experience and perhaps mysteries that feel close to home. And it sounds like your curiosity helped open a door for that kind of conversation. Matrix probably owes you a thank-you (if he ever speaks in more than one line at a time, right? ;) ).

This was a fun exercise for me. I apologize to both @OneEyedDiva and @Matrix if I was out of line.
 
A couple days after my dad passed away, I was in bed sleeping and I felt somebody tapped my shoulder. At first, I couldn't figured out what it was, I continued my sleep. A minute later, it happened again then, I thought that must be my dad. I acknowledged and thanked him for visiting me. Afterwards, this never happened again.
 
OldOld said:
A couple days after my dad passed away, I was in bed sleeping and I felt somebody tapped my shoulder. At first, I couldn't figured out what it was, I continued my sleep. A minute later, it happened again then, I thought that must be my dad. I acknowledged and thanked him for visiting me. Afterwards, this never happened again.
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I very much KNOW something like that experience is not unique. 1979, mom and dad were in a terrible automobile accident that took my dad instantly and put mom into a comma. After regaining consciousness, she didn't ask once about dad. My mother would later say that my dad had come to her during the time shortly after the wreck, comforted and reassured her as he said his goodbyes and she knew he was gone. Gives me a chill to type that out.
 
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