Barbelith Underground > Conversation > Book of the Damned -- the Barbeversion

I've just remembered another one actually.

Back in my teenaged years, me and two friends took a trip to my Father's partner's Hut in a small north west scotland fishing village. This location had already been the site of a couple of strange occurances:

The first was an occasion when my Father and his SO went swimming in a local pool formation. The water up there is dangerously cold in the winter months and after a while of swimming my Father decided to leave the water for fear of pneumonia. At thiis point his SO seemed gripped by a strange affectation and an ecstatic refusal to leave the water. This might not seem strange if you don't know this person, who is usually very calm and collected and very aware of such dangers.

The next occurance was when i was sitting alone in the hut one night and became very aware of the deafening silence that radiated from this remote location, then, above the silence i could percieve the sound of haunting pipes beimg played. To be honest, i'm pretty sure there is a good explenation for that one but it added to an overall picture in my perception that this place was decidedly spooky and had a very weird ambience.

Anyway, when we went up to visit again, we planned to have a good time far form the bright lights of the city and stayed up late drinking some wine in the hut. One of my friends began to act strangely, which is not entirely unusual for him, but this time, seemingly affected by the place, he was much more excited than usual.
The first sign of this was when he set fire to one of the beds through neglegence, which is unlike him. Later, he asked me to walk down by the shore in the pitch dark, which we did. As soon as my friend caught sight of the shore in the torchlight, he was gripped by something i can't explain; he became absolutely vehement that we should go right up to the water line.
He grabbed my hand and began to run full tilt through the darkness towards the water. I was being dragged along by the hand, stumbling over rocks and struggling to keep my balance. At one point i remember catching my friends face with the torchlight and catching his face and eyes like in one of those red eye photos where you can actually see someone's retinas. Suddenly we were knee deep in water and luckily, the shock of this seemed to knock my friend from his bizzare state of mind, and we were able to return to the hut to dry off.

It was a really weird experience and a very frightening one but after recounting it it actually seems quite tame and free form fortean weirdness. However, for me my friend was either possesed or suffering some strange ambient psychic effect from the location.
I still call this my "fairy" story because of its relation to a poem The Stolen Child by Yeats, which we found after the event.