Has anything genuinely creepy or unnerving ever happened to you?

From what I can see there is a lot of retrospective evidence of the phenomenon of telepathy which seems to transfer from an individual in an emotional state (just involved in a crash, planning to fly planes into buildings, or more rarely in a happy state of eg winning lottery) to recipient who is usually “emotionally invested” in the subject, most usually a close relative.

Can’t remember if I posted this one: my mother’s sister and her husband and children were just arriving back to Ireland in 1961 from India, where they had lived for some years, via England. This was two months before I was born. My own mother, pregnant with me, was over at her parents’ house, helping to prepare it for accommodating the homecoming family as they would wait to buy a house.

My grandmother had recently been put on a high dose of aspirin for her rheumatoid arthritis and my mother had already been worried about a bleed in the eye conjunctiva, which the doctor assured was of no concern. The night before their due arrival my grandmother said she was really worried about facing their return next day as she was feeling dreadfully tired. She started vomiting, her digestive system going totally awry throughout. Mum said she was a bit concerned but thought it was a bit of a nuisance tummy bug.

Early next morning Mum was urgently summonsed around to her parents’ house, as her mother was very unwell. Mum said she was extremely pale and had lost a lot of blood. The doctor was called, saying at first it was just a bug, then declaring she was dying and to call the priest. She died about an hour later.

During the night before she died my aunt and her family were in cabins on board a car ferry from the UK to Northern Ireland, from where they would drive to Dublin. My aunt was drifting towards sleep when she suddenly saw a vision of her mother standing at the door of her house and waving goodbye, saying “I’m sorry I have to say goodbye to you”. She bolted awake upright in her bed and said to her husband “something dreadful is wrong with my mother”.

She didn’t disturb the children, but they noticed she was very quiet next morning and reluctant to talk at all. As they drive off the ferry a policeman stopped them and said there was a message to hurry urgently to Dublin. They were given a police escort at least part of the way. My grandmother had died by the time they arrived, and my father had washed her and laid her out which was a difficult enough job to clear up remaining evidence of the slow fatal bleed from the aspirin.

My grandmother’s anxiety about dying before her daughter and family would arrive seemed to have been conveyed to her daughter in that vivid pre-sleep state where she was receptive to it. I asked my mother why an ambulance wasn’t called, but as she explained that in those days you always called a GP first, and often enough the illness would be beyond medical help by the time they arrived; ambulances were reserved for accidents and heart attacks on the street. Even if you got to hospital with something urgent and serious there might be anybody expert enough on duty to save you in time.