Yeah, well he's been dug up so it's a bit late.

I have no idea where Leicester is.

its in the centre of England.

I've probably told this story before, so apologies if it's old hat, but here goes...

The house I grew up in was very, very old.  (Old enough that the chief building material was horse hair and cow dung.) The whole building had originally been one large home, later split into 3 terraced houses.  My brother and I shared a reasonably large room at the top of the house.  Within the room was a very small cupboard built into the wall.  There was a small door, with a latch that you placed across.  The cupboard itself was next to useless as it was only about 1 inch deep.

After we'd been in the house for about 6 months or so, we noticed whilst mucking about that when you banged the back of the cupboard, it was hollow.  So, being the destructive, inquisitive sorts we were, we knocked out the back of the cupboard (wooden) to discover a small room secreted behind it.  There were a few tattered rags, and a long feather with the end cut as if for a quill.  There was nothing else to suggest what the room had been for, and neither the previous owners, nor our neighbours, had been aware of its existence.

We thought nothing of it, and simply shoved a load of our stuff in there.

And then odd stuff started happening.  The most notable was that every morning, even if we closed and latched the door, we would wake to find the latch off, and the door slightly open.  We would put it back, but next morning it would be open again.  Beyond that, the weirdness was more generic.  Clocks would change times, people would report seeing "something odd" (never anything more specific, and I certainly never saw anything) and on a couple of occasions we would hear the piano playing despite no-one being in the room.

Initially we spent ages trying to explain it all rationally (and we came up with something to explain everything, though I'm not sure these were ever all that convincing) but eventually stopped really thinking about it, and just regarded it as another eccentricity of the house...

(Not much of a punchline, but if you prefer you can imagine we held an exorcism, only for monsters to rise from the graves on which the house had been built and tear it to the ground.  The reality I'm afraid was much more mundane.)

Tin Robot's post is creeping me out, I better not flick through this thread at night.

On holiday in France about ten years ago, I was staying in a cottage with my parents in a fairly remote part. The cottage was really old and I was given the bedroom on the bottom floor whilst my parents had the bedroom upstairs.
The first night there, I woke up in the very early morning and felt decidedly uneasy. Stayed awake for an hour or two before falling back asleep.
The following night I woke up again in the early morning and looked up. Standing at the end of my bed was a man in a WW2 style army uniform. He was just standing and looking at me. I shovedmy head under the covers and didnt move until morning. I have never been so terrified.
I refused to step into the room for the rest of the holiday and instead slept outside my parents bedroom for the duration.

In the second week of the holiday, the cottage owner visited us and took us on a tour of the grounds around the cottage. This included telling us some of the history about the cottage, including explaining how it was used frequently by the French resistance during WW2.

I thought(have heard, never read into it or owt) that spontaneous combustion was something to do with some sort of heat source making human fat act like a wick. Or something. I don't know. Stop disagreeing with me. Jeez.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/rdzb3/what_is_the_worlds_greatest_mystery/

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/q0sgj/what_is_a_mystery_that_creeps_you_out_the_most/

FranticPea wrote:

I thought(have heard, never read into it or owt) that spontaneous combustion was something to do with some sort of heat source making human fat act like a wick. Or something. I don't know. Stop disagreeing with me. Jeez.

Yeah, slow burn experiment done with a pig (similar kind of proportions of muscle and fat as human) showed exactly the results seen in spontaneous combustion - previously thought that it was a sudden huge and high heat because the bones completely burn to ash, but that never sat right with the heat being extremely localised (surrounding room untouched). Turns out a localised source will wick from the body fat as it melts, providing enough heat for a very slow burn over several hours that turns the bones to ash without spreading to the rst of the room - only melting and burning the fatty deposits.
So, person has to have died first, then started burning - normally attributed to heart attack while smoking.

[edit] actually, just remembered, the bones burn differently because its the fat in the marrow that burns, so the bone slowly burns from the inside out - which is why they can burn to ash at a much lower heat than would be needed to burn them from the tougher outside layer.

Oddly enough I read about spring heeled jack years back when I was  about 13, it freaked me out then and I don't really know why.

re: SHC, I remember the burning fat explanation from a number of years back and there was another similar one this year, I think, but I'm pretty sure both of them, while initially promising, failed to reproduce the effects in many situations. Can't rightly remember at the moment, will check later.

My step mother swears blind she has seen ghosts and UFO's and all sorts. Not entirely convinced she hadn't secretly been doing drugs.

I thought I saw a UFO once. Turned out it was a tractor.

She thinks she might have been doing drugs? Wouldn't she have noticed?

Every 'sighting' she's ever had has been at my sister's house, who is er, a bit of a druggie. My sister told us about all sorts of weird shit she'd seen - ghosts, visions, hearing strange sounds, seeing weird things in her house, etc, and we only discovered later she was pretty heavy into drugs. My step ma is not entirely unconvinced that sister dearest didn't slip her something.

Or they really did see 7 alien spacecrafts hovering above the house in formation. Who knows.