[Haunted]

Originally posted by Madrigal
Not really a creature, but there is a history of the "paranormal" if you want to call it that in my family.

My mother comes from a small village in Cape Breton, the highlands of Nova Scotia, the northern island-end of the province. Almost the entire population of Cape Breton is Scottish in decent (like the rest of the province) and still very, very close to the scottish culture, and traditions. For example, my grandmother still speaks fluent Gaelic, she only spoke Gaelic in her house growing up, and learned english in school. Her mother (my g-great grandmother) didn't speak a word of english, strictly Gaelic, and so did everyone before her. My mother can understand some of it, and I know scattered words and phrases I can pick out of sentences. Along with the the traditions comes the superstitions, and a while ago, when I noted to my mother that I would often sense things before they happened, she noted that it wasn't uncommon in our family.

I wouldn't so much call it precognition, I would just often get a feeling about something, often something very specific, and then it would happen. Like one weekend when I was younger my scout troop was going camping in a remote part of the province, I had been prepping for this for weeks, the night I was leaving, literally 5 minutes before I got this gut wrenching cramping in my adomen, almost like I was sick, but it carried with it emotion, like a bad feeling. I told my mother, and she said to stay home, my father protested saying I'd be fine, but my mother, knowing the history of this sort of thing in the family, said I would stay. That monday I found out that every single person that went to the camp, 15-20 odd kids were violently ill on the saturday night, a number of them had to get drives back to town to go to the hospital.

We also have a history of forerunners in the family, a superstition most people who grew up in Cape Breton, especially my parent's generation or older, believe whole heartedly in. Many people in the family have had them, and sure enough, what's supposed to happen after a forerunner, has happened.

Many in the family often tell stories of ghosts, and strange lights they've seen, and the town is full of folklore and tales. One of them that my cousins once told me was the belief in faeries, and creatures in the woods. Out by one farmer's field, off of a dirt road there is this large dirt mound, likely standing at 12-15 feet high, almost conical, completely unnatural, and inexplicable. It is covered in grass, so it looks like a really unnatural hill. As my cousins described it the locals believe, and tell their children that there are faeries which live in the mounds, and when you venture out at night, as a child, they will take you into the mound. There you will dance, and play for 80 years, and when they release you, you will have not aged a day, but everyone close, and dear to you will be dead. Had I asked anyone in the town what it was they would have told me the same thing. The name of the creatures escapes me now, the original name begins with an S, and I believe is evident in Scottish, Irish, and perhaps even Welsh culture.

Overall, it's a neat place to go, and read about, I am not saying either way on the paranormal-ness(?) of the family itself, it could just be coincidental.

I should edit your reply, but there's too much good stuff in it. Being an Irish Celtic Witch myself, I know a lot of folklore in that department. (I want to learn Irish so that I can write mantras [Sanskrit term] to The Morrighan).

Would love to share some lore and secrets of the old worlds with you, if you should ever get the time.

@ ye who mentioned the horse creature...sounds like a kelpie to me, although you find them more around water. Some of these creatures are benign and some are not, i.e., the kelpie, which is certainly not something I would want to run into by the water's edge.