Giant Shrimp in Laundry Room!

[Dwayner]

Look!

An unbelievable, yet true, story from the Pacific Northwest, courtesy of Strange Magazine!!!!

 

Giant Shrimp in the Laundry Room

 

Transcription of tape recorded phone message:

 

"Hi. My name is Virginia Staples and in 1948 I lived in Bremerton, Washington. The apartment where I lived had a gigantically huge basement. There were huge holes in the walls and the apartment house manager used to tell me that it was rumored there was a passage to the water. The huge apartment houses were so close together and they all had basements and they were old buildings. There was a washer and a washtub and a clothesline. And on this particular day I had gotten my clothes all hung up but I kept feeling someone was staring at me or looking at me. And it was such a creepy feeling I finally turned around and looked towards the back of the basement and froze. I was so scared I can still feel it. I couldn't move. In one of the huge holes in the basement there stood this thing. [she breaks down here.] Oh, it was horrible! I stand five foot tall and this creature was as tall as I was. It had a bright orange colored body and little spidery thin legs and antennae on its head that kept moving back and in and out. [Crying now.] That thing started towards me. I backed out of the basement and got up to my apartment and I packed all my things and moved. I was so scared. I moved over to Seattle to my cousin's. I went to an aquarium to see if I could see anything that looked like what it was, and the only thing that I could find that looked anything like it was this little tiny shrimp. But it just doesn't make sense. I had horrible nightmares for years. I finally got up enough nerve a couple of years ago to go back to revisit Bremerton. But the Navy has enlarged so much and the apartment house on Denny Street has been torn down. Really nobody would really believe this, but as God is my witness it really happened. "

 

Originally published in Strange 6.

 

Stoke up the Bar-B!!!

 

[ScottP]

Giant Shrimp on Roof.

[Dwayner]

[allthumbs]

"Is that seafood I smell?"

[Dwayner]

Another kind of shrimp:

 

[Dr_Flash_Amazing]

Whatchootalkin'about, Willis?

[EWolfe]

Look!

An unbelievable, yet true, story from the Pacific Northwest, courtesy of Strange Magazine!!!!

 

Giant Shrimp in the Laundry Room

 

Transcription of tape recorded phone message:

 

"Hi. My name is Virginia Staples and in 1948 I lived in Bremerton, Washington. The apartment where I lived had a gigantically huge basement. There were huge holes in the walls and the apartment house manager used to tell me that it was rumored there was a passage to the water. The huge apartment houses were so close together and they all had basements and they were old buildings. There was a washer and a washtub and a clothesline. And on this particular day I had gotten my clothes all hung up but I kept feeling someone was staring at me or looking at me. And it was such a creepy feeling I finally turned around and looked towards the back of the basement and froze. I was so scared I can still feel it. I couldn't move. In one of the huge holes in the basement there stood this thing. [she breaks down here.] Oh, it was horrible! I stand five foot tall and this creature was as tall as I was. It had a bright orange colored body and little spidery thin legs and antennae on its head that kept moving back and in and out. [Crying now.] That thing started towards me. I backed out of the basement and got up to my apartment and I packed all my things and moved. I was so scared. I moved over to Seattle to my cousin's. I went to an aquarium to see if I could see anything that looked like what it was, and the only thing that I could find that looked anything like it was this little tiny shrimp. But it just doesn't make sense. I had horrible nightmares for years. I finally got up enough nerve a couple of years ago to go back to revisit Bremerton. But the Navy has enlarged so much and the apartment house on Denny Street has been torn down. Really nobody would really believe this, but as God is my witness it really happened. "

 

Originally published in Strange 6.

 

Stoke up the Bar-B!!!

 

Bump, and a tentacley tickle at your shoulder...

[billcoe]

One time, when I was in the 6th grade, we were living up on the Clackamas River by Fish Creek, 7 miles or so above Premonitory dam.

 

As was our style, one time my brothers and I went for an extended difficult hike into uncharted terrain that involved crossing the Clackamas to the unpopulated and remote side and bushwhacking up a gully, which looked wild and wooly. It was a long drawn out thick brush affair, at one spot high up we hit a cliff so big that we had to head back down the small creek we were following and exit the valley via a bush-grabbing extremely steep and difficult circuitous reach-around movement to avoid the cliff and gain the upper drainage. Hours later on the upper creek, feeling like we are walking where no man had ever gone before, our reverie was broken by a splash, which I instantly recognized as a frog. Having been raised catching Leopard frogs by the bucketful (and the odd bullfrog or tree frog), and being a kid and all; I pounced and caught the creature.

 

It was scarlet red. The entire frog.

 

We knew of the (poisonous) Red Frogs of South and Central America, and felt that we had seen, and caught a new species of creature in this isolated canyon.

 

We voted: I wanted to take it to town and have the discussion with a scientist or 2 to see if it was a new and unique species or just a variation of and existing Frog. (like an albino is the same species except different color).

 

My older and wiser (7th grade) brother's viewpoint won out in the end after a long discussion. He felt that in it's rarity and uniqueness; we needed to be stewards and not disruptors of the earth. If it was a rare frog, we could potentially wipe out the species if we even removed this single frog. As we didn't know for sure if this was the case -or not- we were charged with doing the responsible thing and leave the environment as little disturbed as possible.

 

My little brother was a 4th grader and took no position.

 

Practicality won out for me in the end. I realized that 2 hands were needed to get out of there safely.

 

So the red frog was spared and left in peace.

 

I have not seen or heard of a Red Frog species in the United States. Perhaps this was the only one.

 

 

That's as close to a giant shrimp story that I have.

 

Later, as a parent, I realized that it is about as unusual to have a parent treat us in that manner my mom did, as it would be to have a 5' shrimp in the laundry room. Mom kept unbelievably tight tabs on us in the city every second of the day. It was painful. "Where are you and when you coming back" kind of things: always. Living outside of the city it was reversed, "hey mom we'll be gone today", we'd point at a far distant peak to indicate we'd be hiking that general direction and head out the door without any of the 10 essentials, coats or even a canteen. More than once we found ourselves drinking out of ditches or jumping a fence to steal cherries to ward off heat stroke.

 

Traveling through Arches N. Monument in 1966 or so and camping in the Moab area, we found all kinds of interesting and dangerous things to climb. Once yelling at mom from about a 200 foot high cliff and for once scaring her on how close to the edge we were. Another climb we jumped the 20 feet vertical feet to the ground which we'd managed to get up, and some other kids who had mistakenly followed us up got stuck on the rock, fearing to make the jump.

 

We'd come back dragging in all manner of creatures we'd captured on our forays, and they always were allowed into the house as pets including a black widow spider (which stayed until it gave birth and the can it was living in mysteriously disappeared), snakes, lizards, various rodents, insects, birds and even scorpions which competed with the rest of the standard pet menagerie.

 

I suspect that 5-foot shrimp-like creature you mention would have been allowed in too.