One autumn night, the old stone bridge over the Weir collapses. Nobody is hurt, but the town is cut in two. By morning, there are two accounts of what happened. The local paper, the Ashbourne Sentinel, reports that decades of council underinvestment in infrastructure finally caught up with a structure that engineers had flagged as failing eighteen months prior. A newer outlet, Weir Truth, reports that the bridge was brought down deliberately, as part of a redevelopment scheme

As someone who regularly experiences things that don't fit conventional frameworks, such as non-local knowing, spirit encounters, precognitive information, altered states where the normal rules of reality seem suspended, I rely heavily on direct experience as a source of knowledge. But as someone trained in rigorous thinking, I also know that "I experienced it" is not a get out of epistemology free card. Direct experience can be misleading, misinterpreted, or simply wrong.