Plenty of other sites feature reader-submitted scary stories on Halloween, but we’ve proved in the past that ours are better. Can we do it again this year? Maybe!
I shared my only firsthand ghost story a couple of years ago, but I have one from my mom to tell.
Mom went to high school in Inverness, Florida in the 1960s. Inverness is so-named because it’s somewhat hilly for Florida, and the countryside is dotted with lovely lakes that supposedly inspired a homesick Scotsman to give the town its name.
Mom said there wasn’t much to do in town for high school kids back in the JFK era. There was one malt shop (“the Creamette,” it was called) that they frequented under the watchful eyes of adults.
Aside from that, boat launches along the lakes were popular places to park and hang out after dark. Mom told us kids back then would find a place to park, listen to their car radios, smoke cigarettes and sip liquor stolen from their parents. (Pretty much the same shit their kids would do in the 1980s, in other words.)
Anyhoo, the ghostly encounter I’m about to describe concerns one of my mom’s high school friends, who had died in a mysterious boating accident. Mom’s friend had drowned in a lake while out boating with her mother and stepfather.
It was considered mysterious because my mom’s friend was a strong swimmer, and the lake where the accident occurred was shallow enough that you could stand up almost anywhere in it and walk to shore if your boat capsized or you fell out. Also, there was a lot of turmoil in that family, which made people suspicious. It was and is a small town.
So, many months after the accident, a carload of high school girls, my mom among them, pulled into the parking lot adjacent to a boat ramp. They had stolen someone’s dad’s bottle of Old Crow and were drinking that mixed with Cokes, smoking Pall Malls and listening to “Johnny Angel” on the radio.
It was a foggy night with no moon. A distant street light at the far end of the parking lot provided the only illumination. Mom said they had briefly discussed the friend they’d lost upon arriving at the lake where the boating accident happened, but the conversation soon turned to other things.
Mom said she was engaged in conversation with a friend who was sitting on the hood of the car, laughing about something, when the friend suddenly stopped laughing, looked horrified and pointed with her cigarette toward the lake.
All turned and saw their dead friend standing right where the shadows cast by the lakeside trees gave way to the dim light of the streetlamp. Mom said the apparition looked just as real to them at that moment as their friend had in life, and she was trying to say something.
Mom vividly remembered that their friend was gesturing with her hands, and her lips were moving. But whatever she said was lost in the din of the girls’ screams.
They piled into the car and roared off into the night, leaving their bottle of Old Crow behind. No one had the nerve to go back and retrieve it until the sun came up. They swore they’d never park by that lake at night again.
When repeating this tale, Mom always told us she regretted that terror had stopped her and her companions from listening to what their dead friend was trying to say. Maybe she was going to tell them what had happened to her — that her stepfather had killed her or something. But they never saw her again.
So, did they really see a ghost? I don’t think so. They were half-drunk teenagers and susceptible to the power of suggestion. But they believed they did, for the rest of their lives. And though I don’t believe in ghosts, I’m not sure I’d have the courage to stake out that lakeside parking lot, play “Johnny Angel” and look toward the lake on a moonless night.
The End.
Now it’s your turn!
Baud
Saw the title and thought it was going to be a Trump-related post.
Aimai
@Baud: ditto. Or the punchline should have been that she was mouthing “don’t vote for trump in 2016”
Betty Cracker
Trump ruins everything. Even Halloween!
A Ghost To Most
My brother’s house, built in 1911 by my great-grandfather (and every stick is American chestnut) , has a set of stairs that creak, one by one, about 1/2 hour after the last person walked on them. It can be somewhat unnerving to lay in bed, listening to it.
coozledad
To be honest, this scared the shit out of me. I would say I’ve got some PTSD from it, but it would only be an incremental addition to what I got being raised among similar shitbricks in the south.
https://rurritable.wordpress.com/2016/11/01/open-letter-to-a-trash-queen/
I regret not laying into them with a baseball bat. Fuckers like this need very clear discouragement.
cope
Uh, at night once, I heard a strange sound and got scared.
Sorry, that’s the best I can do.
NotMax
Reminder.
SlapStyx: TCM is providing an opportunity to compare and contrast some macabre fun for Halloween, airing both versions of The Old Dark House.
8:00 p.m. Eastern time on the 31st is the 1932 film. James Whale directed this horror/suspense tale with comedic undertones. First film in which Boris Karloff received top billing, playing along with the likes of Charles Laughton, Melvyn Douglas and Raymond Massey.
2:45 a.m. Eastern time on November 1 is the 1963 remake. William Castle directed this one more as a comedy with horror/suspense overtones. Stalwart character actors such as Robert Morley, Joyce Grenfell and Peter Bull get ample chance to strut their stuff (plus grim ‘n’ loopy opening credits by Charles Addams!).
And a little toe-tapping jazz for Halloween.
Mike J
Betsy
I used to drive from Palatka to Crescent City very frequently. Often it was just go back and forth to my grandmother’s house on the weekends, but just as often it was at random times of day — just whenever I needed to be in the one place and I wasn’t in it and would drive from the other.
It was a big high rolling cow pasture about halfway between the two towns, and I would look and see wild turkeys and cows and it was a real pretty view because it was High Country in Florida and that’s unusual Betty as you know.
One day I noticed an ambulance from the local Funeral Home pass me as I drove North and I thought, wonder what they’re on their way to or from.
The next couple of times I traveled along that road I saw the ambulance again. it was coming from the opposite direction as before, and again we passed right at the cattle pasture. I thought, that’s odd .. odd coincidence! To pass that ambulance three times. And I questioned myself: was I traveling at the same time of day, was it the same day of the week? Not that I could tell or remember. But I made a mental note of it and went about my day.
I thought well it was an odd coincidence, that’s all. if it happens again I’ll think it’s really weird. And I told somebody about it because it was so odd.
Well it happened again. And it happened again. And it happened again and again, like I don’t know maybe 10 times.
It got so I would approach that cow pasture and think, wouldn’t it be weird if that ambulance passed me right here again? And what do you know along it would come maybe traveling north, maybe traveling south.
I racked my brain to think of how this coincidence could be happening due to some logical cause. I couldn’t put my finger on any travel pattern or irregularity whatsoever.
Morning, afternoon .. i don’t think I ever noticed it at night. maybe the ambulance just traveled back and forth a lot. but it’s about a 30-minute trip between the two towns and it just seemed really really odd that my car and the ambulance would pass again and again at the same point along the route. I got kind of nervous and I would really watch my driving along that point in the road.
That’s all. As far as I know the story doesn’t really have a point. It’s just old weird I guess.
raven
@NotMax: It’s a new world of Gods and Monsters. . .
Nicole
Sometime in the 1950s or 1960s my grandfather gave my grandmother a beautiful antique grandfather clock, signed by the man who built it, in 1789, as it was something she’d always wanted. It, through all the years I was growing up, didn’t work, much to her frustration and many attempts to get it to run again. Two days after she died, my dad, for some reason, decided to try one more time to wind it and it started working again. It continues, (as long as you remember to wind it), to work to this day. The family was convinced the first thing she did when she got where she was going was to track down that clockmaker and give him what for. And my grandmother’s temper was terrifying.
That clock starting working again after years of not is the only thing that occasionally trips up my pretty firm belief that there is no afterlife (note: would be very happy to be proven wrong, and hope to not find out for many decades).
NotMax
@Betsy
Enough to trigger a long buried memory of Terry Teene.
bemused
We have a creak on one of the steps down to the basement so always know when someone in the family or one of our pets is coming upstairs. A couple of times when I was up in the middle of the night reading in the living room (insomnia) and it was totally still, quiet while everyone else was asleep, I heard the step creak. Freaked me out thinking there was a stranger in the house but no one was there. We recently lost our wonderful 19 year old cat, stroke. I also thought I saw her walk into another room out of the corner of my eye.
We really grieved for this kitty so can chalk it up to that except I really did hear that step creak which never happens without a human or critter stepping on it.
HeleninEire
OMG. He’s up and tweeting about Papadopoulos who is the person who’s gonna nail his ass. WHERE THE FUCK ARE HIS FUCKING LAWYERS??
Silent no more
I am not a believer in ghosts, but the evening after my beloved grandmother died (across the country from me, and I didn’t know about it), my telephone rang. I picked it up, heard her unique accent and voice say my name, and then the phone died. It would be comforting to think she was saying goodbye.
bemused
@HeleninEire:
He’s this dumb and nuts and has no awareness he cooks his own goose. He would win hands down the top spot for a stupid criminal cop reality show.
NotMax
Surf’s up! Pure shock schlock.
Boatboy_srq
Indid a chunk of growing up in a neighborhood rebuilt after the 1947 Bar Harbor fire (so named because it started there, but it ravaged much of the coast). There had been a lot of homes there before the fire: melted glass and old nails were everywhere, and more than a few foundations dotted the community. On wild nights when the wind got up and the moon was shrouded you could hear the houses creak – and not the new ones.
Elizabelle
Thank you for this.
Boo!
Boatboy_srq
@HeleninEire: Their shift starts at 9. He’s in the care of his health minders, and they can’t keep his tiny paws off the Twitterbox (they would be fired if they tried – and have you ever stood between a deranged senile oldster and his/her favorite thing? It’s not fun).
germy
Some writers tried to see who could write the scariest (and shortest; two sentences or less) horror stories. Here are some of them:
A girl heard her mom yell her name from downstairs, so she got up and started to head down. As she got to the stairs, her mom pulled her into her room and said “I heard that, too.”
My wife woke me up last night to tell me there was an intruder in our house. She was murdered by an intruder 2 years ago.
I always thought my cat had a staring problem – she always seemed fixated on my face. Until one day, when I realized that she was always looking just behind me.
There was a picture in my phone of me sleeping. I live alone.
I begin tucking him into bed and he tells me, “Daddy, check for monsters under my bed.” I look underneath for his amusement and see him, another him, under the bed, staring back at me quivering and whispering, “Daddy, there’s somebody on my bed.”
I awoke to the sound of the baby monitor crackling with a voice comforting my firstborn child. As I adjusted to a new position, my arm brushed against my wife, sleeping next to me.
WereBear
@Silent no more: I have heard stories like this so many times I kind of think so, too.
What it means, I do not know. But it is comforting.
raven
In November, 1969 I had been home for about 3 months and was “enrolled” at the University of Illinois. The Stones came in early November and I missed it to go to a stupid field trip for one of my classes (actually the only one I passed that semester). My buddies and I learned of the Palm Beach Music Festival over Thanksgiving and decided to go. We somehow got a ride to Orlando and then set off to thumb the rest of the way. We made it over to A1A just before dark and got picked up by a dude in a station wagon. I was in the front seat and my boys were in the back. I guess we were just dopey stoners (even though I just came back from three years in the green machine) and we didn’t notice the guy squatted in the back corner of the wagon until we got under way. We also did notice a number of rifles laid out in the back until the weird fucker drive said he needed to take this guy to his house. We got off the highway and drove down this creepy-ass tree lined dirt road and came on a house with no lights. My radar was going ape shit but the driver pulled in and the knucklehead in the back just hopped out and split. We drove back up the road to the highway and the driver started just hauling ass as fast as he could down A1A. My buddies thought it was hilarious but I was getting more and more freaked so I finally told to the dude to slow down a couple of times to no avail. I was getting to the point of not return so I finally screamed “I’m telling you once more to stop and let us out and if you don’t I’m taking my chances and I’m going to smash you in the face”! He finally pulled over and let us out in the fucking middle of nowhere late at night. He took off but then came back twice more and drove straight at us on the side of the road. I remember telling the story to one of the mom’s of my friends and she said “that god you were there to save my boy”!! The rest of the trip was pretty good except it was cold and rainy and we were out in the open with no shelter! We ended up being so soaked that we hustled a ride and missed the Stones again! See if you can pick us out of this picture I found a couple of years ago.
NotMax
@germy
Q: Why does no one ever manage to get any sleep at Iron Man University?
A: It’s always a Stark and dormy night.
germy
Here’s one I wrote two years ago:
It was 1979. I was 21 years old. I was working full time in a large company. We were busy, but we weren’t overworked. The company regularly posted job openings on a bulletin board. That’s how I got my first promotion: I’d seen a job in a different department I was interested in and applied for it. The company offered to help pay for college tuition, so I could become even better at my job.
There was no balloon-juice back then. No crooksandliars, lawyersgunsandmoneyblog or nomoremisterblogspot. But I read other progressive writers in weekly print alternative newspapers, and found out that an actor I remembered from some corny old B-movies was running for president.
I remembered him because the National Lampoon used to mock him as the worst and silliest governor of California that state had ever seen. I knew he spoke out against medicare, and was a spokesman for GE, a major polluter.
A chill ran up my spine as I opened my morning newspaper the day after election day. The hair on my neck stood up: He’d been elected president of the United States.
Soon after that, the company I worked for changed. The tuition assistance disappeared. There were layoffs. We were all told to work 110%. “But that’s mathematically impossible,” I remember thinking.
Some co-workers in my department tried to form a union. Next thing I knew, the ringleaders of that movement were laid off, and the rest of our department was physically moved to a different building about 100 miles away. “They want to cut out the cancer” someone told me.
After I was finally laid off from that job, I worked in a series of other companies that treated employees the same way. Lower pay, “work 110%”, no unions, longer hours, more mean and nasty bullshit.
Sometimes on dark nights, I can see the ghostly figure of John Mitchell, climbing into a ghostly limo. Before he closes the door, he tells a ghostly reporter: “This country is going so far to the right you won’t recognize it.”
raven
@NotMax: Awesome!!!!
HeleninEire
@bemused: @Boatboy_srq: You know, I hate to admit this but for a fraction of a second I felt sorry for him. Yeah; it passed. I never really bought the Alzheimer’s thing. I just always thought privileged rich white boy thing. But seeing this, I am stunned. As a former manager (yeah I’ll never do that again) I know that it is all about who you surround yourself with.
Jesus.
Boatboy_srq
@NotMax: Ive wanted to slap Styx a time or two… wait, what?
HAL
Coates takes down John Kelly’s Civil War compromise b.s.
Boatboy_srq
@HeleninEire: He’s the right age, he’s done enough to bramage his dain but good, his diet is anything but helpful, and he’s surrounded by idiots and grifters who either don’t see the signs or don’t care so long as they get their sweet sweet grift. I hardly think it excuses him, but it does give a medical spin to his bvgfvckery.
germy
@NotMax:
PaulWartenberg
I awoke one morning after terrible dreams to discover my nation had been transformed into a giant shitgibbon.
NotMax
BTW, last day to watch Ravenous on Netflix before it goes bye-bye – if that’s your cup of flesh.
NotMax
@germy
True story.
Parents never – never – laid in a sufficient supply of candies. My job as a kidlet was to tote my little goodie bag around then hustle back to empty it into the big bowl inside the front door, from which it could be handed out to all and sundry who knocked.
Gin & Tonic
I also awoke to a strange sound in the bedroom very early this morning.
NBD, though – it was the TV coming on. It was last on at 12:51am Monday in the 9th inning of the Astros-Dodgers game when my power went out from the big storm, and has been off since. With these new-fangled TV sets, there’s no actual power switch you can shut off when there’s no electricity, so when the power comes back, it remembers it had been on.
Bobby Thomson
It’s all just the ghost frequency.
Bobby Thomson
FYWP ate my comment.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I’ve been fascinated for years by EVPs, electronic voice phenomena. This is where you hear a voice on your recording device that you did not hear in real life. You can find lots of them online, but most of them sound like just white noise to me. “Crackle-crackle” = Hey did you hear that, it clearly said my name! No, I heard “get out”. No, someone else says, it definitely said “walk this way”.
Being trained in physics, the crackpot theories behind EVP and why ghosts should be able to make them irritate me even more than the white noise “words”. But every once in awhile there’s one that, if it wasn’t faked, is pretty damn creepy.
Anyway I was at Gettysburg and decided to give it a try because, what the hell, pretty cool if I got something. It would be data, positive or negative.
Did I get something? Dunno. No voices, but there’s a whole lot of nearly constant background noise which I don’t remember hearing. And it starts to occur to you after a minute that the “noise” sounds a lot like hundreds of distant guns and cannon firing. And there’s also (maybe) a moan or two.
That’s all I got.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Gin & Tonic: I didn’t grow up with cats but have lived with them throughout my marriage. I figured out early on that one of the best features of having a cat is that you have an immediate explanation for all bumps in the night. “Damned cat, whatever she just broke /knocked over I’ll figure it out in the morning”
germy
Amir Khalid
No story of my own, sorry. But here’s an old limerick:
There was an old man from Peru
Who dreamed he was eating his shoe
He awoke in the night
In a terrible fright
And found it was perfectly true.
HeleninEire
@NotMax: LOL. That’s both funny and sad all at the same time.
schrodingers_cat
When I lived in Mumbai, my shortcut to the train station was through a cemetery. I never saw or heard any ghost.
The End.
As for ghost stories my favorite are the stories of Vikram and Vetal (an undead ghost kind a like a zombie).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baital_Pachisi#Variation
bemused
@HeleninEire:
His mind was completely consumed by his massive ego long ago. He has no inkling of reality.
Yarrow
My cousin worked in a bar that was in an old house that had been many things throughout its existence including a house of prostitution. It had a reputation for being haunted. The ghosts were so well known they even had names.
One night my cousin was was closing the bar down for the night and she went upstairs to close out that section first. She blew out all the candles on the tables, gathered up empty glasses and went downstairs. Came back upstairs and all the candles were lit. She was completely freaked out. No one else had been upstairs. She told the manager who nonchalantly said, “Oh, yeah. That’s Mary. Happens all the time.” Sure enough it happened several times again while she was working there.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@schrodingers_cat: I used to think cemeteries were safe too. Till one day the ground swallowed me up…
I grew up and went to college in a snowy place. Took a short cut across the cemetery and stepped onto a foot trail across the snow that previous shortcutters had left. Except, it turned out, those shortcutters had been wearing skis. Fwump! Waist deep.
Yeah, there was enough snow that people could ski to school.
Agree with you though, always found cemeteries to be peaceful, not scary.
Gin & Tonic
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Having lived with cats for over 25 years, I’ve often said that the most effective alarm clock is the sound of a cat puking. Gets you out of bed like nothing else.
John McCann
Inverness is right next to a wonderful state forest and has hiking trails that lead to terrific spooky places. There are sinkholes and caves; follow the trail through the Dolly Sinks at the southwest section for an eerie afternoon. Great place!
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I appreciate a quiet walk through a cemetery. All those histories that have come to an end. What stories are buried there?
Bobby Thomson
@Yarrow: Hazing the new kid is a time-honored tradition.
bemused senior
My mom was dying in the hospital, and my siblings and I were sitting at her bedside. It was very late, so I told them to go get some sleep and I would call if anything changed. Sitting beside her I drifted off to sleep and had a vivid dream of mom rising up through the air, young, smiling and wearing a beautiful dress I remembered from childhood. I woke up and she had passed away.
Tata
I lived with a bunch of artists and comics and there were not enough hours in the day for everything I needed to do. One morning, I was rushing out of the bathroom and walked straight through a tiny blonde lady. She was there, I walked through her and she was gone. I did not have time to think about that, so I went on my way. In the kitchen, I said to my housemate, “I just ran into your girlfriend upstairs.” He said, “That’s impossible. She’s still asleep.”
Humdog
When I was seven, my mom passed away just before Christmas. I couldn’t sleep wondering if mom’s death meant Christmas died too but I saw mom bring in her Sunday dress to hang on my door as she always did before church and I could then sleep.
My first and only slumber party in middle school the girls wanted to play light as a feather. I’d never heard of it and this church girl was a little afraid but I figured we were just playing. I said the chant and put my finger under the subject’s back and five of us lifted a 12 year old above our heads. I stayed on the ground, freaked, and when I looked up to the floating girl’s back, I saw a black eyed, squatty lumpy grinning thing drooling down toward me and I screamed. The floating girl fell down and hurt her tailbone, all the other girls were mad at me the rest of the night and I never went to another slumber party.
WereBear
Cemeteries are very rarely where the people actually passed on. Why should they haunt anything there?
Yarrow
@Bobby Thomson: True, but she worked there for about four years and it happened off and on the whole time, along with a whole bunch of other stuff.
Betty Cracker
Some good stories! Some sad ones too. Thank you!
I’ve told y’all this before, but it’s one of my favorite childhood memories: When my sister and I were kids, we used to hold seances and stage fake supernatural happenings to scare the shit out of other kids in the neighborhood. We’d balance shelved books on ice cubes so that when the ice melted, the books would fall. We’d tape bags of leaves from the yard under the table so we could press on them to simulate the sound of footsteps. We’d prop the arm of our grandma’s old record player on an ice cube so that when it melted, music would start playing.
The poor neighbor kids would run screaming out of the house, then we’d laugh our asses off! I sometimes wonder if those now-grown people still think they experienced a supernatural event!
AliceBlue
A story our neighbor told us a few years ago:
One late afternoon, close to Halloween, he was walking in our lovely little town cemetery with his grandson and granddaughter, 6 and 4. (Our llama pasture borders the cemetery, but there are trees and brush on the property line, so you can’t see the animals unless you really look). The little boy mentioned ghosts to his granddad and two seconds later, one of our male llamas made the “fighting noise”–sounds like a very large and very guttural belch. Our neighbor knew what it was, but both the kids ran out of the cemetery at about 100 mph. He said he was laughing so hard he couldn’t stand up.
Karen Potter
When I moved into this place I discovered that when make that first cup of coffee in the morning there will be the sound of lighter snapping and then smell of fresh cigarette smoke; I don’t smoke and the house never smells like old smoke. After a few weeks of this I got sage and smudged, the cigarette smoke smell never returned. But lately, in the afternoon there is smell of fresh chopped garlic and simmering tomato sauce.
I grew up with great grandmother who believed that there are more things than we can understand; and I have had weird, strange and unsettling things happen before in my life.
But for me right now the scariest, most terrifying thing is that we have a spoiled thin skinned toddler in Oval Office with access to nuclear codes; so masters of horror have yet to come up with anything as terrifying as present day reality
prostratedragon
@Nicole: There was a nice Twilight Zone with a similar clock theme: “Ninety Years Without Slumbering”
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker: Genius tips with the ice cubes. And pre-internet too.
I would have been one of your victims. LOL.
tsquared2001
@bemused senior: About a month after my Mom died, I heard a knock at the door. I got up to answer it and there was my Mom – her hair permed like it hadn’t been in 20 years, with no walker or wheelchair. She waved at me and said “I’m back!!”
I woke up laughing.
Miss Bianca
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I saw one of those “paranormal” TV shows about people doing recordings overnight at Gettysburg. Yeah, that was some freaky shit.
Which leads me to my second-hand Civil War ghost story: my ex-husband told me that a friend of his, years ago, showed him a family photo that had been taken during a vacation at one of the big Civil War sites – might have been Gettysburg. It looked, at first glance, like an ordinary family photo, taken in front of a little cabin. Then T. saw something else – it looked like someone inside the cabin, looking out the window. The longer he looked, the more it looked like a young man – a kid, really – in a forage cap. “Who’s that?”, T asked his friend, thinking it might have been a re-enactor or something. “Oh,”, the friend said, “you see it too? We don’t know – because there was nobody in the cabin when we took that picture!”
Well, that made me feel a little creepy, I can tell you! I asked T what the kid had looked like, and he answered with one word: “Scared”.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: Naughty, naughty. Will have to try the ice-cubes trick on gullible soul.
Shell
Great. Now Im gonna have “Johnny Angel” running thru my head all day. Oh well, guess thats better than “Monster Mash.”
hitchhiker
During the spring of 1976 I was living alone in a rooming house & going to Michigan State. I’d met this guy from Utah over the winter break, and we were carrying on the most delicious imaginable courtship by snail mail. I woke up freaked out one day from a dream that he’d died, and that his parents had come to see me, inconsolable. I wrote to him about this dream, in detail, because it was so vivid and weird.
I moved to Salt Lake late that summer & we had a very good time together … until around Thanksgiving, when he abruptly became distant and cold. I couldn’t understand what was going on, and I thought he might just be unable to tell me to get back on the Greyhound and leave him alone. Then he got physically weird. He’d put food in his mouth and not chew it or swallow it. He’d start to get dressed and then just stop with one boot half on. I took him to a shrink, and within a couple of weeks he’d been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer.
He died a year to the day from when I wrote my first flirty letter to him. In his things, afterward, I found all the mail I’d sent the previous year, including the description of my dream. His parents really were inconsolable, of course. On the day I left the hospital for the last time, I was driving a car borrowed from one of his friends (he only drove his motorcycle). The road makes a long, wide curve away from the University of Utah medical center and down into the part of town where we lived. As I took that curve, I had the strongest sense of him sitting there next to me in the passenger seat — not sick and strange like he’d been for the last few months, but happy and strong, as he was when I first laid eyes on him.
I was so exhausted and freaked out at that point — 24 yrs old, my first death, and I was alone with most of it. I sort of laughed with relief, like, “Oh, god, there’s another whole layer to this, right?”
I dunno. Not a god person, not anything — but stuff like that makes me think there really is a lot more to all this than we can guess. Anyway, 40+ years later I still have that letter.
J R in WV
OK, I got this. Two stories, one happened to me, one happened to a neighbor farmer. I’ll start with my personal experience.
It was when I was in the US Navy, in 1971, stationed in a Submarine Squadron our of Key West, where we could keep a close eye on the dastardly Cuban Commies. A shipmate, Dave, and I had biked over to the EM Club, over on the Truman Beach, and had a couple of drinks, then biked back to the ship. No alcohol allowed on shipboard, but copious amounts in port. Vending machine with canned beer at the pool, for example.
Anyway, back at the ship, early evening in a tropical paradise, clear as could be, so we went up to the heli-pad, pulled out a couple of big life vests and laid down to watch the stars pivot. There was a small fraction of moon, but it was a cloudless clear beautiful night.
The ship was within a degree or two of straight north and south, bow pointed north, so we were looking south into the milky way. Suddenly Dave made a funny noise, like a strangled outcry, and I looked over towards him, and towards the southeastern sky. There was something flying towards us!
There were three shimmering, glowing shapes, strangely curved and pointed, not like any aircraft then in duty. Now you could call them stealthy shaped. But they weren’t black, or dark at all. They glowed like a fluorescent tube does after years of use, kind of a moving light inside glowing as it moved.
We both jumped up, gasping in our surprise, and the strange three-some formation passed directly over the port where our squadron was based, and as it got just north of the ship, all three of them vanished simultaneously, as if they had never been!
We were totally freaked out! We scampered down below, into the depths of the ship, where there would be considerable steel between us and the sky, and described what we each had seen to the other, trying to verify that we both saw they same images, and weren’t just going crazy.
There was also a Navy Air Base just north of Key West on Boca Chica, still is. At the time Key West also had several military missile bases, with radar. We were in one of the most militarized parts of America, and had just watched three craft blow right over head. They were shaped sort of like stylized doves, with curved swept-back wings and sharply tapered body, pointy on the front and flared at the back.
They were either quite low or really really big, and completely soundless. While a big ship at sea is never really quiet, in port at nearly midnight, in peacetime, things were very quiet that night. And they just vanished while we were both looking right at them!
Shimmering and glowing, as silent as an owl gliding through the forest.
Eventually we split up, went to our berths to try to sleep. The next day, Dave wouldn’t talk about it, nearly denied being with me at all. So his decision was denial, never happened, so he could sleep at night. Obviously, I still remember it like it happened yesterday. Or rather. last night!
There were no such aircraft flown by any earthly agency in 1971! Actually, still are no such aircraft that glow in flight, are silent, and can flat disappear… nope, none!!!
Working nights and living in a very dark place in rural countryside, we’ve seen lots of meteors, bolides, fireballs, and easily explained astronomical phenomena like that.
Once, in the summer of 1969 around 1 am driving to my parents house after work, wife and I saw the hillsides around us light up brighter than broad daylight. When we each leaned out the side windows of the car, there was a bright streak the width of your thumb from horizon to horizon. Later on we found that it had been seen from North Carolina to upstate New York. So, a little uncommon, but not unbelievable, thousands of people saw that, have seen many others like that.
A few years later on, late 1970s or perhaps early 1980s, we were thinking about getting more into cattle, and were visiting other farms to see different breeds and talk with other farmers about the virtues of the breeds they were raising. We learned of a fellow with a herd of Brown Swiss cattle not far away, and arranged to visit them one evening.
A neighbor couple, Tom and Nancy, went with us, Tom and I shared work on each other’s farms, as many things take more than one pair of hands to make much progress, like pulling wire tight on new fencing.
It was mid-summer, and we got over to Harvey’s Creek after dinner. Tom and I walked up onto the ridge top while our wives had after dinner coffee with our host’s wife. The cattle were lovely, calm, big, healthy, happy. Brown Swiss are one of those multi-purpose breeds – you can milk them for home use, not as productive as fully purposed dairy breeds like Holstein or Jersey, but OK. And unlike dairy cattle, they also made a fairly good beef at the slaughterhouse.
Anyway, after a little while our host said we should head down off the ridge. He said “I don’t much care to be out after dark any more.” Which just made Tom and I curious. He was a big strong guy, typical farmer stock, you wouldn’t expect this guy to be afraid of the dark. So we had to ask, how come?
Now back in the 1960s the Kanawha Valley had a number of UFO sightings. And I’ve already told you I’ve seen some very odd things in the night sky. But nothing like what this old man told us walking down the ridge in the gathering dusk.
He has a daughter, he told us, and one evening after dinner, she asked if she could take the family car up the hollow to visit a friend for a couple of hours. Of course they let her go, and told her to be back before too late, expecting her by 10 pm or so, which on a farm is getting a little late.
Well, by 10:30 or so he began to worry that she may have had a flat, or an accident. When they tried to call their neighbors there was nothing but static on the line, which is still pretty common with rural land lines. Which was all the phones there were back then.
So Ed took off in his pick up truck. Just a couple of miles up the road he found his daughter, in the stopped car, hysterical. She told him that a light had lit up the road, and her car stalled, and wouldn’t even turn over. When she looked up, there was a glowing sphere floating above her car, and it gradually sank down to the road in front of her.
She was a pretty level-headed young woman, and Ed didn’t know what to think. When he tried to start her car, it fired right up, and there was nothing odd about the sky. She wouldn’t let go of him, so he pulled the car over out of the way, and they both got into the truck.
Just a few minutes after they started down the creek towards their home, it happened again. It got light outside the truck, and the engine stalled, everything was off, the dash lights, the headlights, the radio, motor, all dead.
Glowing ball of light in the sky, that floated down to the road in front of the truck, then went away. In a few minutes the truck’s lights came back on, and Ed was able to start the truck, and they drove home, pretty shaken by their experience. The next day, like my friend Dave back in Navy times, Ed’s daughter didn’t want to talk about their country roads experience. And Ed didn’t much like to be out after dark, anymore.
And who can blame him?
I believe every word of Ed’s story, and I know for a fact what I saw years before that happened. There are things we can’t explain, can’t even understand. I believe in science, the scientific method, the laws of physics, etc. We can do things today that were impossible when I got out of high school. Genetics, physics, the CERN particle physics center, telescopes in orbit, but none of that explains either of those night-time experiences, not really.
There are things that glow in the dark, and cold spots in some houses, even on hot summer nights. Happy Halloween everyone!
Karen Potter
@J R in WV: Like you I believe in science and all the things that we can do; it has been proven that our minds have the ability to affect the universe around us even to point of laws of physics, but there are some things that science cannot explain. Some memories may well be coded into our DNA but that doesn’t explain people having memories from events that no one in their family was part of. Like the person I know that has gone to sites of small battles and relived or watch them take place; or moving into an old house and meeting someone who died there a hundred years before.
I have had things happen for which there is no explanations; but when sharing them with religious people they will explain them as angels or demons, but if the religious person finds out that you aren’t religious then they become part of your imagination.
Lalophobia
@WereBear: Mess with people. I mean, I’d do it.
Mnemosyne
@J R in WV:
I read a book by David Sklar (who writes about horror movies) who said that he saw a similarly strange aircraft hovering over him when he lived near an Air Force base in Colorado. In fact, it hovered so close that he was able to spot the green and red landing lights on the bottom.
So, yes, you probably saw an experimental aircraft that was never practical enough to pursue.
Can’t explain the second story, though.
Tehanu
I used to do Tarot readings every year at a party held by a historical society I belonged to. One year I was getting ready for the party and decided — why, I don’t recall — to regularize the deck; i.e., to put it back in the original order, trumps first, then each suit in order from Ace to King. After dinner at the party, one lady wanted to be first, so I handed her the deck and told her to shuffle three times — this was my standard procedure anyhow — while I went to the restroom. She complained that the cards were too big, but I said, well, this is how we do it, so she said OK. When I came back, I started laying out the reading and immediately saw that all the cards were from the same suit, all Swords — including the highest numbers, 7, 8, 9, 10 — except the 2 trumps: Death and the Tower. If you know the cards, you know this was an ominous set. I just thought she hadn’t done a very good job shuffling, so I told her to do it again, and this time, the reading came out with a more normal mix.
Two days later, I got a phone call from the party’s hostess telling me that the chapter president had killed himself. I said how surprised I was because he’d seemed perfectly normal at the party. The hostess asked me, hadn’t I done a reading for him? I said, No, he didn’t seem to want one. She said, Then how come I saw him shuffling the cards, right after dinner? It turned out that the lady I’d done the 1st reading for hadn’t shuffled the cards while I was out of the room; she’d asked him to do it for her.
I always took the Tarot seriously — I never did a reading for laughs — but ever since then, I treat them with even more respect than I ever did. I believe that those dark cards in that layout were a perfect reflection of what was in that poor guy’s mind. I won’t deny that it might simply have been coincidence, but I don’t know that it wasn’t, either. That’s the closest thing to a supernatural experience I’ve ever had.
Mnemosyne
@Tehanu:
I used to do Tarot a bit, and I was medium-good at it, though more for state of mind and hopes for the future than actual future predictions.
I did a quick three-card reading before my writing conference and got 7 of Cups (reversed), Page of Cups (reversed), and Knight of Wands. I was pretty satisfied with that once I looked it up, but it wasn’t particularly predictive.
J R in WV
@Mnemosyne:
Experimental aircraft are pretty common in Nevada, AZ, CO, because that’s where the experiments take place. Florida is not. I obviously didn’t do a good job of describing what we saw.
The things we saw were nearly immaterial, light glowed from within, they shimmered like an old fluorescent bulb that you could see the arc inside. I obviously didn’t make it clear, experimental aircraft don’t appear instantly out of nothing, and don’t flicker out of existence, even today.
And we saw these aircraft in 1970 or 1971. Nearly 50 years ago now. 47 or 48 years ago to be exact.
No, we didn’t see a US skunkworks aircraft, not at all. No more than Ed and his daughter did in WV, around the same time we saw whatever it was that we saw in Oceanic Florida. Key West is a long way from the mainland, it’s like being on a tiny island 90 miles from shore.
We heard other stories of strange nearly occult events in Key West, but I’m not going there. I’m sticking to my own eyes in Key West, and the story told by a local WV farmer who is not morally or psychologically capable of making up the story he told me. Besides, there were two people involved in Ed’s story, just as there were in my adventure in Key West. And a farmer who didn’t like to be outside in the dark… I have trouble even imagining that! The dark night is half of why people prefer living in the country. Or more!