"I may be here to tell some kind of story, but I think it's gonna take a little time..."

(title quote: Marc Cohn, Ghost Train)

"An enchanted life has many moments when the heart is overwhelmed with beauty and the imagination is electrified by some haunting quality in the world or by a spirit or voice speaking from deep within a thing, a place, or a person. Enchantment may be a state of rapture and ecstasy in which the soul comes to the foreground, and the literal concerns of survival and daily preoccupation at least momentarily fade into the background."
- H.L. Mencken

First of all, I would like to thank everyone for sticking around and continuing to read through my crisis. I genuinely appreciate all of your comments, support, empathy, positive thoughts, etc. You have helped me more than you could possibly know.

“Adversity is the first path to truth; He who hath proved war, storm, or woman's rage, Whether his winters be eighteen or eighty, Has won the experience which is deemed so weighty." - Lord Byron

Still being relatively new to this blogging community, it continues to amaze me how we are all connected and invested in supporting and caring for each other. The strong ones pick up the weak, knowing that at some point, the time will come when they will need to be carried for some part of the distance. I do feel a great sense of community here.

“The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but deliverance from fear." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I want you to know that I have continued to read all of the blogs I try to keep up with as often as possible. I have not been able to comment as often as I would like, but I will be spending time over the next few days to catch up on commenting on some of the things that have spoken to me over these past two weeks. I have not forgotten about all of you, and I still enjoy reading what you write. Things were, at times over the past two weeks, too broken for me to have anything productive to say. Also, the emotional and mental energy that it took for me to deal with the problems of life these last two weeks, along with the physical energy I have been putting into my new job, have caused me to choose additional sleep over blogging at times. Things are starting to settle down a bit, so I should be able to return, for the most part, to my schedule. I anticipate some rough seas now and then, but I have ridden out these waves of the past two weeks, so I should be able to ride out those "rogue waves."

“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore." - Vincent Van Gogh

It is time once again to lift high the gauntlet thrown down by Nick at Anything Goes! to write the next of my haunting stories. As I stated previously, I have large number of paranormal experiences in my life, which I will continue to write about at intervals here. Since Nick has begun "round two" of what is becoming a collection of paranormal stories, I will relate another of my experiences here. When I wrote the first one, with the idea of writing more of them in the future, I set about to write them down in a roughly chronological order. The next story is an oddly appropriate one to follow up Nick's recent story. I am thinking that these should all be collected with a set of links, much like Josie has done with her collection of childhood stories. Maybe that project is in my future, if nobody else decides to take it up on their own. For now, I shall try to tell this story as best I can.

"The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends and the other begins."
- Edgar Allen Poe

If memory serves me correctly, and on this it may not, for the summers of our youth tend to run together and blend, I was passing my fifteenth summer when I saw him. It started unremarkably enough, as many such stories do, on the front porch of my friends' house. Phillip and Tracy were two of the best friends of my teenage years. They were brothers, separated in age by three years. Phillip, the older, was two years my senior, while his brother Tracy was a year younger than me. They had another, even younger brother, named Kelly, and a sister, in age between Tracy and Kelly, named Laurie.

"Men say that in this midnight hour,
The disembodièd have power
To wander as it liketh them..."
- William Motherwell

On the particular summer night in question, all five of us were sitting together, as we often did, on their front porch. With us was Laurie's friend Stephanie, who was to spend the night at their house that night. When we noticed him, we were making fun of Laurie and Stephanie, as big brothers and their friends are wont to do when little sisters and their friends are present and trying to hang out with the "older kids."

"There are an infinite number of universes existing side by side and through which our consciousnesses constantly pass. In these universes, all possibilities exist. You are alive in some, long dead in others, and never existed in still others. Many of our 'ghosts' could indeed be visions of people going about their business in a parallel universe or another time -- or both." - Paul F. Eno

I don't remember who noticed him first, but we soon all motioned each other to silence, and the six of us watched him creep along the side of the car in the next door neighbor's driveway. Their next door neighbor kept a classic car in his driveway. He was, to us at the time, a bitter old man who always appeared at the door to chase kids away from his property, or shout us to silence if our noise disturbed him. We had never seen the old car run, and its paint job seemed equal parts paint, primer and rust. Yet, he was very protective of that car, and we knew that if anything happened to it, we would be blamed, since we were always hanging out next door and occasionally running through his yard, going about whatever business we were about that day.

We all saw him, this person, who seemed to be about my age, fourteen or fifteen at the most. He was walking in a sort of crouching walk, along the side of that car, and we watched him kneel near the right rear wheel, which was facing us. He was no more than fifty feet away from us. There was enough light from the light on the porch there, as well as the security light in the backyard, and the streetlight across the street, that we could see him clearly, but not enough to allow us to see his features, or get a clear look at what he was wearing. The light that bears mentioning the most is the streetlight. The old man's house was on the outside of about a ninety degree curve in the street, with a streetlight casting dim illumination into his front yard, and a bright pool of light on the street. This bright pool of light begin at about the middle of the street and went to the edge of the yard directly across the street from the old man's house.

"It is a damn'd ghost we have seen..." - William Shakespeare

When we saw him kneel down by the wheel of that old car, Phillip called out to him, "Hey man, you better get away from that car." When he called out, the figure turned and looked at us, but never said a word. He looked at us for a few eternal seconds, then rose back to his crouched position and did that crouched run out into the street. When he reached the pool of light spilled forth by the streetlight, he disappeared. We saw it happen. We were all watching him intently to see what he would do. He was there, in his running crouch, one second, and the next, he was gone. We just looked at each other, amazed at what we had seen. We told Kelly, Laurie, and Stephanie to get inside the house, which the two girls happily obliged, then we walked to the spot where he had disappeared. There was nothing unremarkable. We found no evidence of his presence or passage. He would have had to pass through this brightly lit area for about 15 feet, and then around the house across the street, to reach any concealing darkness. We walked around the houses, along the shore of the lake behind the houses across the street, and even walked around the old car, looking for some sign that he had passed that way. We found none, not that we expected any, for the street and driveway were paved, and there was no reason any person who walked there would have left a mark. Tracy, who has served in the U.S. Army for the past eighteen years, and I have discussed this event many times since it occurred, have never found a reasonable explanation for the disappearance of that shadowy figure, so we have filed it among a number of other strange things which we have experienced together.

"Who gather round, and wonder at the tale
Of horrid apparition, tall and ghastly,
That walks at dead of night..."
- Robert Blair

I had, a few years later, another experience quite similar to this one, and so, though out of order chronologically, I shall relate it here and now, since it begs to be told along with that which has gone before.

"So many ghosts, and forms of fright,
Have started from their graves to-night."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

My junior year of college, there gathered around me a large and close-knit group of friends. We did almost everything together. Most of them were younger, freshmen at the college, and my wife among them. We often went out driving, sometimes cramming as many as fourteen people into my van, but when a drive was not in the offing, we would take long walks around campus and throughout the small town in which our college was built.

It was an old school, with the oldest building having served as a hospital during the American Civil War. At the end of the main road on campus rests a huge cemetery, with graves dating back to the late 1700's, and including those of several members of Confederate General Robert E. Lee's personal guard. There were, and still are, a host of ghost stories floating around campus, some dating back over a hundred years.

"What beck'ning ghost along the moonlight shade Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?" - Alexander Pope

Every student who has ever attended the school has heard the stories of the nurse's ghost that is said to roam the third floor halls of the old hospital, now Smeltzer Hall. Even when I was a student there, the third floor of Smeltzer, which then served as a women's residence hall, was closed. The doors to that floor were kept locked and very few held keys which opened them. During one break, when campus was deserted, I persuaded someone with a key to take me up to that abandoned and supposedly haunted floor. The halls were wide and grand, with beautiful hardwood floors, and the rooms themselves were not used for storage, as most of the vacant spaces on campus were. True, there were a few beds and pieces of furniture up there, but the large rooms were mostly empty, and seemed fairly clean for the amount of time they had been vacant. I saw no ghosts during my short amount of time on that floor, and the kind soul who held the key and gave me the tour refused my request to spend the night there, which I was willing to do either alone or accompanied.

"My people too were scared with eerie sounds,
A footstep, a low throbbing in the walls.
A noise of falling weights that never fell,
Weird whispers, bells that rang without a hand,
Door-handles turn'd when none was at the door,
And bolted doors that open'd of themselves."
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The story I write here is one that occurred on one of our walks around the campus late one night. All visitors had to leave our dorm rooms before 11 p.m. on weeknights, and by 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, so we often walked the campus to continue to talk and enjoy each other's company past those hours. I don't remember how many were with us on the night in question, since the group was quite large, and not everyone was present on all of our jaunts. I do know that there was a large crowd of us that night, probably numbering about ten or eleven. At some point, near the conclusion of our walk, we were walking from the gates of the cemetery, back down the long, straight road to the vicinity of the dorms. When we were about 200 feet away from the cemetery, we saw a man in a dark trench coat and hat walking directly toward us on the same side of the street. The long brick wall of the campus gymnasium was about 5 feet to his left, and the wide expanse of open street lay to his right, with the well manicured lawn of the "president's house" beyond. We began talking about this man and his strange and sinister appearance immediately, in hushed tones. His demeanor troubled us, and we talked of moving to the other side of the street. Suddenly, he was gone. There was nowhere he could have hidden or escaped to, with the wall close by on one side, and the well lit, wide open street on the other. None of us actually saw him vanish, though several of us were watching him carefully. My wife, who has been somewhat of a skeptic of thing supernatural, at least until she spent more time around me and the strange occurrences which seem to surround me, also witnessed this event. We still talk of it occasionally, and she wonders at the man's strange disappearance. Needless to say, we hastened back to our dorms that night, talking all the while of the disappearance of the "guy in the trench coat," as we came to call him.

Those are my stories for this night. I hope you enjoyed them and maybe felt the odd goose bump or two prickle your flesh as you read. I will share more of my experiences with the paranormal in the future. Until then, there are many words to be written about the living and the more figurative ghosts which haunt us daily. I shall return to write of those on the morrow.

“I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth."
- Emily Bronte