He couldn’t remember when he had acquired the mask. He had come into the room one day and realized it was there on the great marble mantlepiece, in a place of honor, candles and sprigs of greenery around it. Days went by and it remained there, though the greenery eventually dried up and was cleared away; by the servants, he supposed, for he certainly had not moved anything. He did not go into that room very often. It was too large, too formal, too much in the middle of things. His scattered thoughts and a sense of restlessness led him to prefer the more remote areas of the mansion. But when he did enter the room, the mask was always there.

He liked looking at it. It was formed like the face of a man, eyes closed, serene smile on his face, but the lines were far too perfect, too beautiful to be any ordinary person. Perhaps it was the face of a god; had one of his friends who enjoyed traveling found it in some distant land where such idols were worshipped, and, knowing his love of beautiful perfection, brought it to him?

Come to think of it, he had once loved to travel. How long had it been since he had set foot on train or ship in search of beauty and excitement in faraway places? He didn’t know. This strange restlessness, accompanied by the equally strange inability to decide where he wanted to go or what he wanted to do, had had him in its grip for as long as he could remember.

 The more he looked at the mask, though, the more it teased him with a sense of familiarity. Was it only because the mask itself was becoming so familiar to him? He spent more time thinking about it than about anything else, and when he left his lonely retreats and ventured down the grand staircase into this room, it was always the first thing he looked for. 

 Something deep inside of him told him that wasn’t the answer, though. He thought–he thought that perhaps the man depicted by the mask was someone he had known once, long ago. But he couldn’t call a name to mind, and surely he would have remembered an acquaintance–or perhaps someone even closer than an acquaintance?–who was so beautiful.

* * *

He had always lived alone in the house–at least, as far as he could remember–so it came as a surprise one day to wander into the grand room and find two elegantly-dressed women standing there. One of them he didn’t know, but the other seemed so familiar, like a long-lost relative he had once been close to and then lost touch with. The women were standing by the fireplace, talking, then the strange woman gestured towards the mask. Curious to hear what they might be saying about his treasure, he drifted closer, taking care not to interrupt them or startle them with his presence.

“Yes, that’s him,” the familiar-looking woman said. “So handsome! All the ladies sighed over him, but, sadly, he never married.”

The other woman made a tsking sound. “What a shame.”

“Yes, it is. And gone so young, barely even forty. Even though masks are out of fashion, we had to have one made, so that we’d always have something of him with us.”

His curiosity piqued even more, he moved to an angle where he could get a better view of the familiar woman’s face, and gasped in surprise. The two women didn’t seem to hear him. The familiar-looking woman bore a striking resemblance to the mask. Forty, she had said he was. She appeared barely older than that–the man’s sister, perhaps? Too young to be his mother.

“Why do you leave it here, then, instead of keeping it at your house?” the other woman asked.

“I’m not sure. It just seems more...fitting, somehow. As though his house would be too sad and empty without something of him in it. Though sometimes, when I come by to make sure everything is all right here, it almost seems that I can still feel his presence...”

The two women moved off towards the hall leading to the kitchen and pantry, the sister saying, “Of course, we’ll have to sell this place eventually...”

He went over to stand before the mask, and looked at it as though he had never seen it before. Of course. And he wondered why he hadn’t realized the truth before. Had it been simple denial? Or that sense of not quite recognizing yourself when you see yourself in a portrait or photographic image?

There was an ornately-framed mirror hanging over the mantlepiece. Why had he never noticed it before? Or had he been deliberately avoiding it? He looked directly into it, and saw only the room behind him reflected in it. An incredibly odd feeling, but he found himself smiling nonetheless. If he wanted to remember what he looked like, he had only to look at the mask, and see himself as he would always be–forever beautiful, forever in his prime, forever as he had been in life.

This piece, A Familiar Face, was authored by Kyra Halland. She is the author of dark-edge tales of fantasy and romance and has written several books and short stories. She lives in southern Arizona and has two young adult sons, a very patient husband, and two less-patient cats.

Photo and picture by Ms. Halland.

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What does it mean to say a man fell from the ceiling? That is, if what fell from the ceiling was even a man at all.

I'll warn you here: you're about to read a ghost story. Unlike most you've read or heard, this one isn't fiction. It's real. It doesn't have any plot or character development because its purpose is to relate the facts of these experiences. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. As with last week's entry, its point is not to convince you that these events happened. Rather, it is to share with you that they did.

To fully understand the weirdness you're about to experience, we'll have to get technical. A ceiling is the overhead interior surface that covers the upper bounds of a room. In contrast, a roof is the uppermost covering of a building. While it is wholly possible to fall from a roof, it is not possible to fall from a ceiling. The surface of a ceiling faces downward, toward the floor of a room, and so it is impossible to stand on ceiling without first nullifying gravity.

One night, lying in bed, I awoke. For no apparent reason, my eyes simply opened. I had been sleeping on my back, and so the first thing I should have seen was the ceiling. Our ceiling was white with a popcorn finish. A ceiling fan hung in the center of the room. None of these things could I see. Instead, there was pitch black. This was peculiar because, although it was dark and the only light that entered was from the incandescent streetlight outside my blinds, there was usually enough light to make out the edges of things inside my room. Many a time had I awoken at night to see the ceiling fan hanging above my head (I'd been against installing it from the start, and too many of my nightmares consisted of the thing coming loose and scoring a direct hit on my face). Tonight was different. Tonight, it was as though a black tarp had been hung from the ceiling.

I looked left, toward my window, wondering why it was so dark. At first I thought there might have been a block-wide power outage, but discarded this notion when I saw the streetlamp burning outside. Shifting my eyes back to center, I noticed something very wrong in the corners of the ceiling. Thick ash billowed in the corners, as though the room were on fire and were filling with black smoke, yet I sensed no heat nor the smell of burning. There was a lot of smoke in the room. The entire ceiling, end to end, was completely consumed. (See: The Cyclone In The Corner).

Just as I was trying to make any sense of all this, the cloud snapped like a taut rubber band. The smoke collapsed into itself, forming a tight sphere about the size of a basketball. In the next instant it drew up into the shape of shadow man and plunged from the ceiling.

It struck me. With its palm. Right square on the flat of my forehead.

The thing that fell on me hit me with enough force to bow the mattress and send my legs kicking into the air. Then, nothing. It was over as quickly as it had come on.

I ran to the bathroom mirror and checked for injuries. A blow like that, and I'd have black eyes in minutes, possibly a broken nose. Nothing. There were no marks. My head didn't even hurt.

The following morning I checked again, thinking that by then the bruises would have started to show. Still nothing.

I've experienced several bizarre occurrences, as I've shared with you. This one is unique in that the manifestation touched me -- hit me pretty hard. Most times, when these things meant me ill, there was a feeling of menace about them, but never did they touch me.

I've only told this story to a handful of people. Very few know, excepting you, now, of course. No one believed me when I told them. I don't mind so much if you don't, as I'm writing this more for my sake than anyone else's.

Some things you just have to get out.

Continuing with our series of real-life ghost stories, we bring you a short run-in with shadowy manifestations: The Cyclone In the Corner.

Most ghost stories are fiction. Some are written with a moral theme in mind, or perhaps tell a story of some too-good protagonists triumphing over (or falling prey to) an age-old curse. The ghost story presented here doesn't fit those norms because it isn't fiction. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. The point of this is not to convince you that this event happened. Rather, it is to share with you that it did.

Things come out of angles. H.P. Lovecraft was on to something when he wrote "Dreams in the Witch House," a short story about a house inhabited by a dimension-hopping witch. Within the house is a room with a bizarre design -- the corners, the angles are off in ways that make no sense and indeed, are hard on the eyes. It's done more for function than form, because the angles permit the witch (and her horrifying attendants) to travel between dimensions. Much like a knife's edge cuts through one surface of a two-dimensional sheet of paper to the other, so too does the witch traverse dimensions using higher-order mathematics that might stump even Stephen Hawking... only to perform such gruesome acts as might have been thought up by Stephen King.

Sorry. I thought the parallelism was funny.

In any event, Lovecraft's art seems to imitate life, as you'll find out now.

For some time before I married my wife we maintained a long-distance relationship. She left home to attend college upstate. I was still living with my parents. Since we couldn't see each other regularly, we made sure to call every night. Our phone calls usually started at 9:01 p.m. because that was when the free cellular talk time promotion kicked in. Often our conversations would go on well into the night, and I'd be the only person still awake in the house. As a courtesy to everyone else trying to sleep, I'd turn off the lights and TV in my bedroom at around 11:00 p.m., and shut my door.

This one night, at around 12:30 a.m., we were in the midst of a conversation too good to cut short. I noticed my cellphone battery was about to die, so I got up off the bed and plugged the phone into a wall socket under my window. The house was dark and silent, and the only light entering my room was the orange glow of the streetlamp coming through the blinds.

I cut off mid-sentence when I noticed something odd at the opposite end of the room. In the corner near my hall door was a billowing cloud of inky black churning up at the ceiling. At the floor directly beneath it was another cloud. Now, mind you, it was dark in the room, but the clouds were darker still, like the exhaust from coal-fired factories of the late 1800's.

"Oh God," I remember saying.

My wife (fianceé at the time) panicked. "What? What is it?" she yelled into the phone.

I could not respond. She kept demanding to know what was wrong.
"Honey," I said, eyes fixed on the thing in the corner. "Quiet."

The clouds churned and rolled in their respective corners. In their darkness there was an almost granular aspect, like they were dust devils or whirlwinds that kick up the dust when a breeze sweeps past tall buildings.

The clouds grew larger. Each let out a tendril as they spun in place. The fingers met in the middle and swirled in a tight spiral.

"Oh my God," I said. A funnel cloud had formed in the corner of my room.

"What's wrong?" my fianceé yelled.

Before I could tell her, the whirlwind spun itself out. The black clouds dissipated. Where once the clouds had been, I could now see into the corner, even with the dim light of the streetlamp outside my window. The corner was empty.

"I..." I stammered. "I'll call you tomorrow."

To this day, I'm not certain what it was I saw. I mean, I am certain what I saw is in fact what transpired, but whatever it was that I saw manifest in the corner is anyone's guess. It's not like an actual cyclone could have formed in my room. The room's only window was shut, and the air conditioning alone could not have caused so strong a breeze. Or the clouds, for that matter. Moreover, if a whirlwind had actually formed, there would be no dust or dirt to sweep up into itself, yet the thing was pitch black.

Another interesting point is this: my dresser sat near to where the cyclone formed. The dresser was covered in loose papers (mostly letters and other opened mail). When the cyclone touched down, it had formed a tight vortex, which would indicate that the "winds" were strong, yet it disturbed none of the nearby papers.

It's never happened before, or (thankfully) since.

Last week, we commenced our exploration of the creepier side of Miami-Dade County. This week, we delve deeper into the abandoned facility on the western fringe known colloquially as the "insane asylum".

Our last few entries have been ghost stories. Admittedly, this entry is not one. Even so, the experiences shared here are creepy in their own right.

Two things to point out before we proceed. First, these photographs were taken several years ago, in March of 2005. The facility may or may not have changed since then, it may since have been developed or brought back into operation. Regardless, the property was in no condition for anyone to be venturing in it. The place is dangerous, especially at night, and that says nothing of what creatures (wild hogs, venomous snakes, spiders, scorpions) one might stumble upon inside. In short: do not go there!

Secondly, and on a related note, "No Trespassing" signs have been stenciled in at the facility entrance (see the photo immediately below, courtesy of Google Maps). The land is purportedly owned by the U.S. government, as the signs indicate. When we ventured out here in 2005, there were no such warnings or "Keep Out" signs. We've heard from those in the know that people found on the land have been escorted off the premises by armed government agents. Thus, we reiterate: do not go there!

That said, read on.

We approached from the north along Krome Avenue (not shown, to the right-hand side of the photo below). It was the dead of night.

Upon pushing through the dilapidated chain-link gate, we found ourselves standing on a broad asphalt access road that ran the length of the property. We turned left, putting us in a parking lot at the front of the building. Once there, the gaping black maw of the facility entrance awaited us.

From this end, the building looked like a long strand of shotgun houses stacked end to end. It was a long, continuous hallway. The corridor was tight -- wide enough for foot traffic walking two abreast. There were small concrete rooms at regular intervals, built with their corridor entrances facing each other. None was much larger than an office cubicle.

Even if you knew nothing of the place, you'd definitely get the impression from this corridor alone, that the facility likely was built to restrain its occupants.

At one time, the building had had a dropped ceiling. The framework for the ceiling tiles was extant but rusted, falling from the ceiling, and warped out of shape. Strands of electrical wires hung from the roof like cybernetic ivy. Piles of pressboard ceiling tiles moldered on the ground, having succumbed to vandalism and the elements.

All the interior doors had been yanked from their hinges and removed; the windows were nothing but concrete encasements where once the panes had been. Errant bullet holes pitted the ceiling and concrete walls. The building showed evidence of fire damage. Everything that wasn't made of concrete was rotting away.

The corridor hit a dead stop at a wall. A perpendicular hallway bisected the hallway.

Here again is where the facility's design seems to point to its apparent use. Our corridor met a dead end at the intersection, but upon entering the intersection and taking a few paces to one side, we saw that the corridor continued on to the rear of the property. This bend in the main corridor prevents one from running the entire length of the facility to the doors leading outside. Were you to run full sprint down the hall, you would have to stop and change direction to continue down the passageway, or else charge face-first into concrete. This pause would buy your pursuers a few moments to circle up from the other side (further ahead in the direction you're headed) and cut you off.

It didn't come as much of a surprise that there was graffiti in the bathroom. Granted, there was graffiti everywhere else in the structure, but no bathroom is a proper bathroom without graffiti, even in an abandoned asylum.

Beyond the living quarters was what looked like a loading bay with an adjoining utility room. The utility room had been stripped of most of its electrical wiring. What remained of the room showed signs of fire damage.

Some time after our visit, we conducted independent research which indicates that the facility in fact operated as a mental hospital. While in operation, it was colloquially named "the annex" and it served as an overflow facility when the other local mental hospitals were at or over capacity.

This place definitely gives off bad vibes. It came as no surprise, then, when we found out the worst of the worst were sent to the annex. According to what we've heard, these walls housed people accused of heinous crimes who were too mentally ill to stand trial.

Is the place haunted? We think so. Even if it isn't, it's still not a place we'd like to return to.

Few know of an abandoned facility known colloquially as the "Insane Asylum". Located on on Krome Avenue's west side, south of Southwest 8 Street, it would be the best setting for a ghost story if it didn't seem so trite. The location is not open to the public, as is made clear by the concrete barriers erected in front of its entrance. Even so, the very barriers set up to keep people out announce the presence of something beyond them, where otherwise no one would think to look.

It seems like Krome Avenue gives off all sorts of bad vibes. Also known as Florida State Road 997 and West 177 Avenue, Krome is a 36 mile stretch of two-lane highway running along Miami-Dade County's western fringe. The highway is a traffic bypass through a sparsely populated region of the county. Straddled on one side by the sprawling Everglades swamp and on the other by a whole lot of nothing, no matter where you are on Krome or which direction you travel, you are in the middle of nowhere.

I'll warn you here: you're about to read a ghost story. Unlike most you've read or heard, this one isn't fiction. It's real. It doesn't have any plot or character development because its purpose is to relate the facts of these experiences. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. As with last week's entry, its point is not to convince you that these events happened. Rather, it is to share with you that they did.

Backed by a small army of friends in three cars, I set out for the asylum on a clear Miami night. We left our homes and ventured west, leaving civilization behind as we pressed into the swamp. We turned south when we hit Krome. Short of our headlights and those of the tractor-trailers roaring by, the roadway was pitch black. For the most part, Krome Avenue is devoid of streetlamps. Geddy Lee of Rush fame sang of those places beyond the bright lights that lie in the far unlit unknown -- I knew then what Geddy meant, as I was in one of those places.

We pulled off the road when we saw the concrete barriers. The tall brush that flanked the roadway had all but consumed the facility entrance. Scaling the barriers and pushing through the brush put us at a chain-link gate that had been punched through. Beyond that, to the left, was a concrete hut, where once a guard might have stood watch.

Once past the entry checkpoint, we found ourselves on a tarmac path that cut a swathe down the length of the facility. There was no way to tell how far the path went. It was too dark, and although we shined our flashlights  down the path, the road far outran the flashlight beams. To the right was a length of hedge, or a shoulder-tall string of trees (the exact details escape me, but I recall there was a line of foliage). Up ahead and to the left was a fork in the road that led to the facility's main entrance.

As I was one of the three in our group with the foresight to bring a lantern, I took up the rear position. Our flashlights were interspersed -- with our group marching in single file, we had one flashlight at the lead, one in the middle of the line, and me at the end. We were a group of about fifteen, which meant there around five bodies between flashlights. There was just enough light to see by, but not enough to feel comfortable.

As the group marched ahead and to the left, toward the structure's entrance, I spied a pair of shadows out of the corner of my eye. They were humanoid, but I could not make out their finer details. The shadows stood against the line of trees to our right, opposite the group's bearing. Interestingly, there was no ambient light in the facility. Remember, we were in the swamp by a rural road, and it was the middle of the night. Light from passing trucks' headlights could not get in to where we were because of the thick overgrowth at the facility's perimeter. What's more, the only lights in the facility were our flashlights. The only other two flashlights were already well along the path, meaning that whatever light made that pair of shadows visible had to be coming from my flashlight.

Then it hit me -- my flashlight was pointed away from where I'd seen the shadows.

I turned in place to look straight on at the shadows. As if sensing they had been spotted, the two shadows ran -- as in, they seemed to pivot in place and pump their arms and legs and flee -- away from the hedge and out into the open air. They vanished. Once in the open air, there was no surface against which they might be seen.

My flashlight swept into the spot in the hedge where I'd seen the shadows only a moment ago. There was nothing there. Tentatively, I took a step toward the hedge, wanting to know more but knowing it would risk separating me from the group. Nothing. There were enough gaps in the hedge to clearly see through it. Nothing hid within it, or behind it.

Check back soon for this story's continuation (click here for part 2), for photographs and a description of the derelict facility's interior.

How do you chase something whose footfalls make no sound? What nets do you use to snare something incorporeal? And, assuming you can catch it, who in their right mind would dare hunt something no one knows anything about?

Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. The point is not to convince you that these events happened. Rather, it is to share with you that they did.

The home where I grew up was built in the 1950’s, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Its living space was distributed in such a way that the master bedroom was at the extreme front corner of the structure, with a window looking out into the front yard. The other bedrooms were connected along the same side of the house via a corridor.

When my sister was born, we built a second master bedroom for my grandparents to live in, and the rest of the family played musical chairs with the living arrangements. My sister took my old bedroom in the middle of the hall, I moved into my parents’ former bedroom at the front of the house, and my parents took my grandparents’ old bedroom at the opposite end of the hall.

By the time my brother was born, there wasn’t any more room to make additions to the home, and so he moved in with me. My bed was arranged parallel to the wall closest to the street. Were you to enter the room from the hallway, you would see my bed in the far left corner, with my brother’s along the opposite wall.

One night, when the house was quiet and everyone was asleep, I awoke. I found it strange that I should be awake because there hadn’t been any loud noises or anything that would have roused me. Lying on my back in bed, I actually considered this, when I noticed a faint light in the hall. It was pale green, like the face of a glow-in-the-dark watch. The light slowly grew in strength, as though its source were drawing nearer.

I was terrified. I had no plausible explanation for what I was seeing. At the time, we did not have any motion-activated lights in the hallway, and when my mother did eventually buy those, they were incandescent orange. Worse - whatever approached was coming from the hallway, which was the only way out of the room.

The glow entered and lit up the doorframe with a sickly green haze. The light was pale, and transparent - even as it drew closer I could see through it to the desk and television hutch behind it. The glow moved toward me. Once it had wafted halfway across the room, it changed. The light shifted to its extremities and became a ring. It did not become brighter - it was as if the light compressed itself and had become opaque in the tight area of the ring it formed. Within the ring it was as dark as the rest of the room, but not so dark that I was blind. My bedroom walls were painted stark white, and I had white furniture and so with the scarce light of the streetlamp beyond my window I could still see.

The space within the approaching green disk darkened, as if it had become a sheer film of black silk. The figure within the disk was human. It had a clearly discernible head, trunk, and limbs. I could not see details. I could not see its face, or digits, nor could I tell if it had either. The legs and arms were positioned away from the trunk in a posture that might have been uncomfortable for a person to maintain for too long, but this made it abundantly clear to me the figure was human-like. The air space that the figure occupied was perfectly dark, opaque. The area it did not occupy I could see past.

It floated toward me in a slow, even pace, as though it were on a conveyor belt. It did not swing its arms or move its legs as it approached. It did not have feet, but the pointed ends of its legs appeared not to touch the ground.

Just as it brushed against my bedside, numbers lit up in the glowing green circle. Twelve at the top, three to the right, six at its feet, nine at the left. In the center of the figure’s torso appeared a tiny disk of green light from which shot three bars - an hour hand, a minute hand, and a second hand. The seconds ticked with rigid precision.

I watched, wide-eyed, as the figure drew within arm’s reach. Meanwhile, my brother slept, unaware of any of this. Had it gone for him instead of me, I don’t know what I would have done, if anything at all. It was all I could do to keep from screaming.

The figure brushed against my bedside, then, as abruptly as it had appeared, it vanished. The shadow in the clock was gone. Without its green glow, the bedroom was darker than before.

I did not sleep the rest of that night.

Most ghost stories are fiction. Some are written with a moral theme in mind, or perhaps tell a story of some too-good protagonists triumphing over (or falling prey to) an age-old curse. The ghost story presented here doesn’t fit those norms because it isn’t fiction. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. The point of this is not to convince you that this event happened. Rather, it is to share with you that it did.

Krome Avenue runs north-south for the length of Miami-Dade County, approximately 36 miles. It is a two-lane highway located on the county’s western fringe, bordered on the east in some areas by nothing for miles, and on the west by the sprawling swampland known as the Everglades. No matter where you are on Krome or which direction you travel, you are in the middle of nowhere.

There is a gas station on Krome Avenue at a four-way intersection. At the extreme corner of the gas station lot, facing the roadway, there is a triangular-shaped section with a ground-level backlit sign advertising the station’s brand and prices. Separating this section from the station is a chest-high hedge.

 The three other parcels along the roadway are plots of dirt and tall grass on which nothing is built. These plots run for acres in every direction.

The only light comes from the gas station, which, at night, is lit up like daytime with harsh florescent lighting. Otherwise, the roadway is devoid of streetlamps. Nor are there any sources of light on the undeveloped plots. Geddy Lee of Rush fame sang of those places beyond the bright lights that lie in the far unlit unknown - I knew then what Geddy meant, as I was in one of those places.

Very late one night, some friends of mine and I were in my car at this particular intersection. We were coming home from a day at the beach. We had had a good time and were all talking. I sat in the driver’s seat with my date to my right, a guy friend of mine (Chris) in the seat behind her, and his date sitting behind me. We approached Krome Avenue from an orthogonal street, about to make a left turn to head south. The gas station loomed ahead and to the left. It was pitch black in every other direction.

I stopped at the intersection to check for oncoming traffic. I looked both ways, and as my eyes shifted forward and I started to make my turn, I spotted a man standing beside the gas station’s backlit sign.

I hadn’t seen him when I first approached the intersection, but after I’d noticed him, I realized how hard it would be to miss him. The man was easily six feet tall and was wearing a stained tanktop shirt that glowed white in the harsh glare from the filling station. His paunchy gut stuck out from beneath his shirt and over the waistband of his denim pants. He was of heavy build, his shoulders drooping at his sides from the weight of his meaty arms.

His head was lowered. I could see his chin was pressed up against his chest. His full pink lips were drawn slightly, as though he were breathing through his mouth. He had greasy black hair that hung in curling strands before his face, forking like a river at the bulb of his nose. I could not see his eyes. Inky blue-black ringed the spots beneath where his eyes would have been. These rings stretched down well into his cheeks. While I couldn’t see his eyes, a strange feeling in my gut told me he was watching us.

Just seeing the man made me feel uncomfortable. I locked my eyes on him as I drove into the intersection, and then looked away to see where I was going. After the moment it took to complete my turn, I glanced at him in my side-view mirror. The man had shifted impossibly fast. He had turned 180-degrees to face me and stood now not on the grass by the backlit sign but on the gravel approach to the gas station. His arm was raised, hand balled up in a fist pointed at us.

“Did you see that?” I asked, cutting short the conversation.

“No,” said my date, sitting shotgun.

“No,” said my friend’s date, sitting behind me.

“Yes,” said Chris, after a moment’s hesitation.

Silence.

“Chris,” I began. “What did you see?”

Again, he paused. “I saw a guy.”

None of us spoke the rest of the way. Later, after I’d dropped the girls off at their homes, I gave Chris a ride to his house. Along the way we talked about what we’d seen. Interestingly, Chris related that he had continuous visual contact on the strange man, while I had to look away and then look back, since I was driving. According to Chris, the man never shifted position or raised his hand, which was bizarre because I was certain he had.

Admittedly, there are other explanations for what we experienced that night, but I maintain that we saw something supernatural. Everything about the man we saw, from his appearance to the sentiment he evoked in us, exuded menace.

Then, also, there is the fact that he came out of nowhere. The only plausible place he could have come from was the gas station, as there was nothing but open land around. Even so, he would have had no business standing by the backlit sign at the roadway. There isn’t even a bus stop there. And for him to have appeared there so suddenly would have required him to jump the hedge. The hedge was chest-high and thick, and it wouldn’t have been possible for a man his size to get across it so quickly.