I’ve gotten in the habit of telling people I haven’t ever seen a ghost, but now I know this isn’t necessarily true. On occasion I will see a ghost and not even know it. I stumbled today on an account I wrote about a November 2009 incident with my wife and family:

“Kelly, the kids, and I were riding our bikes along the Walnut Creek Greenway in Southeast Raleigh. As we rounded a curve, both Kelly and I saw a black man sitting on a bench a few hundred feet ahead of us. He had a brown shirt on and was putting something into a bag. He appeared to be packing up but didn’t seem to pay us any attention.

The curve turned again causing us to lose sight of him. Kelly was ahead of us and stopped a little ways beyond the bench. She asked if I’d seen that man and I said yes. The man had completely disappeared in the seconds it took us to ride up to the spot where he had been! It was like he had a trap door or something! We later looked in that spot and couldn’t find any place in the woods where he could’ve hidden that quickly. There were no footpaths through the woods from the bench and no obvious places someone might have walked.

I’d wondered at the time if we’d seen a ghost, the way he vanished like that.” #ghosts