By Emily Fromant, First Year English Literature
The Croft Magazine // With the spookiest weekend of the year approaching, here's one student's haunting supernatural experience to get you in the mood.
It was a September evening. Cold, crisp, when all colours around me seemed to blur at the edges. I had just turned 14 and was walking down a long stretch of country road with three of my childhood friends. Scary stories always start like this, in the middle of nowhere, in the strange time between daylight and night.
I had never really believed in the supernatural. I never feared the dark, and I loved dressing up for Halloween. I was 14, and at 14 you think you know everything. You want to be so grown up and believe you are invincible.
My friend Lana and I went round the bend of the path. In front of us, a middle-aged man was slowly walking towards us. He stood out to me because he was dressed completely in white. White trousers with suspenders, and a white hat and shirt. It was an unusual outfit to be wearing in the middle of the countryside. As he approached, I felt a sense of dread, a fight or flight response, and all I wanted to do was run in the opposite direction. He passed us quietly, his boots hardly even making a sound on the leafy ground. Our eyes locked and it felt as if he could read what I was thinking, as if all my thoughts were written across my forehead. Finally, he turned the bend and was out of sight.
Once we were sure he had passed our friends, we stopped to allow them to catch up. As they joined, we asked what they had thought of the unusual man, but they said they had not seen a man at all. Our other friends had not been that far behind us, there was no way they could have missed him.
At 19, I have still never been able to explain what I saw. I have just had to accept that there are many things about this world around us that we don’t understand. Do I believe in ghosts? Not in a traditional sense. But now at night before I turn my light off, I always find myself glancing at the corner of my room, as if something might be there looking back.
Featured Image: Epigram / Freya Scott-Turner
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