Your True Tales
August 2007 - Page 22
Ghost at Camp
by David
This is a true story and I have thought about it deeply every day since it happened. This sort of thing never happened to me before or after. For me, it was a one time personal experience. Until this happened to me, I never believed in ghosts.
In September 2001 I was camping with my girlfriend along an unpaved forest road in the Manzano Mountains in northern New Mexico. It was a place I had hiked before and was told that there were homesteaders there in the old days who were unsuccessful in their attempts to survive. It was an evening that was clear with some moonlight. About 2 a.m. or so I woke up to the sound of a single distant coyote howl. I listened to it for awhile and thought it was strange there was only one coyote howling.
Then suddenly a crazy barking/howling came from what seemed to be ten feet outside my tent. I turned over to see if my girlfriend was listening and I thought I saw her leaning up from her sleeping bag on one elbow with her head tilted upward, looking toward the roof of the tent. She had a terrified expression on her face and I was about to laugh and ask her why she was so afraid of a coyote when I realized it was not her, but some sort of strange dark figure with a distorted, translucent face. The figure was right above my girlfriend's body.
I sensed that it was a spirit of some kind, but I wasn't scared. Since I didn't have my glasses on I leaned forward to get a better look. As I got closer, the spirit's eyes became very vivid and realistic and for some reason I sensed that she was a woman. It seemed that she had reddish hair and was wearing a black cloak with a hood. In my mind I wondered, why are you so scared? I tried to get the spirit to look in my eyes, but it looked past me into the distance. I couldn't make eye contact. The eyes were reflecting the moonlight. Soon the figure dissolved into thin air and I could then see the top of my girlfriend's head as she was laying in her sleeping bag. The barking/howling coyote was gone as well.
I lay back down on my sleeping bag and realized that I had probably just seen a ghost. I didn't want to freak out my girlfriend, so I didn't tell her what had just happened. To be sure that I had actually seen the thing, I asked her, "Did you hear hear the coyote howling?" She said, "I thought it was a dog." I replied, "No, that was a coyote." This helped me realize I had not been sleeping and that she too had heard the coyote or dog.
I didn't tell her about the ghost until the next morning. She confirmed that there had been a dog or coyote howling next to our tent. She was freaked out about the ghost and wondered why it had been floating over her body.
Our relationship crumbled soon afterward. I had a strong feeling that I had to move back home to Illinois from New Mexico and started frantically searching for a job near my family. Within a few months after seeing the ghost, my sister called and told me that my mom was diagnosed with a deadly form of lymphoma and she had a 50/50 chance to survive. I often wondered if the ghost had been a premonition.
I moved back into my parent's home to help take care of my mother. She passed away a year after I moved back. (I found it interesting that I had met my future wife during this time who has red hair. Also, my mother had red highlights in her hair when she was younger. It made me think about the ghost I had seen.)
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