Your True Tales
June 2006 – Page 12

Old Man with a Box
by Winkelstein

This story happened to an English building site worker whom I met in Berlin, Germany. Let's call him Paul. He's from Glastonbury.

When he was a young man in his early twenties, he and his friends were prowling woods and fields in the area at nights and shined deer and rabbits with their car's headlights and with strong flashlights. Once the animals froze they shot them with buckshot.

One night when they were on the road to one of their favourite "hunting grounds," the driver of their car had to slow down: there was somebody walking in the middle of the road. It was a tall old man with shoulder-length white hair. He wore a dark long coat, walked rather slowly and carried a wooden box in his hands in front of his chest. They drove around him, shouted some obscenities and were a bit surprised when he totally ignored them.

About five miles later, they had completely forgotten about him and decided to drive down a dirt road to "hunt" in the fields. When they were far enough from the road, they shined the car's headlights into the fields and pointed their shotguns in the direction of the animals they expected to see. But this night there were no animals.

There stood, in the middle of that field, the old man with his box. The guys were flabbergasted. The old man simply couldn't be there in the field, he should have been miles away on that empty road and they hadn't seen or heard any other car that could have picked him up and brought him to that field... and even now he just stood there in the field and didn't say a word. They started to shoot at him, they aimed all their buckshot at the apparition and at the same time the driver tried to get the hell out of there. The old man just stood there and never even flinched, still holding his box. They were too scared to turn around and look at him directly, but they could still see him in the rearview mirror. Paul never went out "hunting" again after this experience.

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