Your
True Tales
October 2005 – Page
12
Time
Glitch
by Erin T.
I swear this is true. It was a freezing cold, dark December day back in 1996, one of those days it's so cold it’s scary. I was 16 years old, on Christmas vacation in New Jersey with my father and step-mother. Not my ideal place for a vacation. We were visiting family in Ocean City, NJ.
My dad and I decided to take a ride over to the boardwalk and explore the barren shops and carnival rides. My family and I always loved to sneak into places that seemed like you shouldn't be there. We bundled up like bears and made it to the boardwalk just as it started to flurry, so we wrapped our scarves and pulled our coats a bit tighter.
There was not one other soul on that boardwalk, no one for miles, you could feel the emptiness of the place, but we loved it. We were just walking and talking, dad and daughter, all was good. (I have to admit, if I didn’t feel the safety of my dad, I would have been pretty spooked out. The atmosphere was pretty creepy, dreary, snowing, old carnival rides, nothing but the sound of wind whistling past your ears, and the bite of the cold on your fingers.)
We had walked about a half mile up the boardwalk, when we noticed someone coming toward us. We stiffened up a bit, only because we had been totally alone, messing with closed rides, and thought maybe someone was coming to kick us out or yell at us or something. But the closer he came, we realized it was just someone jogging. We watched him come toward us. As we were getting ready to say hello, he passed and we smiled, and he just kind of stared at us.
And then something totally bizarre happened. About four seconds later, I looked up and that same jogger was about 20 feet ahead of us again, coming toward us, like he had never passed. I was very confused at first, so I looked behind me to see if the first jogger was still running, but there was nothing behind us. I could tell my dad was going through the same questioning because he was looking behind us too. So the jogger coming toward us was passing us again, the exact same guy, with the same clothes, the same strange empty stare, the same guy.
At first dad and I didn’t say anything. I think we were both trying to make sense of it in our heads, logically. But I couldn't. There was no way he could have run back, pass us, turn around and come back toward us in such a short time, without us seeing. We were the only people for miles, and he was the only other person we’d seen, at all, period. If it was a second jogger who looked exactly the same, then we would have seen him coming along with the other jogger, he was only about 20 feet behind the first jogger. We also would have seen the first jogger behind us when we turned around.
After that, my dad and I got a bit creeped out, so we quietly walked back to our car, on the street instead of the boardwalk. To this day we both think something supernatural occurred, we just don’t know what it was.
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