Season of Shadows Blog

Today’s spooky experience once again comes from my uncle’s bag of tales. His various outdoor excursions, over the years, have taken him to the stomping grounds of ghosts and other forms of paranormal activity. The following encounter may not be entirely ghostly in origin, but it appears to have a connection to something ethereal. I’ll let you be judge.

“Many years ago I spent a lot of time hunting for coins at a popular recreational destination- Jackson Lake, just outside Farmington, New Mexico. While locals, flocking to the location, provided a steady flow of dimes, nickels and quarters for metal detector enthusiasts, the lake was always easier to search when attendance was down. The last thing I needed was a bunch of kids and the occasional old man pestering me about how much money I had uncovered.

So, I waited until summer dwindled down, picked an off-season Sunday morning, packed up my detector and cruised down to Jackson. The early morning air, whipping through my half cracked driver’s side window, was crisp and clean. Last night’s rainfall washed away any remnants of the usual Saturday night parties held at the lake. As I pulled into the parking area, I was pleasantly greeted by empty spaces everywhere, not a single vehicle sat in the flooded out lot.

I grabbed my detector with headphones in tow and started the muddy, quarter mile hike. When I reached the lake, there wasn’t a soul to be found. It was extremely eerie, to say the least. In all of my previous trips, I don’t think I had ever found Jackson totally devoid of activity. However, the creepy feeling didn’t last long; it was time to get down to business while the getting was good. I began making my way around the lake to the typical hot spots for lost coins.

After a short while, I noticed something really odd moving through my peripheral vision. I glanced toward the dam and that’s when “he” came fully into focus- a man dressed in a pious looking white robe with a hood pulled over his head. He was outlined by the cobblestone formation of rocks behind him, standing on an overflow pipe that extended through the bank of the dam.

The figure was no more than one hundred and fifty yards from me and I could see he was pacing back and forth on the pipe. He seemed to be performing some sort of ritual; chanting or singing with his hands cupped in front of him. Attire aside, what really struck me as odd was the figure had not been there just a few minutes earlier. And there really was no place he could have come from, without being detected, prior to reaching the position on the overflow pipe. It seemed as if he had just appeared out of nowhere.

I watched him for a short while and then went back to working my detector, this time minus my headphones so I could hear any subtle movement. I also fixed my gaze in such a way I was able to see the ground and maintain a constant bead on his whereabouts. The hooded figured continued his ritual for the next ninety minutes.

And then, the movement completely ceased. I quickly looked up and he was gone. I knew it was utterly impossible for him to have climbed off the pipe without having fully caught my attention. For the last hour and a half I had become intrigued by this strange figure and there was no way I was letting him get away without satisfying my curiosity. I dropped all of my gear and sprinted the entire one hundred and fifty yards, just as fast as I could.

When I reached the dam, I couldn’t locate him anywhere. I then peered down from my vantage point to the parking lot, only to find my lone vehicle. I searched around the entire lake, including the far side of the dam and never found a trace of him, or whatever it was.”

And that does it for another of my uncle’s experiences. Stay tuned, as I’ll soon be featuring a few other family member’s encounters with possible paranormal activity.

If you have any ghostly or supernatural encounters you would like to share, with the possibility of winning a Ghost Hunters DVD box set, be sure to check back for the next Giveaways of Spirit Contest, coming July 29th.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 11:57 pm and is filed under Visitor's Ghostly Experiences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.