My encounter with a civil war ghost

In the summer of 1999, i was in a local park with my girlfriend. there are some dense woods in the back of this park, and we were hiking along the trails out there when we found a nice place to rest nestled between a stream and a dryed up ravine. we were talking and laughing and being rather loud when i got the feeling we were being watched. i stared off into the woods and locked eyes with a man standing across the dryed ravine. he was probably 30 to 40 feet away from us. he was dressed in all brown with a flat topped hat. he had a scruffy beard and a stare i will never forget. we stared at each other for what must have been 30 seconds, then he started walking towards us. i watched as he headed down into the ravine that was between us and vanished before my eyes. i was completely terrified. grabbed my girl by the arm and started running.

about a week later i went back to the site with 4 of my closest friends. we were trying to find the spot where i had seen this man. we searched the area for a few hours, but the spot wasnt there. disappointed we started to head back to the car when we stumbled upon a historical marker that i had not seen before.

this marker told of the confederate black powder mill that once stood on this site that had exploded in a horriffic accident in 1863. 3 confederate soldiers died in the blast.





and that was the end of the story for 12 years. but something amazing happened this past week.

i was talking to my brother and that incident with the vanishing soldier came up. he asked me if i ever tryed to look up a picture of the soldier i saw. so i went home and did some research and sure enough i was able to find pictures of 2 of the 3 men that died in the explosion. one of them named "william bloecher" was a dead ringer for the man i saw that day. the picture showed him clean shaven, but the eyes were unmistakable. so i went into photoshop and added a beard and a confederate hat. i am absolutely convinced this is the man i saw!


before photoshop


after photoshop


the hat isnt quite right, but this is without a doubt the person i saw.

Have you ever went back to the place and looked for him again?

i havent been back since the time i found the historical marker with my buddies. but now that i have this new information (his name and the horrific manner in which he died) it feels much more personal, and i have been feeling like i should go back soon. hopefully in the next week or so i will get a chance to go back out there.

If you see him are you going to approache him, let him approache you? Run or try to communicate?

Originally Posted by TAZER-69

If you see him are you going to approache him, let him approache you? Run or try to communicate?

thats a tough one. well let me start by saying i have made plans to go back there on the weekend of june the 18th. not this coming weekend, but the next. in the back of my mind, i dont really expect to see him again. i feel extrememly lucky and privilleged to have seen him the first time. (even though he scared the hell out of me.)

if i do see him again though, i will most likely just watch him like i did the first time. i plan to be armed with a digital camera this time and will be trying to record audio (as someone on another forum suggested,) to capture an electronic voice phenomenon.

if anyone has any suggestions or advice i would love to hear them. i have never set out to do anything like this before.

thats so fucking creepy!!!

If it were me I would ask him if there was anything I could do for him. Assuming I had the guts to speak and stuff.

update!

My brother and I went out to the park this past sunday to record audio and take digital pictures. oddly enough, we had no trouble finding the exact location of my encounter this time around. we also visited the crater that was left from the explosion of the powder mill. one of the recordings we made while standing on the spot where the ghost had appeared to me has a voice on it that is not mine or my brothers and we were the only ones out there. i filtered out some background noise and amplified the voice with audio software i have on my pc it appears to respond to a question i ask. ("have you ever heard of a man named Robert E. Lee") the voice on the recording replies, "he's dead".
something even more remarkable happened while i was listening to the cleaned up voice on repeat at my house trying to figure out what the voice was saying. my closet door was open at the time, and the heaviest jacket i have in my closet came crashing down to the ground. the force of this was so great that the plastic hanger holding the jacket sheered in half, and the shirts on either side of where the jacket had been hanging were swinging rather wildly. as this happened, i felt a thick cloud of cold air around me in my room and i left the house for several hours out of frieght. im worried that something may have followed me home.


we also caught some strange things on a few pictures we took at the crater. hard to say what they are but i will share them anyhow.


the picture below has a small strange mist in the middle. this was not there when we took the picture and appears ,to me, to be floating above the ground.




the picture below is also taken at the crater and shows odd rays of light coming off the edges of the crater. could be lens flare, i really dont know.




this link below is the original recording with the voice. it happens durring the crunching leaves sound from me walking towards the end of the recording.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23864644/spr...0audio%201.wav

and this final link is the results of me cleaning up the voice with software.to me, it clearly sounds like "he's dead"

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23864644/he%27s%20dead.wav

Interesting story, Dragonfly...but um how come all your photos and audio files are missing?

Cool story , it does sound like something followed you home. No pix and I get a 404 error on the links desert rat