More Ghosts

 I have been seeing/hearing from ghosts since I was a kid. I never saw them as scary or trying to scare me. I always understood that they were on a journey to say goodbye to people they had loved, or get unfinished things accomplished. Some ,l discovered, didn’t even know that they were dead. Of course, I didn’t know how to help, so I would grin and shrug my shoulders. 

I was married when I saw my first ghost and knew it. One day I was at the barn finishing up my morning chores. My husband and I had built the barn and house together ( with a lot of help.)  It was a small row barn with 4 stalls. We used one for storage and it had a nice tack room ; just enough for my Appaloosa horses. I loved it.One morning , as I was finishing the last stall, I heard my Dalmation barking. I stepped outside to see what was going on but didn’t see anything. All of a sudden, a man stepped into view. He smiled and waved to me. Not to be rude, I asked if I could help him. He said that he had been hunting in the State Forest and managed to get all turned around. It was rifle season after all … hunters continuously got lost .I asked him about his gun and had told me that he had put it down as he didn’t want to scare me. Ooooookaaaay. He asked me if I could direct him towards a certain road because that’s where he had parked his pickup.He had on a red plaid flannel shirt and jeans. The weather had not gotten to cold yet and he sure looked like he’d been walking awhile. Happy to see him gone, I told him what he had to head to find his pickup again. He thanked me and started walking down the driveway to get his gun. When he picked it up, he waved and yelled ‘thanks again.’ 

I went back to my chores and didn’t think much about the whole thing. Lost hunters wandered on to our farm being lost a lot anymore. People from out of the area got lost in the State Forest all the time, so it wasn’t unusual.

Later on in the evening when we were done with dinner, I settled down to read the local newspaper. It was getting cold finally…I remember thinking that I would have to get winter blankets for the horses from the big storage trunk.I decided to check the front page news and see what had happened that week. I was shocked to read an article about a hunter who had deer hunting and had accidentally killed himself. He apparently had been in a deer stand when he was getting down, he’d dropped his rifle. It hit the ground in such a way that it must’ve fired. These were mere suppositions because he’d been hunting alone. It was so terrible and I felt awful for his family. 

All of a sudden, I gasped! There was a photo of the same man who had been at my barn this morning.. Yet the news article reported that he had died the night before , when another hunter found him.

. Go figure…..