The Restless Soul

One night my uncle wanted me and a friend of mine to go to the store for him. We were on our way back home, coming up the hollow where we lived, when I saw a bright light. I thought that it was a car coming the other way. The light got brighter the closer we got to it. Suddenly, I saw something in the corner of my eye that started across the road in front of the truck. I slammed on the brakes, thinking that it was a kid, but when it got right in front of the truck I saw a man with a big black hat, like Abraham Lincoln’s Stove-Pipe hat and a long black trench coat. He looked about in his forty’s.

My friend was looking away at the time and didn’t see him. He asked me why I hit the brakes and I asked him if he didn’t see that man step in front of the truck. All he said he saw was a glance of something like a shadow. I told him that a man just walked out in front of us and then just disappeared.

A couple days passed and I was sitting on my grandfather’s porch telling him about what had happened. He asked me what the man looked like and I told him. My grandfather told me that there used to be a man who lived there and dressed just like that. The man loved his black trench coat and black hat, and he wore them all the time. My grandfather went on, saying that he was an evil man, that he tied his wife and child in their beds and burned them alive. The neighbors heard them screaming, but were too afraid of the man to go help. Later that day, after he had killed his wife and child, the man took his own life down at the oak tree by the road where I saw him. I’m not the only one who has seen this. My father said that when he was young, he and a friend of his would walk up that road at night and they would see him too. He said the man would chase them back down the road.

Every word of this is true. I was not the kind of person who believed in ghosts, until that night. I know what I saw and it still haunts me to this day!