Around the time of Halloween, exactly seven years ago, I witnessed what most people would believe to be a human, but I do not. Till this day I believe this mysterious man in orange was someone or something else. Maybe it was a sign from God, telling me to do something. Maybe it was a figment of my imagination, but whatever it was, it must have wanted me to see it. What I saw on this freaky day down behind my father’s land was an old man wearing an all orange suit, like people in jail wear, walking an old, rickety looking bike along the freshly cut grass and occasional patches of dirt.
What I thought was going to be a normal day turned out to be one of the scariest days of my life. I was at my dad’s house, which is surrounded by acres and acres of woods. I was home alone with my stepsister, Danielle, who is only one year older than I. Being as bored as I was, I asked her if she wanted to go outside and play catch with the football. We tossed the football back and forth on the side of the house. While playing she threw the ball way over my head, making it almost roll down into the ravine. Luckily, I was able to catch up to it. I grabbed it and began to jog back to her. Before I reached the side of the house, I heard a faint noise. It sounded like something being dragged across the grass. I turned around slowly and didn’t see anything, but I didn’t give up on this strange noise. Closer and closer, I inched my way to the edge of the grass. I took each little step one at a time. When I finally was at the right angle to where I could see what was making this noise, the image I saw will forever haunt me.
I saw an old man with ghostlike features. His hair was as white as a glass of milk; his eyes were sunken in his head with black surrounding them, and he was wearing an all orange suit, which made him even scarier. The weirdest part was that he was rolling a bike along the grass. My natural reaction was to greet him by yelling, “Hey, how’s it going?” I’m sure he heard me. After saying this, the old man suddenly paused, stopped rolling his bike, and slowly turned his head toward my direction. This is an image I will never forget.
With his darkened, sunken in eyes, he just stood there and stared at me for the longest time not even answering to my polite greeting. After this death stare I received, I scampered on back to Danielle who was furiously waiting on me on the side of the house. She shouted, “Why did it take you so long?”
I said, “There’s a creepy guy down in the ravine.” Despite what I just told her, she did not believe me. We decided to go to that very same spot where I had seen this mysterious looking man. Of course, he was nowhere to be found. I told her “I swear he was right there.”
I urged her to go down to the ravine and help me search for him. I found his bike tracks, which had dented the grass, making it easy to find which way he had gone. Danielle and I followed his tracks for quite some time, and eventually we found the ending point of them. We had arrived at a crick, which was about twenty feet to the other side and about a ten-foot drop. ‘Where could the man have gone?’ we both thought to ourselves. The tracks ended right at the edge and just vanished. There’s absolutely no way he could have picked his bike up and swum across. The current was too strong, and the water was too deep. Did this creepy old man just vanish into thin air? Till this day I’ve never figured out what had actually happened to this old man. Was this a human, or something from the other side?