A Pennsylvania Experience
First, some background: I grew up in a small factory town in western Pennsylvania. The town existed only because of the factory, which employed more than half the men over age 18. The plant produced giant steel rolls which were shipped by rail to other factories in Pittsburgh and Detroit to be used in making steel beams, automobiles and such.
The factory dated to before World War II and had a long history of paying men, and only men, a livable age (remember, this is a bygone, more sexist era). Or at least those men who weren't badly burned by the molten vats of steel, or maimed by the large machinery. The town lay in a narrow valley that paralleled a small river stained yellow from sulfur mines. Railroad tracks also paralleled the river, and the mill, with its black buildings and gray water tower – the town's tallest structure – lay cradled against the river and the railroad tracks to the southwest. Narrow streets supporting small, wooden houses ran perpendicular from the mill, and one wider street stretched about seven blocks south to north from the mill past a few bars, and then a Catholic church, to a brick elementary school. One of my best friends lived in a slanted, wooden house a half block from the school. During summers, a bunch of us would hang out together, and for a while it was fun to grab our sleeping bags and spend the night on my friend's porch, just munching chips and pretzels and shooting the bull late into the night. I must have been about 10 or 11 that summer.
On such a night I was startled awake.
I don't know the time, but it must have been late. I could hear the breathing of my friends asleep in their bags, and I was certain I was the only one awake. I also became immediately aware of other sounds coming up the sidewalk from the direction of the factory: Labored breathing and someone or something dragging a leg as it walked.
The breathing wasn't just heavy: It sounded like agony, as if air was being forced through a ribcage crushed or ripped open. And the footsteps I heard weren't just of a man limping, but truly of a maimed or fractured leg being dragged.
Needless to say, I was scared senseless, but I forced myself up on one elbow. A streetlight shone over the sidewalk, which was only about four feet from the steps of the porch. I had a clear view, and I could follow the sounds of the breathing and the footsteps as they approached, passed right in front of me and receded. All the while, there was nothing to be seen.
More than 30 years later, I can still vividly recall the experience, and if I close my eyes and concentrate, I can hear the breathing and footfalls traversing empty pavement. I lay awake for a long time that night, hours probably, and somehow slipped into sleep before dawn. The next morning, none of my friends had heard a thing. That was obvious – they were roughhousing and acting normal, and I was badly shaken. I wondered if I had dreamt the experience, but then I thought I couldn't have. It was all too vivid, too clear. It must have happened, I kept telling myself.
One of my friends mocked me when I told him what I had heard during the night. Another believed me and got creeped out, but he was always susceptible to getting terrified and couldn't handle the most mundane horror movie.
But what got me almost as much as the experience itself was when I told my friend's father, the one who owned the house where we had been sleeping.
He practically turned white. After a pause to compose himself, he told me about a tragedy that had happened to a neighbor when he was a boy. This was the house where he grew up. His father lived here when he worked in the factory, and now my friend's father did the same. A neighbor up the street had suffered a terrible accident in the factory. He got caught in a machine, which ripped his chest open and crushed his leg. The poor man had died there, one of the casualties of the mill in a time when industrial accidents weren't uncommon. Had I encountered the ghost of that man trying to will his ruined body home from his place of death?
I don't know, and I shudder to think about it. This was the only experience I ever had with a ghost, if indeed it was a ghost. I hope I never have another.
True story.
Submitted by Patrick Meighan - 07/25/07