What made me think twice about dismissing ghost stories

Readers, 

Happy Halloween!

To round out this spooky season I have nothing more valuable than I can give to you other than my own personal spooky story. 

It was fall of last year and I had just left a friend’s house. It was the first time my parents let me stay out past my 10 p.m. curfew since I was only watching a documentary with a friend. It was around 11 p.m. and it was time for me to make the 15-minute drive from Horace to my home in West Fargo. It was a fun night and I grabbed my backpack, walked out of her house and sat in my 2016 Ford Focus. 

As soon as I sat in the driver’s seat I was overcome by the feeling of having someone sitting in the seat behind me. So just to be safe, I turned on my car light and looked behind me and there was no one there. 

If you are a car person, then you know that the Ford Focus is a very small car. They just barely have a middle seat in the back and hardly enough legroom for anyone older than nine.  My car only has one row behind the driver’s seat, so if there was someone in the car I would have been able to spot them with no problem. 

So knowing no one was behind me and the radio playing, I began the drive home.

The street she lives on runs parallel to Sheyenne, with two stop signs before I was able to turn right towards Sheyenne. 

At 15 miles an hour, I crept down the street. 

My anxiety began to swirl in my stomach with every yard my car crept. 

One stop sign. 

The longer I drove down the road, the stronger the presence became.

It felt like a hand was just behind my neck. If the hair stood up on my neck anymore I would feel someone touching me. It felt like choking. It felt like someone was in my personal space. It felt like when you have your back turned, but you know someone was watching. 

By the time I reached the second stop sign, I put my car in park, turned on the ceiling light and turned to look. 

No one. 

The knot of anxiety did not uncoil. 

I turned right toward Sheyenne and quickly drove down the short, narrow road racing to the left turn that would take me out of this neighborhood and towards town. Finally, I was at the left turn that would take me onto Sheyenne and away from this neighborhood. 

That is when it happened. My radio stopped working. Life 97.9 was replaced with static. My comforting, Christian radio station turned off. In fact, the radio stopped working altogether. 

I turned the dial-in both directions, 

Static. 

I had my radio search for any open radio channel. 

Static. 

I checked all of my presets, static. 

Finally, my panic rose out of my stomach and into my chest. I turned my radio off and on again, music. 

Nothing more happened to me that night. Was my anxiety getting the better of me? Maybe. Was it simply leftover paranoia from watching the true-crime documentary? That’s a possibility, too. Perhaps a case of highway hypnosis. Who knows. 

And that is the mentality I had for quite some time following the incident driving home that night. When I called my friend she didn’t believe me either. 

Until, October of last year. I was walking down 12th avenue around seven at night toward church at the Memorial Union, and I got a call from my friend. The very same friend who has told me there was no way I experienced paranormal activity the night of the drive home. 

So I answered. And she told me the strangest thing had happened to her on the way home. 

She said while driving home she saw a man off the side of the road standing in all black by the cornfield. 

Then when she got to the roundabout at the end of the Sheyenne, outside of Horace she saw a purple floating light orb under the street light. Weird! 

And then I remembered, this same friend had a few months earlier, told me about her sister’s friend that she used to ride the bus with on the way to school. Tragically, her sister’s friend ended up taking her own life. Later the home that she died in burned down. The only room left standing was her first-floor room that she had died in. 

And how did she die? She hung herself. 

Where was I feeling the oppressive force? My neck. 

It seems like a lot of strange coincidences and that was the last of the strange occurrences I experienced visiting her home. But it is the most visceral.