My family, my parents and my younger sister and I, used to
live in a rural part of North Carolina but we moved to
Maryland 7 years ago due to my father's job.
We used to go
on trips to the NC mountains every year but when we moved
away, our mountain getaway trips sort of stopped.
Well, we
finally got a chance to go back to the NC mountains a
couple of years ago. I was in my 1st year of college and my
sister was still in high school, but since it was during
the summer, we all got to make the trip and really had a
great time.
Nobody in my family has ever had any sort of
supernatural experience so what happened on the trip home
was a great shock to all of us.
We had decided to take the
long way home from the mountains so that we could pass
through our former home town. It was mid morning and a
sunny day and I was just looking out the window while my
sister listened to her portable cd player with earphones.
We were on the outskirts of our town and my father said
something about a turtle, so I looked up to see what he was
talking about. There was a turtle crossing the road and my
father didn't want to hit it. He pulled off the road and
parked on the side of the road next to a creek. I
volunteered to get out and take the turtle down to the
creek since that was the direction it was headed anyway and
we didn't want it to get run over. When I got back in the
car, my mother said that she saw Mr. Whitener out plowing
his field. We all looked at the field which was on the
opposite side of the road on which we'd pulled off. We
could see a man in the distance on a red tractor. None of
us had seen Mr. Whitener since we'd moved away. We'd seen
him out plowing that field every year and it was a common
sight. But my father made the remark that the field was
usually already plowed by this time and corn was usually
already growing. There were still old stalks lying down and
we didn't see any parts that had been plowed up.
I got the
binoculars from the back floorboard and looked out into the
field. It was sure enough Mr. Whitener on the tractor. He
always wore an old pair of overalls and a baseball cap when
he plowed. I passed the binoculars around and then as the
tractor got closer, we got out of the car and waved to Mr.
Whitener. But he didn't wave back. He looked straight ahead
even as we yelled out to him, and then turned the tractor
in the opposite direction. The spot where he turned around
wasn't that far from the road so he had to have seen us. We
just assumed that his eyesight must be pretty bad since he
was getting up there in years. We didn't really have the
time to stick around and wait for him whenever he would
plow in our direction again so we just got back in the car
and went on our way.
Before we left town, we had to stop
and fill up on gas. My father went in to pay while my
little sister got some soft drinks from the cooler in the
trunk. When my father came back to the car, his face was
very pale and he had a troubled look on his face. My mother
handed him his drink and asked him what was wrong. He
wouldn't say anything and just started the car and drove.
Finally, after about twenty minutes, my father told us that
while he was in the store, he ran into a wife of a former
coworker. He had mentioned to her about seeing Mr. Whitener
a few minutes before. She told him that it couldn't have
been Mr. Whitener that we saw because he had died two
months ago! He had suffered a stroke around Christmas and
just kept going downhill, never getting better! But we all
know what we saw!
I still get chills just thinking about
it! All I can figure is that we were seeing a part of the
past being replayed that day. It was definitely the image
of Mr. Whitener that we'd all seen. We saw him plain as
day! He was solid and so was the tractor. We've all talked
about that day many times in the past two years. My father
always mentions about the way that the field was unplowed
and that even where the tractor was supposed to have been
plowing at the time, there wasn't any plowed up earth.
I
guess we just didn't notice the unplowed earth part that
day because we were so excited to see an old friend and
were trying to get his attention. And the obvious reason
that the old stalks were still there is because Mr.
Whitener had died before he could plow the field and plant
new corn that year.
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