An Interesting Story

This is regrettably a very short story based on two separate incidents witnessed, once by me, and another time by my wife about a year ago.
I work full time during the day and do a lot of volunteer work at night which sometimes sees me arriving home after midnight. Although the city I live in, Canberra, is small by most standards it does have an interesting past which, for obvious reasons, I won't pursue at this stage, suffice to say that the general area used to be broken up into large sheep stations. One of these was called Ginninderra and indeed Ginninderra Creek still flows through the sleepy suburbs to this day. And so it was one of these late nights that I was driving home with the creek, shrouded in mist and trees and undergrowth, on my right hand side. The section of the road is quite eerie and somewhat remote even by Canberra's standard and to my surprise I saw ahead of me walking beside the road, a whitish yet somewhat blurred figure. It was mid winter and below zero and I thought to myself that this guy had to be an idiot to be out at this time. The figure, although walking alongside the road, did not appear to be following the road but slightly veering away from it as if following another path. I slowed down but kept driving and was rather surprised to look in the rear vision mirror only to see that the figure had disappeared. Of course this does not sound to much like a ghost or spirit and could be shot down in flames by any skeptic. However, something about the way the figure moved and the unusual path that it followed, not to say its appearance either, made me think about it over the following week. After some research on the local district I discovered that there used to exist a crossing across the creek at or about the area I saw the figure and apparently in the early 1880s a young stock handler died rather violently during a storm when the river flooded and he was swept away to his death. This I found interesting but nevertheless, nothing to intriguing and I didn't mention it to anyone until a few days later when my wife arrived home from working her night shift as a nurse proclaiming that she had just seen 'a pair of legs and half a body' walking down the road near the creek. I asked her where and the area was the same as where I had seen the figure previously. When I questioned her more she said that the fog either obscured the top part of the body, or it had no top part, which is what she believed. She also had slowed down wondering why someone would be walking along the road in minus temperatures at that time of the morning, about 6.30ish. And, like me, she was intrigued and had a feeling that something was just not quite right about the figure she had seen. Driving past the figure she also looked in the mirror only to realize that the figure had now disappeared. And then came the clincher, she mentioned that it appeared as if the figure she had seen was not walking along the road as such, but along another path that did not exist.

I told her about my experience and the tragic death of the stockman and for some reason she simply said, 'yes', almost as if she suddenly understood. This is not the first time I have witnessed some sort of 'paranormal' event and neither my wife, in fact she appears to quite often attract events as such and therefore when she simply nodded her head and said 'yes', I accepted that she immediately understood what it was all about.

As I said, short and rather boring, but interesting in a way. None of your scary, blood curdling, heart pumping action, just a figure, a lonely one at that, wandering by a road near a creek. Why it appeared I have no idea. I could not track down the exact date of the death of the stockman but it was in the same month that we witnessed the figure. There was never any feeling of dread or fright, or even unease, moreso just that something was not quite right, or not quite how it should be. Could we have been looking back into the past? Had this figure simply appeared in the present. Could it all have been a mistake? These questions I cannot answer although as a postscript I will add that one of my wife's friends came over one night and we were talking about, of all things, the existence of the Tasmanian Tiger, Thylacine. Suddenly she burst out that she had seen a strange man walking along the road near the creek but not quite adjacent to the road. And yes, he appeared to be in all white and when she looked back he was gone.