Spotlight

When I lived in Tasmania, I always used to go for weekends and school holidays at a place called White Beach. White Beach is about half an hours drive from Port Arthur and about and hours drive from Hobart. My friend Nick had a block of land there, where a caravan was permanently placed. We did the whole campfire thing at night and surfed during the day. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

We were playing spotlight one evening with Nick's sister Alice and making quite a game of it. Nick and I were crashing about in the long grass, looking around for Alice and were planning to make this the final round. Then, we spotted her. Well, what we THOUGHT was her. It was remarkably darker than it should have been, but despite this, we still managed to spot a figure striding along the other side of the fence line. We yelled that we'd found her and the game was over. Then we did a double take....it couldn't have been Alice, it was far too tall and striding in a most peculiar fashion. We kept yelling at it, but to no avail. It kept walking. It did not turn or even break its march. It went past a sapling gum tree and completely disappeared forever. Nick and I looked at each other for a moment and then shot back to the relative safety of the campfire. We considered the facts. It had been extremely dark, yet every feature of the figure had been perfectly visable. Then, we discovered something truly frightening. The batteries in our torch were completely drained.