I guess I’ll be the first to admit, yes. I do. And I’ve seen one, or at least the “presence” of one.
When I was about 8 years old my family lived on a large wheat farm in northern Montana, just a few miles south of the Canadian border. This is the great plains, and the land is very very flat.
The farm we lived on was divided into “sections,” or plots of land that were a perfect square one mile on a side… kind of like a checkers board if viewed from the air. The farmhouse sat on one edge of a section, and an old homesteaders shack, long abandoned and disused, sat on the edge of an adjoining section ~ 1 mile away.
One night in October (naturally!) my mother was in the kitchen doing something or other and suddenly cries out for my dad to come in there. My dad (and me and my brother) come into the kitchen to see what the fuss was. Mom was standing at the kitchen window looking east, and in the distance we could see the old shack—or, more accurately, we could see a light in the one of the old windows in the shack. There was no electricity in the shack, no fireplace, the woodstove that had originally been there had been pulled out decades earlier. The light had the yellowish glow of a Coleman lantern, and my dad theorized that a hunter had gotten himself turned around in the snow and somehow stumbled upon the shack and had decided to hold up for the night.
Now of course this was October in Northern Montana. “Cold” doesn’t begin to describe it. The idea that someone was holed up in an old shack with no door and broken windows was unacceptable, and my dad immediately headed to the garage. His plan was to take his old F-250 4x4 and go get whoever it was that was in the shack. There was nearly a foot of snow on the ground and it was continuing to come down, but lightly. He wasn’t going to let someone say outside in weather like that.
Now, despite the land being flat there was small coulee that ran across our property, and it happened to run between the main house and the shack. This meant the access road dipped down into a little draw made by the coulee before rising up again. I don’t remember why, but I accompanied my dad as he headed out to rescue whoever was in the shack. As we left the house and followed the access road along the section lines, we could clearly see the glowing window off in the distance.
However, as we dipped down into the coulee, the old shack slipped out of view. Even though it was dark we knew where it would be on the black horizon when we crested the little draw again.
Except… it wasn’t. Dad was taking his time driving through the snow on a small, one-lane dirt track across the edge of a wheat field, so we were in that draw for maybe a minute or 90 seconds. But when we finally got back onto the flatland the light was simply gone. It was dark out, and I mean dark. We couldn’t see anything other than the scattered snowflakes in the headlights.
Dad continued down the section line until he could turn and follow another one to the shack, maybe another quarter mile on. When he pulled up to it we could see that there was nothing there. No vehicle, no footprints… nothing.
Dad reached under the seat of the pickup and pulled out a big 4-D cell MagLite and hopped out of the pickup. I remember rolling down the window and sticking my head out, watching him walk toward the shack. He was wearing big rubber Wellington boots that somehow seemed to be extra loud in the snow. Dad hollers out every few steps, seeing if anyone answers. I’m sitting in the cab shivering, hoping dad will just walk up the doorless shack, get whoever is inside outside and take him back to the house for a hot coffee and a warning not to trespass on our land again. But dad doesn’t do that. Instead he makes a big circle around the shack, his footsteps fading away, then getting louder as he makes his way closer to the pickup… then away again as he circles the shack.
I finally see him shine the light into one of the widows and look in the building. He stays that way for maybe thirty seconds before walking back to the pickup. He climbs back in, tosses the flashlight on the dashboard, and turns the pickup around, heading back for home. I ask him what he had seen, but he simply hushed me. I remember listening to the windshied wipers as we made our way back, sans passenger. My dad never spoke a word on the way back, and the ride was silent except the crunch of snow under the tired, the hum of the engine and the windshield wipers. There was no wind, no storm, nothing else… just black silence.
When we got home my dad told me to go to my room and shut the door. I did so, but laid on the floor listening at the crack at the bottom. I heard dad give my mom a play-by-play recap of what we had done. He then said that when he walked up and shone the light in the window, the shack was completely undisturbed. Decades of dust, dirt, animal nests, broken mason jars, and all manner of junk still littered the floor, just as it had for years. There were no tracks inside, no wet footprints, no undisturbed snow. The shack was as untouched as it had been since the last occupants had left in the 1940’s.
Yet not half an hour earlier all three of us had seen a gas light flickering in the window. We did not hallucinate it. Someone, something, had been in that shack.