I’ve posted this before on the boards but I can’t find it, so I guess I’ll share it again.
My grandfather owned a ~3000 acre wheat farm in northern Montana. He died in 1987 and, for reasons I don’t really understand, my parents decided to uproot from Oregon and go to Montana to help run the farm until a buyer could be found. I was 6 years old.
The farm was on the plains just south of the Canadian border. The land is very flat. However, a small coulee (a creek making a shallow ravine) ran through the property north to south. The farmhouse was on the far western side of the property.
One night in October my mom was in the kitchen washing dishes when suddenly she yelled for my dad to come into the kitchen. I distinctly remember watching Duck Tales when I heard my mom yell. My brother and I ran into the kitchen along with my dad. My mom was pointing out the kitchen window, due east.
East of the house was an old homestead shack almost exactly a mile away – the land was plotted into “sections,” or a square of land a mile on a side. Both the homestead shack and the modern farmhouse were on the west side of sections, but each on a different section. The homestead shack had been abandoned since the late ‘40’s and had no doors and the windows were long broken. The bare wood floors were littered with dirt, debris, broken glass, wood scraps, and animal nests.
And what my mom had seen, what we all then were looking at, was a light. A light coming from one of the glass-less windows of the shack.
It was October and my dad muttered something about a hunter somehow getting lost and bivouacking in the shack for the night. It was snowing and there was already a foot or so of snow on the ground. My dad wasn’t about to let someone freeze to death on his watch, so he decided to go get this lost person and bring them up to the house for a cup of coffee and a warning to stop hunting on private land. For whatever reason he let me go with him, something that I as a father would never do but maybe those were simpler times?
Anyway, dad had an old F-250 4X4 that he used to get around the farm when the snow was deep or the mud was bad. We put on our boots and coats and headed out to the pickup. He started it and pulled away from the house and headed out the main road, turning south. The world was pitch black, the only thing I remember seeing was the falling snow in he headlights. It wasn’t snowing heavy but it was enough that dad needed the windshield wipers periodically.
Because all the land was divided into sections the access to each was along “section lines” or dirt tracks that ran along the edges. Imagine the land divided like a giant chess board, with the only access along the edge of each square. So to get to the shack which was a mile to the east of us we had to drive half a mile south, turn east, drive a mile east, then turn north for half a mile until we got to the shack.
Which was exactly what we did. But there was that north-south coulee that ran across the property and where the section line encountered it the road dropped down 20 or 30 feet, went across the creek for 100 yards or so, then back up 20 or 30 feet to resume crossing the prairie. As we approached the coulee we could still see the glowing window of the shack in the distance, flickering through the falling snow. Dad slowed a bit, downshifted, and descended into the coulee, slowly making his way across the bottoms. There was a fence along the section line for almost the entire road (except where the actual creek was, but water only ran in the spring) so there was no danger of going off the road despite the snow. Dad crawled across the coulee bottom and then slowly up the other side and then levelled out again.
And the light was gone. The whole world was black again.
Dad continued on until the north section line came up. He turned and made his way north, slowing down as he approached the shack. When the shack materialized out of the darkness in the headlights, it looked… well, just as it always had. A long-abandoned building, maybe 25 or 30 feet on a side, no paint, no windows, no sign of life.
Dad got out of the truck and grabbed a big police-style Mag-Lite that he kept under the seat. He switched it on and started towards the shack. I rolled down the window and watched.
He made a big circle around the shack, his boots crunching in the snow. Every once in a while he hollered towards the building, but never got a reply. He made a couple of concentric circles around the building then turned 90 degrees and walked up to the front door – the door itself was long gone. He shone his light in for maybe 30 seconds then stepped back and returned to the truck. He hopped in, tossed the flashlight onto the dash like a hillbilly, and turned the truck around and headed back the way we had come. I asked him where the person was but he just hushed me. The ride back was silent except for the engine and the crunch of snow under the tires. In the distance, of course, the farmhouse was lit up like a Christmas tree – it must’ve looked like that every night but of course I had never seen it at night from that vantage point.
When we got home he told my to go to my room. I did under protest. When I got to my room I closed the door and then laid on the floor to listen to what he was telling my mom.
He said that he had gone around the shack looking for footprints or snowmobile tracks or a Jeep or anything, and saw nothing. No sign anyone had been through that snow at all – certainly no evidence of anyone recently leaving. He then went to the front door and peered in. The floor of the shack was just as dirty and dusty and cluttered as it always had been. No person had been in that shack in years, probably decades, nothing, not even an animal, had been inside to disturb all the dirt and junk that was in there. There had been nobody there.
But half an hour earlier all 4 of us had seen a light coming from the shack. Not a piddly little flicker, but a bright warm glow. Coming from inside the building.
I remember the last time I told this story someone came along and informed me that they had solved the mystery: that we were seeing reflected light against the windows and that was all there was to the mystery. No ghosts.
No.
First, there were no windows left to reflect light. The frames remained but all the glass had been broken out decades before. Second, the nearest house was our farmhouse. We looked out that kitchen window daily and had there been any lights from the house that would be reflecting on any (existent) windows in the shack we would’ve known it. Our nearest neighbor was six miles away… to the east. Third, there were no cars on the road to shine a headlight at the shack and even if there had been because of the grid-like layout of the road system there would be no headlight shining on the shack itself.
Besides. No glass.
It wasn’t snowing hard enough to cover any tracks of someone who had recently left. They would’ve had to have left hours before for their footprints to have filled in. But we saw the light minutes before we got there. Not hours.
We all know what a light in a window looks like. That is what we saw, that is what we continued to see as we drove toward the shack that night in the falling snow.
Then there was nothing.
But something had been there.
replied, “Something wise.” I replied, “Say something wiser,” and he replied, “Oh much wiser.” The whole video is about eight seconds long.