A Super Natural Tale

This story was told to me by one of my best ever friends , who we lost to cancer some twelve years back.I am still in touch with his widow , his sons and their families but this happened when we were in our teens.

Every summer we went round local farms making a little money loading the trailers with hay bales from the field after the bailing had finished, if you were lucky you got a pitch fork , if you didn’t your forearms would be lacerated and sting like billyo.

We’d work from six til ten at night , school the following morning and did this from the age of about 13 to 17 , until you got a proper job. It would be dark and you would get back to the farm and be offered a drink or three often home brewed by someone on the farm , totally illegal , we were under age but good workers and we didn’t say no to more beer.

Of course afterwards you had to get home. Sometimes you were on bikes and sometimes on foot, sometimes you were offered a lift in a car or van or on a motorbike , but eventually you departed.

You always looked for who paid well , who gave you beer and sometimes it was just relatives who wanted you . There was no negotiation and if you needed money it was relatively easy to pick up.

Anyway one night my mate had been baling at a relative's farm and had been dropped off by his dad so was going to have to walk home, but he got his money , drank his beer , and set off home.

He decided to take a short cut over a field and through a wood , but at that age you are fine with it. These days I could see the media screaming at this situation today , but that’s how life was then.

So over the gate he went through the field , before coming up to the small dark wood.

As he entered the wood he thought he saw something but brushed his eyes and ignored it .

As he walked through the woods , now he had taken this path it wasn’t worth turning back to the road, he started seeing things.

Ahead of him he could see shapes moving , across his line of vision, they were grey or dirty white rectangles maybe a couple of feet long and a foot high floating about a foot off the ground.

He hadn’t a clue what they were.

But he started to get a little worried.

They weren’t coming towards him , though he was moving towards them.

This was a mystery , it was dark in a wood in a Lancashire field, with floating flibberty gibbets , capable of who knows what mischief.

Were they ghosts or something supernatural?

He got a little scared and started to run , there was only one way , and as he ran he hit one of the things with some force , and suddenly it became absolutely clear.

The thing , or the the creature , was nothing more than a sheep , with black legs and a black head , thus explaining why he saw what he saw.

So not really a ghost.

I had a similar experience travelling to Newcastle from my home in Leyland through Cumbria near Kirkby Stephen . It was five in the morning , pre dawn , and I was in red Ford Sierra on a single lane road. Suddenly the road was blocked with what looked like boulders. Out in the middle of nowhere , unable to revers , perfect horror film scenario.

I stopped the car , got out and the rocks moved , they too were sheep. So another supernatural mystery naturally explained.

The music I included was "Mad Alice Lane" by Lawlor , very atmospheric. but this is no longer on Youtube, though you can buy the CD below. I was going to use "Sheep" by Pink Floyd but that would have been a give away, so I have gone with "Paile Green Ghosts" by John Grant