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The original was posted on /r/paranormal by /u/westcabiria on 2024-06-23 17:19:48+00:00.

My Grandad has had this written out and kept in a cupboard for as long as I can remember, it’s written by a relative detailing a night they experienced while out with their dogs in 1959 around Haltwhistle/Greenhead in the north of England. It doesn’t have tremendous shock value but he swore by what he saw and I figure it may be of interest to some. I used to read it when I was little.

I’ve written it out exactly as he did below.

Dear Mark, 

The following is a factual record of something I saw one night while taking my dogs for a last canter before turning in for the night. 

It was a very bright morn with just a trace of haziness round it and I could discern quite a bit of detail in the hedgerows and landscape. 

The time was somewhere between midnight and one AM and the year was 1959-3. 

I’d been walking for ten minutes or so and when I came to a small bridge over the Tipalt Burn I stopped as usual to watch for rising trout and changed my pipe while I watched. 

When I’d got my pipe drawing to my satisfaction I turned to continue my walk and noticed the dogs standing close beside me and staring fiercely at a point some fifty or sixty yards away at the field. They seemed scared of something. Following their line of vision I saw someone walking across the field towards the River South Tyne. 

He was approaching a fence at the end of the field and just a few yards beyond the fence the ground fell away where the river had washed away the topsoil over the years until at this time where was a drop of about six or seven feet onto the riverside stones. 

To my amazement when he got to the fence he didn’t climb over as I expected but just walked on as though there was no fence there. 

Of course this made me very curious and I watched very closely and noticed that he was very oddly dressed by modern day standards and was carrying some kind of pack and a stringed musical instrument of a type I’d never seen before. I later found out that this was an old fashioned lute or something to that effect. 

But now came the time when my curiosity turned into fear as he reached the edge of the field and carried on walking six or more feet above the stones towards the site of an old ford over the river approaching Bellister castle which although still lived in is partly in ruins due to a fire. 

I don’t know how long I stood there petrified by fear but eventually I was able to move and I did just that, faster than I’d ever before, naturally away from the source of my fear. 

Well Marc, that’s a true recording of what I saw that night and I hope it proves of interest to you. 

You will never again hear me say I don’t believe in ghosts because at last I’d seen one with my own eyes and a former disbeliever was converted that night. 

While writing this account for you, even though it’s broad daylight on a warm summer night the hairs on my neck were prickling and shivers were running through me even twenty two years later.