Real Ghost Story - The Man in Black

Another story revolving around my Aunt Elsa had to do with a warning she received from a very menacing looking man dressed all in black . . .

As the story goes, my Aunt Elsa, my mom, my grandfather and his sister (my great Aunt Mary -Elsa’s mother) were driving on their way back home. It was a stormy night and my Aunt Elsa was feeling very uneasy during the trip. Shortly before the vehicle was to travel over a local bridge that they had been over hundreds of times, my aunt happened to look over to the street corner. As she did, she caught the eye of a man standing against a light post. This man did not seem ordinary to my aunt. He was dressed all in black and was pointing toward the bridge and shaking his head “no”. My aunt couldn’t explain what came over her but she began screaming that she did not want to go over that bridge. She begged my Grandfather and her mother to please not go over that bridge. It seemed the only thing they could do to calm her down was to promise that they would not travel over the bridge.

The next day in the paper my grandfather read how the bridge that Aunt Elsa had caused such a commotion over had been washed out in the rainstorm the night before. Call it luck, call it second sight, call it whatever you like, but if it were not for my aunt heeding the man in black’s warning you probably would not be reading this story today.

My Aunt Elsa claims that she saw this man one other time while she was a child. She was on her way home around dusk one night and was just about to cross over railroad tracks which was the usual shortcut all the kids took home. When she neared the tracks however, she again caught sight of the man dressed all in black on the other side of the tracks. Again he seemed to be warning her of dangers to come. Rather than chance it, she took the long way home. She never did find out if anything happened on those railroad tracks but she had learned from experience to heed this dark man’s warnings and so she did.

The moral of this story is that sometimes we see things for a reason . . .