All the while we looked it felt as if we were being watched. This wasn’t unusual because it fell within the parameters of the situation.
Our search ended when police units checking side streets around the hospital radioed that they had caught the suspects. The holdup men subsequently admitted to hiding in a garage loft in the next yard over, a place from which they could see our movements as we searched.
Again, there was nothing supernatural about the feeling of being watched because we were at the scene of a crime just moments after the suspects had fled.
But it was a different situation on that August afternoon on a tree-lined residential area. The day was beginning to heat up and the neighborhood streets were quiet, probably because anyone not at work was staying inside out of the sun. There was no other traffic, no barking dogs, not even a chirping bird. Just quiet.
The driver blew through a stop sign like it was a green light and I pulled him over in front of a two-story white house. I never liked writing citations, figuring a simple stop and a warning was good enough to get most drivers heads out of wherever they had been and back on the task of paying attention to the road. The driver was pleasant, apologetic, and he even thanked me.
That’s when I felt it.
My heart rate suddenly accelerated and a tingling sensation danced up my spine to bristle the fine hairs at the base of my neck. This wasn’t anything new to me, as I’d felt it to greater and lesser degrees many times in Vietnam, and at least once or twice a week on high-risk situations on the police job, such as kicking in a door on a dangerous warrant service or going up against a man with a gun in a tavern. But on a pleasant summer day on a sleepy street?
I bid the driver a good day and watched him pull away from the curb. It clearly hadn’t been the traffic stop giving me the heebie-jeebies because the feeling intensified. I made a 360-degree turn, scanning the sidewalks in all directions, as well as the streets as far as I could see north, south, west, and east. I looked over at the big house I was parked in front of and the ones on each side of it. Nothing, and I didn’t see anything suspicious with the houses on the other side of the street. So why was my adrenalin revving up?
With the fight/flight juices percolating in my veins, and with no one with whom to do battle and no threat to back away from, I headed back to my car. But before I could get there the feeling worsened. My heart was thumping now, my eyes watering, and goose bumps were out on my arms.
I had to get in the car and do so quickly.
A lot of officers refer to their police units as their “office.” For some, they think of their car as a protective shield against threats and dangers from forces outside of it. This is an illusion, of course, because the car doesn’t protect against much of anything other than the weather. In fact, it makes for a larger target. Officers know this but still they take some comfort once they slip inside and shut the door.
But getting into my car didn’t alleviate any of the feelings. I again scanned all four sides. Nothing. Not until I accelerated away from the curb did the sensation start to lessen. Two blocks away, I pulled under the shade of a big tree and sat for a moment as my heart rate returned close to normal, my anxiety decreased, and my adrenaline began to cool.
Eventually I returned to patrol and my shift ended three hours later without incident.
The next day my sergeant asked me to see him after roll call.
“You stop a car on Sixty-Third and Fleet Tuesday?” he asked.
“I know nothing and I wasn’t even there,” I said with a smirk. When he didn’t smile at the old joke, I told him I had. “Guy blew a stop sign and I gave him a verbal. He complaining?” I didn’t understand why he would file a complaint. I was pleasant to him and—
“You stop him in front of a white house, a big one, two stories?”
“I didn’t block their driveway. Did the owner…” Then I remembered the terrible case of the creeps I’d had on the traffic stop. More accurately, the rush of dread I’d had after it.
“Better sit down,” the sergeant said. “A young woman came into the precinct last night. Said a uniform officer was in front of her house yesterday afternoon talking to a driver. Apparently her fiancé has a real hate on for the cops; he’s an ex-con.”
“Okay,” I said, wondering where this was going.
“He saw you through the window and he apparently flipped out. Told his girlfriend he was going to shoot you. So he retrieved a rifle, loaded it, and propped the barrel on a windowsill. He lined you up in his sights and was about to fire when the woman leaped at him and tried to get the rifle away. Apparently, you drove off while they were rolling around fighting on the floor. He got the weapon back and he was majorly upset to see you had left. So he beat her up pretty badly. She got away and that’s when she came here to the precinct.”
I slumped deeper into the chair, struggling for air.
“Close one,” the sergeant said with a shake of his head. “Be careful out there. You just used up your good karma.”
THE LIGHT
By Marc Spicer
There have long been stories about Oxford Milford Road in Ohio’s Butler County. Depending on whom you talk to, you will get varying accounts of what has supposedly happened, as well as what you might experience there yourself. Some call it “The Legend” and others call it “The Light,” but by whatever name it’s basically the same story told about similar places all around the world. “Blink your headlights three times and you will see a light appear in the distance, then come toward you, only to disappear,” or some variation there of.
I never gave the one on Oxford Milford Road much credibility until a deputy and I experienced it.
Every year, especially around Halloween, we would get repeated calls up there about cars parked on the roadway and partially in people’s yards. It was usually younger folks, mostly teenagers from all over as well as students from nearby Miami University that came to get spooked on the lonely countryside road. We would run them off, telling them there was nothing to see.
Occasionally, and just for the fun of it, we would head up a ways to a crossroad, turn on our spotlights, and move slowly toward the crowd. Almost every time, the kids dispersed before we got all the way to them.
One late Halloween night, another deputy and I were dispatched to Oxford Milford Road on suspicious activity at a roadway construction site. As we neared, we noticed what appeared to be someone carrying a light of some kind that emitted a weak yellowish glow. We assumed it was a “someone,” though we couldn’t see the figure.
Then, just like that, the yellowish light disappeared.
We scanned the area with our spotlights and got out on foot with our flashlights to look around. Not finding anyone or seeing any damage to the equipment, we cleared the call. Just to make sure, we did another cruise around the site before driving back up to the usual parking spots to shoo a few people away. Then it was coffee time at a little joint in Oxford.
Cops are used to having their lunches and coffee breaks interrupted and such was the case this night. We had no more than got our cups filled when dispatch sent us back to the same construction site, on the same complaint.
Again we saw the strange light as we pulled up to the scene, we checked the area, and once again it was gone. This time, we decided to wait out whoever it was. We positioned our cars side-by-side where we had a good view of the construction area and the nearby road. We chatted, we watched, and chatted some more.
Then we saw a light. This one, round and brighter than the one in the construction site, was coming straight toward us on the road. Silently.
Just as I told the other deputy that it was the quietest motorcycle I’d ever heard, or not heard, the light descended where the road dips. We waited for it to come back up. But it didn’t. There were no houses or intersecting roads in the area. The road remained dark and silent.
The other deputy and I drove down to the dip, expecting to find a bicycle or a broke down motorcycle at the bottom. But there
was nothing. Not even marks in the grass at the sides of the road.
Up to this point, I hadn’t given the urban legend any thought, as I was busy trying to figure out why we hadn’t found anyone on the work site or at the bottom of the dip. We decided to head back to the construction area. The plan was I would get out on foot on the far side and check around where we had seen the earlier light.
At 0238 hours, (I still remember the time distinctly), we both saw it again, but this time the light was moving to and fro, as if someone were carrying a lantern of some kind. I watched the light—I assumed a male was carrying it—until it came within about 20 feet of me. Then I lit him up with my flashlight.
Nothing.
He, it, or whatever it was—had disappeared. A second earlier, the light was only six or seven strides away. Then it was gone. Not even a flittering firefly. Just nothing.
I radioed the other deputy and told him what had happened. But by the time I got back to my car, he was gone. When I ran into him some time later, it was apparent he was still shook about what had happened. While he appeared unsettled and confused about the whole ordeal, he said he was glad of one thing: That it was me who got so close to the light, not him.
WRONG NUMBER
By Loren W. Christensen
Writer Emma Bull wrote, “Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and pulleys.” If so, where are they in this situation?
In the late 1960s, Constable Peter Moscardi worked as a police officer in England working in London. One day he ran into Dan, a friend of his who told him he had been trying to call him at work but was unable to reach him. Moscardi apologized and said his number had recently been changed. He gave his friend the new one but inadvertently mixed up the last three numbers. Instead of 116, the constable told him 661.
Several nights later, Moscardi was on patrol in an industrial area when he found an open door. He got out of his vehicle and slipped through the opening into what appeared to be an office. He looked around to see if anything had been disturbed.
A desk phone rang.
Out of impulse or compulsion he snatched up the phone. To his amazement it was his friend.
Shocked, Moscardi said, “Dan? What the—? How did you get this number?”
“You gave it to me the other day. You having memory problems, or something?”
“I didn’t give you this number,” Moscardi said. “I gave you my work number.”
“And I dialed it and you answered. Funny how that works, huh?”
“But I’m not at that number I’m out on a call at an industrial site.”
Confused, Dan read off the number Moscardi had given him. “That’s not my number. You mixed them up.”
It was at this point that the constable looked down at the telephone and, to his astonishment, saw that the phone number noted on it was the same wrong number Dan had dialed.
A wrong number given, a door left open, and a friend calling the officer at the exact moment he was standing in a building he had never been in before and in front of a phone bearing the wrong number.
Retold from an entry in Mind and Magic: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Mysterious and Unexplained (Crescent Books, 1991)
ON PATROL IN THE NEWS
St. Louis County, Missouri
On one foggy October night, a veteran officer was patrolling an area called Lemay Ferry Road when he saw what appeared to be an elderly couple walking near the Park Lawn Cemetery. It was 3 a.m.
The man was wearing a brown suit and the woman a light colored dress, clothes hardly appropriate given the damp and chilly evening.
Officer Dicandia later told the St. Louis Dispatch in an interview, I honestly thought they were people visiting a grave and perhaps they had Alzheimer’s. There was a nursing home close by.”
When the officer saw the woman take the man’s hand and the two of them walk into the graveyard, he decided to check them out. But when he turned into the cemetery—they were gone.
“That’s when I got the chills,” he said. “I had watched them for a good 20 to 30 seconds.”
Officer Dicandia patrolled that same area for another two years but never saw them again. He is a detective now and he still can’t get the image out of his mind. “It’s something I won’t soon forget. I wasn’t tired and I know what I saw.”
Source: St Louis Post-Dispatch
*
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
One night, Army officer and physician Jeffrey MacDonald stabbed his pregnant wife and his daughters, 2 and 5, to death in their home.
The house remained empty for 5 years after with boards over the windows and the power shut off. Nonetheless, military policeman Oliver Boyer and other MPs were dispatched there a half dozen times regarding mysterious circumstances.
Boyer, now the sheriff of Jefferson County in Missouri, says, “It wasn’t unusual for us to get calls to the house because people saw lights on, or they heard someone talking or screaming inside the residence.” He said giving credence to some of the calls was the fact the complainants were high-ranking officers on the base.
The situation reached a point where some unnerved officers refused to search the house.
Source: St Louis Post-Dispatch
*
California
Cindy’s mother was cleaning the house when her daughter, about three years old, asked her to go to the potty with her “because there’s a man in there.”
The mother took her to the bathroom but the room was empty. When she asked her daughter what she saw, Cindy told her the man was a policeman. Her mother had been a police dispatcher at one time so she knew Cindy knew the different uniforms. When she asked her daughter the color of the uniform, Cindy indicated it was tan, the color of the Highway Patrol.
As they walked out of the bathroom, Cindy pointed at her bedroom and said, “There’s another one in there.” She told her mother that the officers had been shot, in her words, they had been “shooted with a shoot-gun.” She then went on to tell her mother where exactly on their bodies the bullets had struck. She said one officer was hit in the elbow. As a former police dispatcher in California the mother knew exactly who the men were.
Later, Cindy’s mother was talking to a friend of hers that still worked as a dispatcher. When she told her friend where her daughter said the officers had been shot, her friend replied that the information about one of them getting hit in the elbow had been withheld from the public. Even Cindy’s mother didn’t know.
Note: Partners Roy P. Blecher and William M. Freeman were working out of the Woodland Area Office the night they were gunned down along Interstate 80 near the Yolo Causeway in West Sacramento. Blecher was handcuffed and shot in the back of the head and Freeman had been overpowered, shot, and killed. Investigators found signs of a struggle. Their last radio contact was at 3:12 a.m. when they stopped the suspect for a routine traffic violation. The killer was captured, tried and convicted of the murders and is currently serving a life sentence.
Source: Your Ghost Stories, OfficerDownMemorialPage.org
*
St. Louis, Missouri
Two officers responded to an open door and a blaring alarm at an old Victorian home in the Soulard area; the owners were out of town.
The officers entered through the kitchen, cleared it, and moved on to a room with only one way in and out. They had no sooner walked in than the door slammed shut behind them.
They continued their search throughout the house. Finding nothing disturbed, they proceeded back to the kitchen where they had been minutes earlier. This time the faucets were running.
“They were the kind of handles you had to pull up,” one of the officers said later. “It gave us the chills.”
Source: St Louis Post-Dispatch
*
New Mexico
Officer Karl Romero of the Espanola Police Department was at his post watching surveillance video aimed at various places inside and outside the station when he spotted something that tru
ly spooked him.
It was a foggy figure, human in form, moving through the police parking lot and out through a locked fence.
“At first I thought it was a fly, a moth,” Romero told KOAT TV. “But then I saw the legs. It was human,” While this is the first time anything has been caught on video, other officers at the station have experienced eerie happenings that cannot be explained.
Some have said they feel someone breathing against their necks when they are working in the briefing room.
Others have heard strange noises in the station in the middle of the night and have seen “images” in the lobby that can’t be explained.
The image on the video recorded by Officer Romero [you can see it on YouTube] has shaken many of the officers that work at the station.
KOAT reports that the police station, which was built in 2006, wasn’t constructed on hallowed ground and no one has ever died on the premises.
Source: Fox News
*
Massena, New York
Dragon Obretenoff [yes, that was his real name] was a Bulgarian immigrant who owned two restaurants in Massena, a small town near the Canadian border. He was killed when a hunter mistook him for a deer.
He was buried in Pine Grove Cemetery and ever since ghost hunters have flocked to his grave.
One day a couple was walking their dog near Obretenoff’s grave when they both heard someone behind them hiss, “Turn around!” They didn’t, but they did flee from the cemetery, no doubt changing their dog-walking route.
There are numerous reports of electronic interference in the area to include police radios in passing police cars.
Shadow people [see Terminology page] have been seen in the graveyard. A local ghost hunting group as well as local police officers all report seeing dark figures darting about in among the graves in the early morning hours.
Cops' True Stories of the Paranormal: Ghost, UFOs, and Other Shivers Page 5