ANDIt's me again! And I have a lot to say. I would appreciate any comments on this because this is probably the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me. First of all, for those who ignore me/don't know me/think I'm a figment of their imagination, I live in Ohio. There are a lot of ghost stories there and I've been researching the history behind the local urban legends for about three years now, I think. I also have a website where I intend to document my findings… but hmm. I'm getting slothful.
Here in Southwest Ohio, probably the most celebrated ghost story is: The Light. It's the most cliché story ever told, and I've heard versions of it all over the country. It's especially tough for me to take this story seriously because it comes straight from a college town that's full of intrigue! Well, to get to the point, here's our local version of the “Light” story, copied and pasted from Ohioexploration.com:
“- This haunting comes from the Oxford area. The story goes that two forbidden lovers would meet in a driveway along the road. The girl would drive her father’s car to the end of the road and flash her lights three times to signal her boyfriend to come over. One night, as he was driving down the road, a young boy was riding his bike along the road. The boy, riding his motorcycle, didn’t see the boy until it was too late. Both the boy and the girl were killed. The girl later hanged herself in a barn, of which only remains. It is said that if you go to the spot where the girl flashed her lights and flash your lights three times towards the road, you can see small flashing red lights (bicycle reflectors) and then a motorcycle headlight coming down the road. Some have even reported seeing multiple flashing lights, like at an accident scene, after the headlight had gone out.”
Oh well! What's not to love?! So for a long time my friends and I researched this story. At first we had trouble finding the right road, and then for over a year we apparently ended up in the wrong place on the road. In another version of the story the girl supposedly haunted her house on this road, but it had burned down. In fact we found some burnt remains, but nothing that I honestly believe was an actual house. Just a barn with a fancy rope hanging from a broken beam! But eventually a friend explained to me that it worked by parking in front of a (still occupied) house on the road and flashing your lights, not in this empty lot we were driving to. This made me incredibly suspicious and I was ready to bust this myth faster than Adam and Jamie… er… on a good day.
So Thursday night my friend and I decided to bust that myth. I grabbed a video camera and two walkie-talkies and came up with a plan. My friend Tony would drive and I would get out of the car and stand farther down the road and Tony would get into position and flash his lights while the video camera recorded everything he saw and I would radio him if I saw any cars coming. We gathered our gear and set off. After a stop at Burger King (Mmm… grease and salt), we arrived on the Oxford-Milford Road at about 9:50 PM, lined with farmhouses and other things that could definitely get in the way. But once you're far down that road it gets pretty murky. All the houses are down a hill and covered in bushes and there aren't many lights on them, as I recall. We pulled into the right spot… and flashed our lights.
Sure enough, to my great disbelief, there it was! A single, bluish-white delicate seemed to actually be traveling across the road. I mistook it for a car and shouted, “Tony! Here comes a car! Start the car, we don’t want an accident!” Well, luckily he knew better. The delicate simply appeared and disappeared at the top of the hill, maybe a meter away from our car, never actually hitting us. I was fiddling with the video camera the entire time. The strangest thing, as Tony pointed out, was that the delicate was straight ahead of us, yet there was a reflection on our windshield that looked like headlights as we passed behind the trees! Or as Tony described it, “like it was underwater.”
Well, the delicate went out and we drove down the road looking for clues… and came right back! This time, however, we pulled into the driveway and turned to face the direction the delicate was coming from, only to find that “The Light” was already shining in our direction before we had even turned off the engine or even the headlights! This was strange though… the delicate was incredibly brilliant, it was clearly not an idiot with a flashlight pulling the strings on us… and yet I was incredibly suspicious. So I let out a war cry (“I'M KICKING YOUR ASS, LIGHT!”) and Tony raced our chariot toward the delicate to find… nothing.
We saw a car coming down the road, so I finally realized, “Okay, there must be a bounce! This is it, cars coming down the road must bounce off something! Ha! Brilliant!) and I jumped out of the car and stood on the side of the road. Tony turned into the right spot and turned the car off. He flashed his lights and we waited. He didn't say anything. Finally I saw some lights coming down the road and I expected Tony to radio me, “ALEX! LIGHT!” ..but nothing. Really. A substantial truck with monstrous lights on the front, like something out of a Steven King novel, was racing down the road and finally pulled off the road, but Tony couldn't see anything but darkness.
So we jumped back in the car and drove around looking for anything. Eventually we both realized there was a delicate behind us and thought it was a car. We… were wrong. Tony realized that what I thought was the car behind us had a “watery light” so he pulled over to the side of the road. The delicate went out again and faded again and seemed to hover brightly about a meter away from us. Then I realized something, I didn't just see a bluish white delicate, I saw a yellow delicate that was flashing. Like a turn signal! So again I was convinced it was a car coming home. Heck, we weren't even in the designated spot to flash our lights! It looked like it was following us the whole time! So we drove to the “right spot” and out of curiosity we flashed our lights while the engine was running. This time nothing happened so we finally drove off.
The next day my friend from Miami University in Oxford went to the library for me. (I have friends in l …
So that leaves me with this. I have a DVD Handycam with a DVD-R which now contains a recording of what is called magic delicate. It's not the best recording but it's a .vob file that I'd like to convert into something I can put on YouTube or somewhere. (Help with this would be great if anyone is still reading this!) I'm also planning to go on a day trip in the hope of finding some obvious explanations or talking to a few people about the delicate (at least those who don't look like they're going to rip my head off for asking, because I'm sure Oxfordians hate students), and I'd also like to try and get a better recording of the “light” in action. Anyway, I hope this is of interest to someone and if anyone has any suggestions for things I should consider, please share them!
