"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science." ~ Albert Einstein Describe something mysterious.

Something recently happened to my husband which was both mysterious and downright creepy. Rich typically leaves for work at 5:00 am when it's still dark outside, and the first part of his route is along Highway 80, which is split in the middle by a median, with two lanes going in each direction. When the weather is nice, he likes to take his motorcycle.

This particular morning he was on his Harley and he was leading a small pack of cars behind him traveling down Hwy. 80 in the darkness. It had been awhile since the highway department had cleared the brush along the sides of the road, so the bushes, vines and kudzu that the South is famous for were growing right up to the shoulders of the road.

Suddenly and with no warning, a man appeared immediately in front of his headlights, rising up out of the brush at the roadside. He was African American, dressed in dark colors from head to foot, and began striding purposefully across the road with absolutely no expression on his face. There was no sign that he could hear the roar of Rich's motorcycle, no flicker of recognition that he could see the army of headlights heading straight for him.

Rich fought his natural instinct to jerk on the handlebars, knowing that would spell disaster. Thinking quickly, he avoided the impending tragedy by barely, almost imperceptibly, flicking his handlebars to the left. He missed the man by mere inches. He said the man's face was almost right above his, and it was zombie-like, as if he never even saw Rich. As if Rich and the cars behind him didn't even exist.

It took awhile for his heart to quit racing, his body to stop trembling, and his adrenaline to cease flowing, and Rich was so busy trying to calm his nerves that he never looked back. The odd thing was that he expected to hear brakes screeching, tires swerving, and horns blaring from the cars behind him... but inexplicably, he never heard anything. He has no explanation for how that could be possible. He says he can still picture the man's face in his mind, and the vision haunts him. It was a true Twilight Zone experience.

A few days after this incident we went to Charleston for a long weekend to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. While we were there, we signed up for a candlelight ghost tour one night. Rich is normally very skeptical about such subjects, but it got him to wondering.... had he truly seen a ghost on that early August morning?