OTHERPLANE

I have never doubted that ghosts exist. Both my wife and my best friend had had encounters with spirits. But when it happened to me, I knew for sure deep down that there is a presence out there somewhere, always there, but not always seen or felt.

I lived in southern Arizona at the time, Cochise County to narrow it down. There, is a river (most would only call it a creek or stream) called the San Pedro. It is only one of a few on the hemisphere that runs from south to north. It is a beautiful place with towering cottonwoods, abundant wildlife, and lush, green foliage that follows the path of the river from its origin in Mexico up to the San Carlos Indian Reservation, where it joins with the Gila River near Winkelman, AZ. It is the river that Francisco Vasquez de Coronado followed during his expedition for the city of Cibola, The Seven Cities of Gold, in 1540.

There is also local folklore surrounding this river, and its hundreds of connecting "washes". Washes are stream of river beds that empty rain water from all over the county into the San Pedro during periods of monsoon rains. These washes range from small, two foot wide dried stream beds, to miniature Grand Canyons that can be hundreds of feet across, with vertical walls that cut into the earth, that can reach 50 feet in height.

Local legend tells of a widow in the 1800's who cannot afford to feed her two children. She is forced to choose between herself or her children. Ages and sex of the children are not clearly known. But the legend says that during a season where the San Pedro River is swollen from bank to bank with raging monsoon rain overflow, she dumps her children into the river hoping to relieve herself from their burden. And now the ghost of the widow roams the river and the washes looking for her children in an attempt to rid herself of the guilt she lived with.

Well, the very first (indirect) encounter I had with this "ghost" was with my best friend. He is a very down to earth, intelligent, straight forward guy. One morning during high school, I was crossing the street across campus to meet the usual gang to smoke a cigarette before class started, and he was waiting across the street for me, with the weirdest look over him. When I finally got across the street to him, he was as white as a ghost, looking like he had seen something very out of the ordinary.

He had explained to me in a dead serious tone, that the previous night he was walking home from another friend of ours. The usual path down Foothills Dr. crossed over a wash of fairly decent size. And when he was about halfway across the bridge over the wash when he glanced down and saw in the distance what looked like the figure of a woman in drab, old clothes, who looked like she was carrying a small, limp body in here arms. He said he yelled out to her, but no reaction. What he did next kind of made me laugh, there was no humor in his tone. He said he picked up a small stone, and once again yelled out to her. Still no reaction from her. So he launched the pebble from his hand hoping to get her attention. Well, the stone unintentionally met its mark, coming right down towards her. "But", he said, "It didn't hit her, it went right through her!".

Okay, I had to laugh at him just because. And after awhile all our friends knew about it and we teased him about it forever. But seriously, I never doubted him one bit. Now it's a few years later, I'm out of high school, and I'm out with two other friends, Steve and Dave. We decided to do some fishing one evening near these ponds that used to be old rock quarries that are only a stone's throw from the San Pedro (no pun intended). The night was warm and clear. Fireflies buzzed around, and there was the occasional ruffle in the bushes from some bird or small mammal. We had grown bored of fishing the ponds, so we headed towards the river. And after a while, we had grown tired of that also. So were just standing in the starlight, drinking, smokin, and just shooting the bull. When after a while, I don't recall how long, I saw a dark figure not quite human, but not just some shadow that was apparently standing behind one of my friends, to my right. Although I didn't actually see it there, rather I saw it leave from behind him, and move swiftly, effortlessly, silently into the night. Like it had happened onto our little B.S. session, grew tired of it and moved on. I might have passed this off as some kind of minor hallucination, except for the fact that I had this overwhelming feeling in my body that there was a presence just there, and that I felt the presence leave our group of three.

Now, like I said, I was still going to pass this off as a minor hallucination, when a few moments later, in the midst of our jumbled B.S. talking, my friend Steve said abruptly, "Stop!". Dave and I both shut up and just looked at him oddly. Steve said, "Who are we missing?". Now we all knew that it was just the three of us that had gone fishing that night, yet we all had to think about it really hard. I said, "What the hell you talking about? Duh, it was just the three of us that came out here!". Steve exclaimed, "No! There was someone just here!". As soon as he said that I KNEW it was real. My eyes just filled with water at the powerful surge of emotions that filled my body. The kind one might get from seeing a ghost. I explained exactly to Steve what I had experienced, saw, and felt. All three of us were just silent from disbelief, belief and awe.

We packed up our fishing gear rather hastily, and started the trek back through the dark desert to our car. I know what I saw and felt was real, because I wasn't the only to experience it. As for Dave, he didn't experience anything. But from the reaction and explanation from Steve and I, he was convinced. I just wonder when and where I'll get to have that kind of spiritual experience again.