Midnight has passed, and in the stillness of these hours, the hauntings are never silent.

This is Real Ghost Stories Online.

After midnight.

The story happened in the fall of 1987, but for years David rarely talked about it.

Part of the reason was that he couldn't explain what he had seen. The other reason was that whenever he did tell someone, the reaction was almost always the same. People smiled politely, nodded in the right places, and then found a way to change the subject. Nobody ever called him a liar, but he could tell what they were thinking.

If someone had told him the same story, he probably wouldn't have believed it either.

At the time, David was 12 years old and lived with his parents just outside a small

Midwestern town. The area was mostly farmland and patches of woods connected by narrow

county roads. It wasn't unusual for kids to spend

entire days outside riding bikes, fishing in creeks, or wandering through the woods with friends.

Parents expected their children home by dark, but beyond that, there wasn't much supervision.

On the evening, everything happened. David had lost track of time at a friend's house.

The son had already disappeared by the time he started home, and he knew his mother was going to be unhappy.

To save a few minutes, he took a shortcut through a wooded area that connected his friend's neighborhood to the road leading toward his own house.

The path was familiar. He had walked at dozens of times and knew

every bend in turn. Even in the dark, he could have followed it without thinking. The woods

eventually opened onto a narrow two-lane road that cut between stretches of farmland. There were

no streetlights, very few houses, and almost no traffic once the sun went down.

Most nights the road felt completely isolated.

As David emerged from the trees, he noticed a pair of taillights in the distance.

The site didn't seem unusual.

In fact, the car was the only thing moving anywhere along the road.

...