Sleepless Nights

From: 
Story type: Ghost
Location: Chattanooga, TN
Source: Form Submission

I have been diagnosed as an insomniac. If I am not medicated, I do good to get 2 full hrs of sleep at night. Often when unable to sleep, I go outside and look at the stars and constellations.

One night in the summer, I was particularly restless. As per my norm, I went outside and laid in the freshly cut grass looking at the stars. There's no telling how long I'd been there but it felt like quite a while. The medicine felt like it was about to kick in, so I decided to head back in and see if I could get a little shut eye. As I was getting up a young man was standing about 5 yards away on the side of the road. He was handsome and very visible under the streetlamp. I began to walk towards him thinking that a conversation may be interesting. I approached him and said my hellos but he never acknowledged me.

After a few more failed attempts, I began to walk away. I was watching him over my shoulder when suddenly I blinked and he was gone. MIA. Nowhere. At first I thought it was the meds and shrugged it off.

Several nights later, I saw him again just as I had before. Only this time, I had taken no meds. I approached him again with the same results. Three more times I would see him and approach him and be ignored by him.

A few days before I was to move out, I was speaking with one of my elderly neighbors. I told her of my odd encounters with the strange but handsome young man while standing across the fence of her front yard. She paled and invited me in (I'd never been inside her front yard much less her house) and my jaw hit the floor. Pictures of that young man were framed all over the walls. The stranger I'd seen was her deceased son. He'd been killed by another driver on the very spot in the street when he stopped to change a tire for neighbor.