The Ghost Stage Coach

From: Nancy B (nancyebruff@lexcominc.net)
Story type: Ghost
Location: Lex, N.C.
Source: Form Submission
Date submitted: Sun Aug 26 13:33:05 2007

This story that I am about to tell you has a lot of unsolved history in it. I have told in all my stories that we lived on a rather large farm in NC. Our original house burnt down and our family moved a couple of miles down the road into a another house ....that was also haunted. There we lived for a couple of years until our house was rebuilt.

On many nights approximately around 2 in the morning , a strange look into the past would occur. The first time I saw this , it puzzled and frightened me at the same time.

I could not sleep one night and so I went outside for some fresh air. The moon shone brightly . The night time was filled with familiar sounds of crickets, whippoorwills and owls. I was on the front porch on the swing when out of the corner of my eye I caught movement of something. I turned my head, and focused on the movement. It was coming down our dirt road in front of our house. I saw what looked like a stage coach being drawn by horses, and it had a swinging lantern in front. However , what was strange is that it made no sound. I rubbed my eyes because I thought I was seeing things. When I opened my eyes it was still there, slowly, making its way, around our drive way, which was gravel at the time . It turned onto an old road that my dad had widened. This road lead to his fields and the creek and our bottom land. It went down a big hill with forest on both sides of the road. My father found this road that the trees and grass had started to take over. My dad fixed it to where it could be traveled on. He used this road for his tractor going from field to field , checking on his crops.

I got up from the poach swing and started toward this image, keeping my distance. It keep going down the this road until it got half way down this road and it disappeared. I stood at the top of the hill and watched it disappear with my own eyes.. The moon gave plenty of light and made it easy to make this image out. I went inside and could not wait to tell my dad this one.

The next morning , after breakfast, I said "Dad I need to tell you something". I was almost sixteen at the time , lacking a few months.

I told him what I had seen the previous night. I expected a sarcastic remark like, "it was just a dream, or ," You've been watching too many horror movies". This time he did not the remarks that I had come to expect after so many years. He looked me dead in the eye and told me that he had seen it many times , and not to worry about it. My mouth dropped open. This was the first time my dad ever admitted to seeing anything as long as I could remember, and the only thing that he confided to me that he had seen.

He told me that he had seen it hundreds of times and it was around 2 in the morning . Like clock work. He then revealed to me ,that what we knew as our road and drive way in the front, and the road that he fixed that turned off of it, had once been used as a stage coach route back in the late 1700s.

He told me that he himself had followed the coach , he had seen the lantern swinging. He saw the driver, barely seeing that it was a man driving holding the reins with his hands and a hat on. He could not make out any distinctive features, only that it was a man.He would walk a several feet behind , and it would always disappear in the same place every time.

I saw it several more times after that, and my dad was right. It always disappeared in the same spot , at the bottom of the hill on this dirt road.

My dad and I talked about this mystery. Did something happen to this stage coach, did they get robbed and murdered? We could only speculate what could have happened to the stage coach and its passengers.