Thank you for sharing! I am reminded of something I read long ago:
"I have known only one person in my life who claimed to have seen a ghost. It was a woman; and the interesting thing is that she disbelieved in the immortality of the soul before seeing the ghost and still disbelieves after having seen it. She thinks it was a hallucination. In other words, seeing is not believing. This is the first thing to get clear in talking about miracles. Whatever experiences we may have, we shall not regard them as miraculous if we already hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural. Any event which is claimed as a miracle is, in the last resort, an experience received from the senses; and the senses are not infallible. We can always say we have been the victims of an illusion; if we disbelieve in the supernatural this is what we always shall say. Hence, whether miracles have really ceased or not, they would certainly appear to cease in Western Europe as materialism became the popular creed."
C.S. Lewis, "Miracles," God in the Dock (Eerdmans: 1970) 25.
Curiously, the only person I ever met who claimed to have seen a Sasquatch did not in fact believe it was a Sasquatch, i.e. a physical previously unsubstantiated ape. I myself have seen and experienced things for which I do not have comfortable rational explanations, perhaps because my reason has not reached far enough, perhaps because it is the wrong tool. But I remember, because it is my accumulated reason which causes the problem; the pieces do not fit....
My one inexplicable railroad related story:
I grew up living just a mile from the Southern Pacific's mainline through Oregon's Willamette Valley. My home was on a foothill which commanded a view not just of a good stretch of the Cascade Mountains, but also a long straight stretch of the tracks and all the magnificent tonnage and streamliners going by. Too late for steam but an abundance of first generation diesels and second and those which followed.
To drive to my high school, my church, my fishing holes, etc. meant a drive down and across the main, where the speed restriction was 79 m.p.h. and many were making up time heading toward Portland. The grade crossing (since removed, so it is now also a ghost) was raised from the lower valley floor and on a gravel road, so whatever speed you had obtained had to be given up to make it over. Further, my vehicle at the time was a '72 Ford Galaxie 500 with very low clearance so I had to take even more care. There were only the old crossbucks as warning, no gates or other visual or audible signals of any kind except the locomotive warning.
At a time in my life where everything was changing and I was under a great deal of stress, I started across the tracks only to hear the horn of the string of SD-9's too close, and looked up to see the lead locomotive inches from my car, a train I had neither looked for nor seen. There was no way it could fail to strike. I can remember the colors, the imperfect paint, the pilot, the dirt; all. The next thing I remember is being on the other side stopped with the train safely past, trying to figure out what just happened, and shaking.
So of course there are all kinds of easy rational explanations; after all, I was stressed and could have easily misjudged distance and so on. The difficulty is that at the time I had not been that close to the front of an Espee SD. I did not have a memory of the really close up detail. Till then. And the memory is of head on and not at a tangent. And inches away.
Best wishes this Halloween,
Timothy
