Castle Grounds Phenomena

I have been reading a lot of these stories over the last couple of days. Some of them very interesting, and others not so much. I am now going to tell you my story, and I hope at best you find it intriguing. It's a true story, and I wasn't the only one there.

Anyway the location is Mallow, County Cork, Ireland. The year is 1986. It was the summertime and I was 15 at this time. A group of us, including my best friend, decided to go camping on the castle grounds by the river. There are two castles there, the oldest was built around 1598 I believe. So we pitched our tent under what was known as the "hanging tree". Whether they hanged people or not from the tree in times gone by, I really don't know. Now as far as I can remember, I'm going to say it was between twelve & one o clock in the morning, a warm clear night.

So there we are, about 4 of us boys just sitting around messing about, when suddenly a short distance away, someone appeared with a white sheet over their head. Our reaction was to laugh. A sad attempt to scare us we thought. It turned out that the "ghost" was a friend of one of our group, in fact there was three of them, and they all sat down with us for more general horsing about and banter. But what happened next, I will never forget.

A short time after our friendly "ghost" appeared, another showed up, in exactly the same spot. As true as night and day, it looked exactly like someone was just standing there with a white sheet over their head, at a distance of about 30 yards away. Anyway, just like the first time, we all jeered and laughed at this pathetic attempt to scare such hardy bucks, and wondered "who" was it this time under the sheet? And where were all these white sheets coming from?

And then... Whatever it was we were looking at, just seemed to expand taller and wider into what I can only describe as a white fluorescent mass, like a cloud, but I remember it was glowing and seemed to now travel slowly toward us. Well I have to say... At this point, I nearly crapped myself. We were all terrified. We just wanted to be gone from this place, where we all had been a thousand times before. But we were surrounded by a mass of overgrowth of bushes, trees, weeds & foliage.

So at that point we had to travel toward this strange sight a little ways to get back onto the path and away. So off we went all in a line, I think I was somewhere in the middle. I grabbed onto whoever was in front of me and kept my head down until I got to the path, and then turned and we were away. We ran for our lives. No Olympian was going to outrun us that night. And as we ran terrified towards town I remember someone yelling behind me "WE HAVE TO GO BACK, OR IT WILL HAUNT US FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES," which I find comical now looking back on it.

Needless to say, we never went back, not that night anyway. But I do remember we did go back a few nights later when we got a bigger posse together and felt a bit braver, and we all stood under the hanging tree like a bunch of morons and waited to see if this thing would return, but it never did.

Maybe there is a logical explanation for what we saw, but I like to think there was something supernatural about it. I have to say I never saw anything like it since, and probably never will again. I hope I do, but I would most likely just run away again. Thank you for reading my story. Please let me know what you think.