One evening around 11pm in November of 2016, I was hard at work in my recording studio, located in the basement of my house in Huntsville, Alabama.
I was working on a mix session of a recording I'd produced earlier in the month for a band from the area. I'd briefly gone upstairs to make myself a drink for a final listen to the tune I'd been working on. My wife was upstairs watching television and I'd told her that I was almost finished with work for the day.
I went back down to my control room, just off the soundproof music studio, to take a final listen before I made a final mix of the song, and then I decided to step outside to clear my head and get some fresh air.
To get outside, I had to walk out of the studio out a doorway, through my 2-car garage, and out another door which opened onto my side driveway.
As I was coming out to the side driveway, I decided to glance at my iPhone, specifically my Facebook page, which I used for my studio business. Seeing there was no activity that I needed to respond to, I clicked the "lock" button and put the phone into my back pocket.
My side driveway is roughly the width of two cars, and beyond the driveway is a side yard around 15 yards wide, with a couple of very tall pine trees. At the edge of the yard is a heavily wooded and rocky area which leads down into a a city-owned drainage ditch.
On the other side of the ditch is another heavily wooded and rocky area, on a steep hill, and then another house which is mostly obscured by trees and heavy underbrush. That house sits on a different street which backs up to the cul-de-sac on which I live.
It was chilly outside, but no wind blew. Typical Fall night in Northern Alabama for that time of year. It was approaching 11pm on a weeknight, and the quiet neighborhood seemed even quieter than normal.
I looked around the area directly across from me and saw that there were no lights on in the house across the ditch from me, 50 yards away. In fact, the only light visible in the whole area was a streetlight located in the back of our cul-de-sac, about 75 yards to my right.
All of a sudden, things became VERY quiet. The crickets and bugs had stopped chirping, the night birds had gone silent, and the low-key noise of a suburban neighborhood had entirely ceased. Very strange since usually one would hear a neighbor's air-conditioning unit or a lone dog barking in the distance. Even the traffic sounds from a heavily traveled thoroughfare around 10 blocks away had gone silent. Immediately the hair on my arms raised, and I felt a chill.
I scanned my heavily wooded backyard to my left and saw and heard nothing. When I looked back across my side yard, I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
Hovering above a flat rock about 15 yards from me was a smoky-white apparition with a white glow, around 12 feet in height, shaped like an enormous mummy. The apparition had the clear shape of a head, shoulders, arms and legs, but no "feet" were visible.
I could barely make out the shapes of trees through the apparition, so in a split second, my rational mind attempted to make sense of the apparition by thinking it was simply a small patch of fog. But this "fog" was clearly in the shape of an enormous man, like an outline of what we'd commonly think of when we visualize a mummy.
I literally wiped my eyes, and looked again, and the apparition was still there, and I got the overwhelming feeling that I was being watched and observed. (I had seen and heard things around my house and yard before in the six years I'd lived here, but nothing as distinct and intimidating as this.)
While watching the apparition, I reached into my back pocket and called my wife, who was still upstairs, and asked her to come out the front door and around to the side yard, and to bring a flashlight we keep handy in our TV room, telling her I had seen something that I wanted her to see.
So, thinking quickly, I thought to actually verbally address the apparition. I said, out loud, "Hey, it's okay that you are here. We don't want to hurt you, nor do we want you to hurt us. We just want to know who you are." And with that, I switched on the flashlight function of my phone, and slowly walked toward the apparition, who remained in the same spot as when I first saw it. I got within about 10 yards from the apparition, and I was able to get a better look at it.
The thing was floating a couple feet above the flat rock below, and I saw no sources of light for the apparition. I looked left and right and saw no sources of light from either side, or anything from above it, or any stray light from neighboring houses. The thing just glowed dimly white.
I took a couple more steps, saying to the entity, "It's okay that you are here, I don't want to harm you, and I don't want to be harmed." With my third step or so, I watched as the apparition began to descend slowly down into the rock it was perched above. It literally just folded itself down until it was completely gone.
Just as it disappeared, my wife came around the corner of our house with the flashlight on, asking me what she was supposed to be looking for. I told her briefly what I'd seen, and I grabbed the flashlight and went over to the rock where I'd seen the apparition. Nothing remained, and the area was pitch-dark.
About that time, the noise from the crickets and bugs returned, a dog barked in the distance, and I began to hear noise from the main road several blocks from our house. It was as if something had flipped a switch and suddenly the world of that neighborhood was audible again.
I'd made a mental note while observing the apparition about its height and width, using nearby trees as a guide. The next morning, I was still a bit shaken, so I took a construction-grade tape measure from my tool box and made some rough measurements of the relative size of apparition. I came up with figures of around 12 feet tall and nearly four feet wide.
On reflection, the apparition looked to be in perfect proportion to a large mummy, but made of milky white fog or smoke which seemed to "move" inside of the outer shape. I got the overwhelming feeling of being watched, but strangely, I felt nothing negative or antagonistic about the apparition. I just felt like it was watching me. Now I wished that I'd stayed still and not approached it, so that my wife would have also possibly been able to observe it.
The land on which my house sits was undoubtedly Indian land at some point, as our land backs up to a low-lying city park that looks as it had been a shallow lake in the last 200 years. To that end, I wonder if the apparition had been some sort of a spirit of one of the former residents of the land?
Anyone have any clues as to what I observed?
Thanks for reading, and I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts and theories, and welcome your questions.
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Wish I'd tried for a photo, but I was too afraid the apparition would disappear while I was fumbling with the phone. I think I thought that the image wouldn't be clear or visible at all.
I did speak to my dear friends who live across the street, who know my experiences and sightings well, and they haven't seen anything remotely similar at all, or much of anything else. They are aware that spirits and the like are out there, but they haven't seen anything out of the ordinary.
I like your theory that something may be under the huge rock which the apparition floated above. But as the rock is flat, but about the size of a small European smart car, I can't see a time when I'd be able to move it or dig around it. The entire area is inundated with massive rocks which were liked moved to the edge of the yard when my home was built around 1974.