Okay, this is quite a long story, which is why I posted it as a separate thread. I’ve debated posting this for some time, and finally decided to go ahead and put it out there for you to read and contemplate.
Everything I’m about to write happened in July, 1989. It took place just outside Bitburg Air Base in Germany. I’m using different names – just in the very off chance that one of those present is actually here on TFP.
This is a ghost story, and I still get chills today when I think about it. So, I’ll try to make it interesting and hope you stick the whole story through.
Here goes.
In July, 1989, we were undergoing some ground combat training. Training lasted one month. During the last week, we were on bivouac a few kilometers off base. Some visiting Green Berets had agreed to participate in our training as OpFor and were going to try to penetrate our line sometime during the week, to see if our defense was strong enough.
During our training, I was the 60 gunner, which meant I had the pleasure of carrying the heaviest weapon and got to dig the largest DFP (foxhole) in the field. I was thrilled. We reached our bivouac site and spent the first day digging our holes. We were in a heavily wooded area that had foot paths for hikers. An agreement had been made with the local government that closed off the paths to civilians during the week we were there so there wouldn’t be any confusion among the locals. Our site was at the intersection of two of these paths. Our DFPs were dug along one of the paths, with my DFP where the 2 paths met.
Here's a drawing of what the site looked like.
<img src='http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2004-9/831739/ghoststorymapcopy.gif' >
There were 2 people per DFP. This allowed us to take shifts at night keeping watch, waiting for OpFor to try and make it through our line. However, we pretty much spent the nights smoking and making jokes to deal with the boredom. We also had field phones connected between each DFP and all connected to the command center. These field phones were the kinds that had the cranks on the side that you turned to call the other field phones. Instead of ringing, they made a kind of buzzing sound. We spent our nights prank calling each other.
On the last night, everyone was tired as hell. We’d pretty much been up for 5 days and were ready to go home. It was somewhere between 2:30 and 3 when Jim, my assistant gunner, shook me and said, “They’re here.”
“Who’s here?” I asked.
“OpFor.”
I looked out into the woods and told him I didn’t see anything. He told me to keep looking. At this point, our field phone buzzed. I picked it up. Bill, who was in the hole across the path from us, was on the phone.
“I see them,” he said. “But they’re cheating. They’re coming from behind us. They were supposed to come from the front.”
At this point, Jim asked me if I could see them yet. I couldn’t.
“But they’re right next to us!” he whispered. I looked around but I still couldn’t see anything. The overhead cover on our hole prevented me from seeing anything on Jim’s side of the hole.
By now, more people started picking up their phones as Bill kept telling us they were cheating. Suddenly his voice changed and he started talking more quietly.
“I don’t think these guys are Army.” He said. He sounded a little scared.
At the same time Bill said this, Jim said, “Can’t you see these guys?? They’re HUGE.” I still couldn’t see a thing.
Other people on their phones started joking with Bill. They were telling him he’d been up too long and he was seeing things. I said that Jim was seeing them, too. So far, though, they were the only two who could see them.
Jim nudged me. “I don’t like this,” he said. “These guys aren’t Army. They’re, like, 7 or 8 feet tall, and they’re all dressed in white.” I was starting to get nervous, too, listening to Jim in the hole with me and Bill on the phone describing the same thing.
A few minutes went by with Jim asking if I could see anything yet and people joking about Bill’s hallucination. Finally, Bill said, “What’s wrong with them? They just keep staring at us??” I could tell that Bill was really scared now.
Eric, who was at the far end of our line, said, “Wait! I think I see them, too. They’re all dressed in white and they’re tall. I mean, really tall.”
I still couldn’t see anything.
Another voice came on the field phone. It was our Lt. He told us to quit fucking around on the phone or we’d double-time it back to the base the next day.
Bill responded, “Sir, I’m not lying. I see about 20 or 25 individuals, dressed in white in a single line coming down the south path. They’re just standing there watching us.”
All of this was being said in whispers, which added to the eerie feeling of it all.
Jim nudged me again. “Can’t you see them?” he asked me again.
“I can’t see anything, Jim.” I was trying my best to see what the hell they were talking about.
“I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all. They’re staring at us! I don’t know who they are, but I know they’re not OpFor.”
More and more people on the phone started claiming to see them, too.
Our Lt. said, “All right, this exercise is over. I want everyone at the command post in 30 seconds.”
We hung up the field phone and crawled out of our holes and headed back to the command post. When we got there, I turned and looked toward the path where Jim said these people were standing. I didn’t see them.
“Look up in the trees,” he said, pointing to the trees that were in front of our line.
I looked.
The trees were old and tall, possibly around 15-20 meters tall. As I looked at them, it seemed as if there were people up in the trees. They were sitting on the branches and looking down at us. Jim was right, they seemed quite large, and they were all wearing what looked like white robes. It was dark, though, and somewhat hard to make out any details.
We all stood at the command post looking out at the trees. A few of us started saying that we should pack up and leave right now. A few of us were pretty freaked by what was going on. How did they get that high up into the trees? Who were they? Why were they watching us?
Our Lt. told us that OpFor had cancelled and there wouldn't be any exercise.
He told us we were all tired and seeing things, that was all. He told us this happened a lot during bivouacs, but I noticed that while he was telling us this, he was looking up in the trees, too.
The sun comes up early in Germany in July. Usually around 4 or 4:30 in the morning, which meant that by 3:30, it was starting to get light.
We all stood there for a good half hour, staring up into the trees and scaring each other to death with stories of strange things we’d seen and heard while working midnights in faraway corners of the base. As it got lighter out, the figures in the trees faded away into the light, until it was dawn and the figures were no longer visible.
By 8 am, we had our gear packed up, our holes filled in, and were on our way back to base. No one said anything about what we saw on our way back. We had 3 days off before going back to our regular work as cops.
On our first night back, Jim and I were on patrol together. We met up with Bill’s patrol. We started talking about what we saw on bivouac. Bill refused to talk about it. No matter what we said, he would not discuss it. I was stationed with him at Bitburg for another 2 years and for those 2 years, he refused to talk about it. One time I asked him privately why he wouldn’t talk about it.
This is what he said:
They were looking right at me. They came walking down the path, got right beside our holes, right between us, and stopped. They looked at your hole, then over at mine, and stared at me. They just stood there and stared at me. It scared the hell out of me. They were all dressed in white robes and they must have been at least 8 feet tall, every one of them. But they just kept staring at me for about 10 minutes. They could see me in the hole and they just stared. They started walking into the trees just before the Lt. called us back. I don’t ever want to talk about it again.
He never did, as long as I knew him.
A few of us would talk about it, especially with new troops who just got stationed at Bitburg. After some time had passed, a few of us started conceding that maybe we were hallucinating; we’d been up for 5 days with hardly any sleep. People see weird shit after so little sleep; it’s true, but what no one ever explained was, how did 23 people hallucinate the same thing? During the first 10 minutes of this hallucination, 4 different people who were not talking to each other directly saw the exact same thing, not knowing that anyone else was seeing it, too.
I also remember the look in our Lt.’s eyes that night. He was telling us that we were seeing things, even as he was looking into the trees himself. He looked as if he were trying to convince himself of this more than he was trying to convince us.
I later learned that, during WW2, Patton had come through where our base was and had nearly wiped out the town of Bitburg. I was told that over 500 German soldiers were left dead on the piece of land where the base was built.
That's it. That's the one time in my life that I've seen what I believe are ghosts.
I witnessed a lot of other strange things at Bitburg, but this is the only one that I would consider a ghost story.