This story a part of the True Ghost Stories page on Obiwan's UFO-Free Paranormal Page. Please do not copy or distribute without permission from Obiwan and/or the original author!
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1998 01:21:11 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Nicholas Lancaster"(nlancast@buag.co.at)
To: ghost-stories@aurora.cdb.com
Subject: Edge Hill
A few years ago a friend of mine invited me along for an evening at Edge Hill, the historic battle ground in England. The whole thing was instigated by a friend of his who we worked with. This chap had an extensive knowledge of Edge Hill and even knew the real date on which the battle's anniversary fell - apparently the date changed over the years due to changes to the calendar. So the evening was set, myself and my friend with his friend and about four other blokes.
We drove up to Edge Hill and parked in a near by pub car park. We then walked a short distance along a very dark lane to the start of the hill and entered the first field. We walked down the field, making a fair amount of noise, joking and generally trying to spook each other. Anyway, very little happened as we walked through the field and we entered the next field with feeling a little dissapointed. We continued to walk towards the hedge at the end of that field when one of the group spotted some lights in the next field. We all stopped and looked at the lights. At first appearance they seemed to be the aircraft warning lights placed on electrical pylons, there were two pairs of these lights at the same height from the ground. From where we stood they appeared to be about six feet above the level of the field and we assumed that they were indeed electrical pylons several miles distant.
We continued to look at these lights when suddenly the pair on the right moved. This was a dark field, but as we watched the lights moving it was possible to make out a faint sillouhette against the backdrop of distant town lights. The sillouhette looked like that of a man. As we watched it became apparent that what we were seeing was a man with a torch strapped to either side of his head and who appeared to be swaying from one side to the other. One of the lads with us had a large Mag-Lite and shone it at the 'man' but the torch failed to illuminate the area, almost as if the light was being absorbed. Then the second pair of lights began to move in the same manner. By this time we had all shut up and were watching the scene before us. One of us suggested that the show was nothing more than a couple of locals out playing a prank on anyone who had come to do as we had done. Spurred on by this we decided that as there were seven of us and apparently only two of them the sensible thing to do would be to shout abuse and see what happened. This we did, but the lights just carried on dancing and even appeared to get closer. We could see no way through the hedge into that field and decided as these lights were now quite un-nerving and our attempts at communication had failed the next best action would be a tactical retreat.
We all began walking back up the muddy, slippery field trying to get to the top of the hill for a better look. About half way up I turned round to look at the lights, they were now in our field on the other side of the hedge. This really scared the cr*p out of me and I tried to run the rest of the distance, passing a couple of the other people and shouting at them to look behind them. We all ran up the hill and into the next field, eventually reaching the top of the hill and resting on a bench there.
We sat, smoking and debating what we had just seen. One us then noticed something moving in our current field. We watched this, then saw another thing moving, then another. Then one of these things came towards us. It was a bloody horse! Pure black, no rider. The field seemed to have at least ten of these horses, all black. But we hadn't noticed these on the way down the field, nor on the way back up! Well, that did it for us. We left the field and walked back down the lane towards the pub car park, feeling a little safer as we saw the lights of the pub ahead. We talked about the horses and the lights and what it could all mean, one of the lads in the group said that horses had been seen before around edge hill in strange circumstances - apparently many horses were killed in the battle as well as men. As if to punctuate his dialogue we suddenly heard this whinnie from behind us and I mean RIGHT behind us. We turned around but there was no horse there and on either side of the lane the hedge was quite low and no horse could be seen.
We jogged the remaining distance to our cars and left the area, myself convinced that I had experienced something supernatural that evening.