“Welcome, customer. How may I be of service?”

“Man, you wouldn’t believe what happened to me last night!”

“Umm…excuse me?”

Light conversation can also become a doorway for something more. It just depends on which way the conversation naturally steers towards.

There is always a time and a place for storytelling, and a lot of it depends on comfort, familiarity, and a good reference point. The better we know people, the easier it is to share our experiences. In the case of writing, it’s basically an open invitation from the author to anyone within reading distance. Without reference to what anyone else’s life has been like, mine has been pretty wild. It’s had its more heavenly moments, but also its more hellish times. For me, that’s just life. It’s not all good or all bad. I don’t pretend things don’t exist or don’t happen just because they are unpleasant or taboo. I’m here on this earth to have a genuine learning experience, and I’m not afraid of sharing what I’ve picked up along the way.

My first story begins back in 1995. I was just an ordinary high school student whose personality was far from being truly defined. I was sometimes told that I was weird or unusual, and I didn’t quite know how to process that. There were many groups and cliques at school, and I knew I never belonged in any of them. Because of that, I kind of gravitated toward other “misfits.”

One such person was a young man named Stosh. I first met him at a summer camp in elementary, and then was placed in the same homeroom as him in middle school. It was not only our previous experience in the summer camp that made it easy for us to become friends. There were many other people my age who I had seen in various places with whom no traction was ever caught with. We just must have had similar personalities.

Stosh and I became very good friends in middle school and high school. We always went to see the newest Jackie Chan films in the theater, crushed each other for hours in Duke Nukem 3D vs. mode, went to The Ultrazone on weekends to play laser tag, and practiced our ninja skills in his neighborhood at night when most other people were getting ready to sleep. It was on one such night when something very strange happened.

It was about 10:30 pm on a Friday in September. We were both dressed in all black to blend in with the darkness and keep other people from seeing us. After an hour or so of sneaking around undetected through his neighborhood, hiding in the bushes and behind trees, we decided to take a break at Vilas Park to take our hoods off and breathe easy. Stosh was walking around near the swing-set, and something made me look in the direction of the zoo that was nearby. On one of the buildings that was nearest to where I was, there was a light attached to the roof of the building that was shining down on a footpath below. I followed the light down to the ground with my eyes and noticed there was someone standing directly in the path of the light. It appeared that they were looking right at me.

“Who would be out here by themself at this time?” I thought to myself.

As I focused in on the person, I couldn’t believe what my eyes were telling me. The person, though it was in the shape of a person, didn’t look like any person I’ve ever seen before. It looked almost like smoke, and it was moving throughout the person’s body! No eyes or distinguishable features at all!

My eyes widened and I stood there in awe just staring, as whatever it was was staring right back at me. It looked kind of like a Yautja with its camouflage activated from the movie “Predator.” Then, suddenly, it turned to the left and started running as fast as a track athlete and disappeared down a small ridge from my view.

“Did you see that?” I said to Stosh, still in awe.

“See what?”

“I don’t know. I thought I saw someone, but they looked weird,” I said.

I thought perhaps I had watched Predator too many times, and I had just bought it on VHS a few months earlier. Yeah, maybe I didn’t see what I thought I saw, but I could swear that I did.

A few years later, I was driving down Vilas Park Drive at night with a couple of friends. One was named Tyler, and the other named Sephiros. Tyler was a member of this south side clique I was now a part of. It was a very unstable alliance. The thing that held our group together more than anything else was probably drugs and alcohol. We did each other worse than we did other people, just about. Most of us lived on Ridgewood Way in the Burr Oaks neighborhood, and some of us in other surrounding areas. Sephiros was part of our extended crew. He lived out of town and would join us occasionally on one of our many escapades throughout the city.

With Lake Wingra on our right, and Vilas Park on our left, across the grass field, there stood the park shelter, alone in the dark.

“That place is haunted!” said Sephiros.

”Yeah,” I said.

I also noticed that Tyler agreed.

“There’s a ghost there. It likes to make you lose things like money,” Sephiros added.

Seeing the shelter and hearing what Sephiros said reminded me of a dream I had when I was a small boy. I was in that exact same shelter at night, and it was all closed up. It was so dark that I couldn’t see anything, but I remember feeling a presence, which did not seem benevolent, and hearing some sounds. I was huddled up on the ground, petrified by fear, but in the end of the dream, I remember breaking out and running away. I wondered if there was any connection to what Sephiros said.

Then I remembered also from my childhood when my sister’s friend was reading us a story from the book “Haunted Wisconsin.” It’s hard to remember exactly, but there was some story about an American-Indian ghost roaming around the Seminole Highway area, and was described as being composed of a cloudy-white substance.

Then everything started to make sense to me. The entire area near Vilas Park was built on American-Indian burial grounds. Could it be that there were still some restless spirits lurking around that were trapped between life and death? A friend of mine told me that some of the American-Indian tribes buried their dead with personal belongings which would help keep them here as kind of an anchor. I didn’t know, but it sounded plausible to me. If my eyes didn’t lie, which I strongly believe they didn’t, this would’ve been the first evidence to me that there is life beyond death. I had always heard stories about ghosts, fictional and non-fictional, but until now, there was nothing in my mind that led me to believe that there was any truth to it.

About a year after Tyler, Sephiros, and I drove past the Vilas Park shelter that night, I finally got around to asking Tyler about it.

“When Sephiros said that place was haunted, I noticed you agreed with him. Why did you agree that place was haunted?” I asked.

“Because when I was a kid, I had a dream about that place. There was someone sitting on a picnic table in front of the shelter. The person looked cloudy-white, like smoke.”