Sherman’s Blue Coats

01 July 2020 | Haunted locations, Your Stories, Your True Encounters

I write this experience as a way to possibly relieve long standing stress and fright that I have had to deal with personally since it occurred to me. I would hope that you will be able to respect what happened to me and take it for what its worth. Just know this experience still haunts me to this day, and I have only ever told one other person about this. They believed me, but due to my occupation, urged me to never speak of it in any serious fashion to anyone else.

I suppose I am getting a little ahead of myself so I will start from the beginning. For sake of me telling this you can refer to me as “Jack”.

I live in a predominantly rural county in Southeastern Georgia. I have worked as a police officer at one of the agencies near my hometown for nearly 10 years. I have seen a lot in my time to include arson, assault, murder, rape, crimes against children etc and I felt that I really had seen it all. Sure I have the occasional nightmare about a gruesome scene that I had processed or a helpless victim that I interviewed, but what I saw one night on my way home completely changed my perspective on things that occur in this world.

I work the mid shift meaning that I come in the late afternoon and will work until just after 2am. As I said before I work at an agency away from where I actually live, approximately 30 minutes from my house. I can still remember it like it was yesterday. I had just clocked out, climbed into my police car and started on my way home. The work for that day was not completely overwhelming as it sometimes is, and I have always worked these hours so I know I was not sleepy or tired in any way. I take a series of back country roads to get back to my family farm where my house resides and there are not many houses along the way, mostly just fields and pine forests. As I was nearing the last road to turn on to get home, I can see in my headlights a young boy running, for dear life, across the road and into a freshly harrowed field with no crops yet planted. There are only 3 houses on my road. One is mine, the other my parents, and the third lives nearly a mile from my house. None of which had young children. And I live nearly 5 miles away from the nearest town. So my suspicions was already heightened that the boy had to have been brought here and was running from something.

My radio was dead from working my shift and I did not have a replacement battery, so I could not call out for assistance, which after what I saw next it was probably for the better.

I exited my car and called out for the boy to stop and come to me. I could still see his outline, through the aid of my flash light, still running through the field. I noticed that his clothes seemed rather outdated, almost like he was wearing something from the 1800s. A white shirt with old tattered overalls and a round bill hat. Again something weird.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I saw no less than 6 men on horseback, crossing exactly where the boy had just ran and appeared to be chasing him. I nearly fell on my ass by the shock that I just endured seeing this. By this time, I had reached for my service weapon and pointed it at the men and ordered them to stop. They ignored me as if I wasn’t there at all.

I then jumped the ditch by my car and chased after them on foot hoping that maybe I could catch up to them and see what was going on and why they were chasing this boy. I was able to keep my flashlight trained on the men even as they were steadily getting ahead of me. I then noticed in utter confusion that they were all dressed up like civil war era soldiers, blue coats, rifles, equipment the whole nine yards. Shortly thereafter I lost sight of the men and the boy. I tried to look down and follow their tracks, but to my confusion nothing was there, no tracks or anything.

I then began to frantically search hoping that I could stop whatever was about to happen to this boy. I then could hear what sounded like a child screaming and laughter coming from the top of a small hill about 300 yards away from me. I ran as hard as I could to the hill with my light and gun trained on the hill. As I approached I could again see the outline of the men and horses on top of the hill in a circular formation. Again I yelled for the men stop and to drop their weapons or I would shoot just as I  had been trained to do. I may have been about 100 yards away when I noticed the boy in the center of the circle crying. I could hear the boy telling them ” I don’t have anything, leave us alone“. Then one of the men said ” you little rebel shit, give me the bag“. I saw one of the horses rise up and come down on the boy. He made a scream I wont ever forget.

By this time I was closing in on the men and began firing my gun at them. I had to have shot at least 4 times, before re engaging commands for them to stop. When the smoke from my pistol cleared I noticed, no one was there. No horses, no men dressed like soldiers, no boy, nothing, not even a single track other than my own.

At this point all I could think is, am I hallucinating, is my mind playing tricks on me? I made a futile search of the area to find some piece of evidence as to what I had just witnessed, but came up with nothing.

I then begrudgingly decided to walk back to my car, believing that maybe I have been far more tired than I thought or maybe I had just seen an animal or something, Anything other than what I know I had seen. I decided to go home and check back in the morning after getting some rest. There was no point in trying to report the incident at this point because there wasn’t really anything to report. I had come up with nothing.

The next day, I went to the area and found nothing other than my shoe prints of what had occurred the night prior.

A couple of days passed by and I wrote it off as maybe a case of extreme exhaustion or working too hard. I then took a couple of days off and went fishing with my dad on our property that backs up to the field where I had seen the incident. We got to talking about guy stuff and my work, hunting, football . Ya know, normal stuff.

Then I asked him how long our family had been on this farm, a question that surprisingly I had never asked before. My dad, being a keen student of history, explained that our family had been here since just before the Civil War. I then asked was there ever any battles or anything that happened here. He said not really, but when General Sherman made his march to the sea and burned his way through the state, Union troops did come on the land. He said that his great great grandmother was here with her youngest son, his great uncle who was 10 at the time, when they came. He then said, “the way my great grandma told the story was when they came, they started burning her mothers crops and shooting her pigs. She then gathered up a bag full of food and put it in a sack and told her son, John, to run and hide in the woods behind the house and wait until they left. John then snuck out of the house and ran, but them Yankees saw him when he went into the woods and chased after him on their horses.

Dad then pointed to the area I had been days before and my blood began to run cold. He continued ” back there in that next field behind us, the soldiers caught up to him and cornered him up wanting the food he had on him. He didn’t hand them the bag, so one of the soldiers reared his horse back and trampled John, breaking his leg. They then left him there. After they had done taken everything from the farm they could they left and told her where to find her son if he was still alive.”

Tears began to well in my eyes as he continued. He said that she found her son barely alive from his injuries. She was able to save him but he walked with a limp for the rest of his life and when he died he was buried near the hill where the soldiers cornered him.

That was when I realized that, everyone I saw that night, never noticed me because they weren’t really there. I don’t know if they were ghosts or what. I’ve never been much of a believer in such things, but after what I witnessed, I don’t really have a doubt anymore. Take the story for what you will, again I know what I saw, but I will be damned if I will ever be able to really comprehend it.

Submitted to Weird Darkness and My Haunted Life Too…

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