Unexplained Experiences: 1 – the Running Man

Part of a short series of posts on my experiences which remain unexplained by me, to me or in any other way. Whether they are paranormal or part of my own creation, I don't know.

This will be the first of three accounts of experiences I have had for which I have no explanation. If you read them and think you could supply a great explanation for what happened, or seemed to happen, then feel free to speculate.

For the scientifically completionist among you, here’s some extra information: at the time of these experiences I did not know the following – that I am autistic, have ADHD and, when younger, narcolepsy. I just thought I was crap at life, couldn’t be bothered with boring stuff, and went through phases of just not being able to stay awake, especially in the evenings after dinner, even when I was actually still at dinner, even when people were talking to me.

For the record I have not had what I would consider a narcolepsy episode in a long time.

Prior to this particular experience I had spent a couple of months with migraines coming on and off. I had experienced one with the mirror-shatter (IYKYK) visual effect. I had medication for these, but at this time of the incident I did not have a migraine and had not taken medication of any kind.

I am a fan of Dogman Encounters Radio, the podcast, and I was half-listening to an old episode of this, but I couldn’t tell you which one.

I have not had any visual disturbances since the mirror-shatter migraine. I no longer have migraines, fingers crossed. I worked very hard to lower my overall tension levels at all times once I realised my nervous system was totally shot and always in overdrive.

And now, to the recollection.

It’s October 24^th, 2024, an ordinary day. Three o clock in the afternoon. The skies are clear, with just a few small clouds and the sunlight is strong and golden, because it’s always turning gold at that time of day at our latitude in October. It’s bright and very clear. You could see a pin on the paving from twenty feet away, no problem (glasses allowing).

I am driving to pick up my husband from the gym. It’s a short drive along roads I travel every day; commuters pack those routes and they’re busy even outside rush hours. But at this point when “it” starts, for some reason there is no other car on this part of the street.

The location is a stretch of road about a hundred and fifty metres long, if that, between two bends. (We drive on the left in the UK btw, not that this matters). To my left is a row of houses set back up a steep hillside. Cars are parked in a layby in front of these. To my right is a recovery yard, which used to be a train station, and then a wall, which separates the road from the railway cutting – a steep drop of about fifteen to twenty feet almost straight down to the tracks. These tracks are one of the main rail routes in and out of the city towards the south.

The road ahead is dead straight. After 150m it makes a 90 degree turn onto a bridge to cross the tracks. Coming down from the hill on the left, there is a road which would run straight over the bridge but it has a stop sign: my route is the priority road. That hill road is full of houses.

From my end of this little straight I can see some hedges and then a big, white garage door which faces me. To the right of that is a footpath opening and then the wall that lines the road as it goes over the bridge.

I am two miles out of the city centre (Leeds), or less. I am listening to a podcast. As I round the turn I am doing about 25mph. Everything is absolutely ordinary. I am calm. Everything is OK.

What happens next took place over about 8 seconds, between rounding the turn and reaching the next turn. (I have timed it several times to be sure).

I see a guy come running down the hill road from the left. He is about six feet tall and wearing a black tracksuit with a hoodie, the hood up. His trainers are dusty black. The cloth looks the colour of a black cotton trackie that has been washed quite a few times and has started to fade. His ankles seem to be grey, paler, socks. But he stands out because he’s so incredibly fast.

A day or so before I’d been watching some athletics on TV and this guy was as fast as the fastest runner I had seen on there (Jakob Ingebrigtsen, FYI). I said something like “Wow!” and I figured that he must be going to go straight on, for him, across the bridge, and was probably headed on the footway towards the football stadium. That hill really gave him a start!

But then he crossed in front of the white garage door and I realised two things almost at the same time. He wasn’t following the pavement, he was coming off it, but it wasn’t clear where he was going (maybe the pavement on my right before the bridge?) and…he had no head.

I mean in the instant of my amazement and seeing him turn more to face my direction it was just…gone.

I feel a long pause which does not exist in which I check this about a million times but it doesn’t change.

Everything else in the world fades away.

I am now paying attention to everything I am seeing with a hundred percent focus. Time seems to slow. Immense detail pervades. He still has shoulders. He is still running. He is coming across the bridge road towards my car.

I look in my rearview mirror, a very quick glance, and then to my left. I want someone else to be seeing this, so I know I’m not going crazy. Nobody behind me. To my left a man is walking with his head down looking at a phone? Or the pavement. Doesn’t seem bothered by anything unusual.

Back at the road, thinking ah it was an illusion, but – still there! Now the shoulders are beginning to fade and something else is happening. This is extremely difficult to describe because as I was seeing it I could feel my brain going through its entire catalogue of possible matches and coming up with absolutely nothing plausible at all. Quickly followed by ‘things it is like’. Of which it offered the following suggestions (far faster to ‘see’ than to explain).

Brain Theory One: this is a cloud of smoke that has been blasted out of some huge diesel engine. Maybe a vehicle doing works on that hidden road up the hill. And I’ve mistaken it for a person. But it’s smoke. Maybe a steam train was due to pass and it blew out a big puff of billowy smoke and I am seeing what’s left of that as it came over the bridge.

Clearly fucking rubbish. It’s not smoky and – from the waist down the legs are STILL RUNNING very fast towards me and starting to head towards the point of the wall where the railway company’s high metal bars stop blocking the top of it because that’s where they figure their stop-human-jumping barrier should stop.

The legs are on point. But from the waist up some funky shit is happening.

I look for signs of weird winds in the nearby trees and foliage to explain that I am seeing; some blowing rubbish from a skip or something. Nothing. No wind to speak of.

Brain Theory Two: this is a black plastic bin liner which has been torn from someone’s yard and is being blown across the road now, and it’s only one layer thick, and cheap crap, and there is light shining through it so that you can see thin bits and thicker veins in it like a bat’s wing held up to a torch, but black.

Nice theory, but this ‘wing’ stuff is twisting and writhing like it’s in some kind of frenzy to get shit done. It looks, above all things, alive.

Beneath this the ‘legs’ are still working, but they’ve given up on details, they’re merely a kind of watercolourist’s suggestion of shapes, pumping the steady rhythm, gamely determined to cross this road.

Both these things are now about five feet off my front bumper, heading right. I have SLOWED. To about 10mph.

It’s not a bloody bin liner, clearly.

(I did think, brief, fleeting whimsy, of Black Bag, the Faithful Border Bin Liner (Viz Comics) as my rational mind did its best to prove it knew what was going on. But it was nothing so comforting). Bin liners aren’t animated, last I looked. And they’re made as bags, not weird undulating sheets.

I am now watching as I have never watched. There is nothing left of me but the bit driving the car trying not to crash and my vision. I am Witness.

The weird binliner bit and the legs sort of reunite and fade, becoming a two-dimensional, flat black shadow with ragged edges. Where those edges bleed out into the afternoon air they do so as fucking hexagons, more transparent at the extremities of the now shapeless form, darker at the ‘core’. Like it’s had the last laugh. “Thought I was real? Nah. Supernatural? Hah. Check out this techno twist!”

We are now parallel for one instant as I look out of my side window and see it cross the wall just at the side of the bars. I feel (and this is a very slight, very hint of suggestion thing) that it is aware I can see it and it doesn’t quite like it, but it’s not really bothered about me. It’s just off.

It doesn’t jump like I expect it to. It transects the wall, remaining visible above it until it has cleared all the stones.

Then it shoots straight downward and it’s gone. Exactly as a person would have fallen, if they had jumped that wall into that steep drop.

I have to concentrate to drive around the corner.

I think yes! I will have it on my dashcam.

When I arrive at the gym I – put the car in Park. I didn’t know that this cancels the dashcam footage. I am an old fart and dashcams and their doings are news to me. I didn’t know how mine worked. I should have pressed save first or something. When my husband tells me this, I am gutted. I wanted to show him. We try to recover any video. Nothing. Now I’m just another kooky story person.

I feel calm, like I’m not sure. Was that real? How could it be? It was. But it was so ODD. I’m not scared. I’m not really anything. We go home. He believes me.

I am puzzled. I try to scrounge up some emotion but I don’t have any. It was just so nothing of a thing. I can’t categorise it enough to have a feeling about it. I do have a great visual imagination, but it doesn’t ever manifest as an actual hallucination, other than those hypnogogic moments now and again but this was an order of magnitude weirder than those ever are, and much longer, and I was very, very awake.

I can’t figure it out. I just have to let it be.

*

Jump forward a few months to Christmas. My cousin visits. He lives on the road which is next to the road in question and has done since he was a child. I tell him my sighting story and he tells me his ghost stories – I’m thrilled! I didn’t know he had them and his are GOOD. But I can’t tell you those.

A few weeks later he sends me a note. He says he recalls his father’s friend once coming to their house in a state when he was a teenager. This friend lived on the hill road that features in my sighting. The man was very upset because he had been out gardening and had seen someone run past his gateway in a dark tracksuit (this would be in the 1970s) of a very odd design and colour. The strangeness and speed of it made him frightened for some reason he couldn’t describe. He instantly suspected robbery and he hurried out to look and see where the running guy was going, thinking he must be up to no good.

But there was no sign of him.

He had looked for a while and found absolutely nothing. He felt he had to tell someone. He was spooked.

*

My cousin said maybe it was a ghost. The old rec yard was station in times gone by. Could it be someone running for a train? If it wasn’t that, it was some kind of timeslip and he ‘doesn’t do those’. I felt quite strongly from his intonation that he did not want to discuss this second phenomenon at all, ever. So, I have said no more. I’m not sure I ‘do those’ either.

I have absolutely no idea what it was. But I know I saw it, and I’ve seen nothing like it since.

I have had other paranormal type experiences however, and I will relate those in future posts.

Essays posted here will appear later on Medium.

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