My dad has always been extremely logical and refuses to acknowledge anything that can’t “be seen or experienced” but we were on a walk yesterday and he just started telling me for the first time how he thinks he saw a ghost once
For context i live in a town that originally was a forest area and even today you’d spot an occasional leopard come into the city after wandering out of the hills, it’s very quite and isolated here, and back when my dad was younger the roads were all paved through forests for the most part. My dad moved in when this place was just starting to develop and was relatively empty. He would go work in his factory which was a 20 min bike ride away through really quite and dark forest roads and would be back home around 10-11 pm.
This one time he decided to drop his colleague off home as both of them had been working overtime that night and halfway through their journey at 11 pm in the night on this forest road both of them spot a lady on the side of the road (keep in mind this is south asia in 80s this was highly uncommon to see a lady out alone this late) but my dad didn’t stop as she didn’t look distressed or lost, so he drove past her, he did however say he had “a weird feeling” and just told his friend to not look back at the woman they just saw. Of course since he didn’t really give him a reason, his friend looked back and almost immediately started screaming. After pulling over and failing to calm his friend down my dad eventually managed to drop his histerical friend home, the friend soon he heard had suffered from a fever so high he had to be hospitalised.
When he went to visit the friend in the hospital room almost immediately the friend grabbed his arm and started questioning him on why he asked him to not look back. My dad of course didn’t have a good answer and just said “i had a bad feeling” and it took them another 15 mins to get my dad’s friend to admit - when he looked back he saw the girl right in front of his face, blank expression and he said that he felt an unbelievable amount of dread like he would never be able to escape her again.
Friend quit the job and moved a few weeks later and my dad avoided the forest route and started taking a longer route home. When my dad told his parents they told him that in our culture based on your birthday similar to your astrological signs we also believe that certain people have an affinity to see heavenly entities, certain people can see demons/evil entities from hell, and certain people can not see anything beyond the normal eye. My dad was told that he was supposed to be from the group that sees demons/evil entities, my mom and i on the other hand are from the group that seeing heavenly bodies. Curious stuff