I’ll just start by saying, I don’t believe in ghosts. Not in the traditional sense of the spirit of a dead human is stuck in-between the realms of the living and the dead. There are other kinds of ghosts: things that haunt you, unexplained feelings of foreboding, your spidey sense that something isn’t right. But, I firmly believe, every human being is headed to one of two destinations upon expiration.

So, while this may sound like a ghost story, I believe it to be about an interaction with something more sinister. Whatever it was, it was witnessed by many and in 20 years, I’ve never come up with a scientific explanation for it.

It was 2005 and we were in Oldenswort, Germany (pop. 1,300) for the wedding of my old friend, Aaron. Oldenswort is in Nordfriesland, the northernmost district in Germany on the peninsula with Denmark. We were staying down the road in two apartments over a garage on a sheep farm. In one apartment, it was myself, my then fiancee (now my wife), Aaron’s brother Wade and Wade’s girlfriend. In the other apartment was his dad, Steve, step-mom Joy and his sister Stephanie. As we walked up the drive I noticed a tombstone off to the side by the tool shed and thought how odd that was considering we passed the cemetery on the way in.

Once we all picked our apartments and room, I noticed our window looked right down on the driveway and that tombstone. I pulled out my camera, which then was film, a Canon Rebel SLR, and tried to take a picture because I thought it would be a crazy story. When I tried to take a picture, the camera died and the battery showed dead. At first, I didn’t think much of it because we’d already been in Europe for about two weeks at this point and I’d taken a lot of pictures. But, I turned the camera off and back on and I showed I had full battery. I tried again to take a picture and again, the camera died. I said something to my wife and she took her point-and-shoot camera and the same thing happened to her. We’d turn the camera off, then back on, take a picture of something in the room, or each other, and it worked just fine, but as soon as we pointed it out the window and hit the button, it died.

Then, I went and got Wade. He brought both his still camera and his video camera and the same thing happened to him. Turn it off, turn it on, take pictures of people in the room, point it out the window, dead camera.

After that, we got Steve, Joy and Stephanie in on it and they too had the same experience. Between the seven of us, there were five still cameras and two video cameras and all of them did the same thing. I have almost a whole roll of close up photos of all their faces from where we’d test it inside the room before pointing it back out the window again. I must have tried at least a dozen times that day and then once or twice for the next few days before I gave up.

Finally, at the end of the week, as we were packing to leave, I spoke out the window. I simply said, “I don’t mean you any disrespect, I was just curious. Now, after the last week, I have a helluva story to tell and I’ll tell it the rest of my life and I would be grateful if you allowed me to take a picture of your tombstone.”

I pointed the camera out the window and click. The shutter opened and closed and I got the picture you see here.

I’ve had a lot of weird experiences in my life, but most of them have some kind of rational explanation. The only other one that doesn’t was the house my dad lived in in Maryland near Antietam that most certainly already had an occupant when he moved in. What was crazy about this story was not only that all seven of us experienced it, but that when I spoke to it before I left, I got the picture. And no, I never changed the batteries in the camera. It was the same batteries at the end of that week that I put in the camera before we left Chicago, where we were living at the time.

I have told this story a hundred times if I’ve told it once. Twenty years later and I still can’t make sense of what happened other than I was interacting with something supernatural.

Interacting with Something Supernatural in Germany