by Tim Stanbury from Hull, UK
About nine years ago, me and a mate used to frequent a caravan site a couple of miles up the coast from were I use to live. During the summer, we would drink in the site's pub called, "The Mermaid" -- booze on the beach, and chat up the holiday maker's daughters, etc. One year, a couple of months after the summer crowds had left, we'd gone to the bonfire that they have there, to watch the fireworks and generally just join in with festivities. We ended up staying late...just wandering about the site before finally ringing a taxi. We were waiting for it outside the Mermaid, inside the doorway of a rundown toilet block near the edge of the cliff. It was quiet, but there were still a few people about.
After a couple of minutes of us standing there, I'd seen something at the cliff edge, in a shallow ditch around 30 yards away. It looked like the start of a fire. I mentioned it to my mate (I remember saying, "What the hell's that!"), and I think his response was something along the lines of, "I don't even want to think about what that might be."
We carried on watching, and the fire grew until finally something blue became apparent in its center. I couldn't tell what it was at first, but it quickly materialized. It or rather, "he" was a man in a blue boiler suit (with shoulder straps), wearing a tan cowboy hat and an orange shirt ; and he was digging hard into the ditch. As he dug, he got lower until around the point only his torso was visible. The image seemed to evaporate; the fire closely following suit.
Me and my mate didn't speak during the sighting and I don't think we spoke much on the subject on the ride home. But whenever I talked to him about it after that, he always made a joke or fobbed it off. I reckon some people just won't believe in ghosts. As it is, I haven't seen this mate for years, and that experience is the only thing I really remember regarding him, that caravan site (Tunstall, near Withernsea, near the city of Hull - England) and what I can only describe as a spirit.
Some woman who I told about it in a nightclub years later, said maybe it meant something. I can't think what, but sometimes I think maybe she had a point.