WHAT DID I JUST SEE? By Kathy Polich I don't spook easily. I think I'm pretty tough. However, living in Northwest New Mexico, the majority of my life has afforded me a few opportunities of being unnerved to my core! My grandma always told us there are no such things as ghosts. Growing up on a ranch outside of Grants, her tough ranch mom always encouraged her brood to investigate anything that seemed eerie. Grandma would tell me if you see a figure in the shadows, don't run away, take a look. It will turn out to be a branch or something harmless. I always thought that sounded a bit crazy, what if it was the boogie man? Maybe not a mistake you want to make. Well, following in the legacy of my fearless foremothers, I'd say 90 percent of the time
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that has proven to be reliable. The remainder of my encounters, I haven't been able to resolve. After you read the following episodes, I'll let you figure out which one I solved and which two still slip into my dreams on occasion.
Ghost Road
I think it was around 1986 or 1987. It was already dark outside when my dogs started barking. I knew my friend Nicole was in front of my house to pick me up when I heard her rev the engine on her Suzuki DR 100 dirt bike. That was our form of communication before we had cell phones. There was no way she was going to knock on my door. Not with Jumper, my blue heeler, keeping watch. I jumped on the back of her bike and asked her what we were going to do. She said we were going to meet some of the neighbor boys for a game of chicken, but we had a bit of time to get some practice in first. Our version of chicken is different from what you might be thinking. There was a road in our neighborhood that only had two houses, one on each end. Each house had a porch light. Other than that, the gravel road was pitch dark. One of the houses had Doberman watchdogs. If you drove by, they would chase you the length of their owner's property. Our chicken game consisted of approaching from the opposite end of the street and driving as slowly as possible. Winning the game was easy. All you had to do was drive the furthest slowly while the attack dogs approached. The first one to accelerate and get the heck out of there was chicken. Looking back, this was dumb, and I get why the poor owner hated us. I even forgive him for sneaking up on the opposite side of the road and trying to hit us with a broom one time! Dear neighbor, my 12-year-old self apologizes! It was a crisp fall night. We stopped at the end of the road and discussed our strategy. Nicole started
creeping up the street. We could hear the dogs approaching, but couldn't see them. We were both looking off to the left, which was the side the house was on. For some reason, something caught my attention, and I turned to the right. There was a figure running right next to us. I tapped Nicole on the shoulder to get her attention and screamed a few expletives. She saw it too and started to accelerate. For a few seconds, the specter ran beside us. Just as suddenly, it veered off the road and into the dark sagebrush field. Nicole hammered that bike, and we didn't slow down until we got a half a mile up the main road. We were shaking and almost crying. We didn't even know how to put into words what we had seen. We called the game of chicken off that night. From then on, we referred to that area as Ghost Road. Every once in awhile, when I run into my dear childhood friend, we talk about that night on Ghost Road. That night we will never forget! I could tell you many more stories from my childhood on the west side of Gallup, but for now, I will fast forward about twenty years and switch locations to the south of Gallup.
UFO OMG!
One evening in 2008, my boys and I got home after an afternoon of shooting guns with the Red Rock 4H shooting team. My son was in kindergarten and was so excited to have shot his very own Cricket Rifle. He was chatting non-stop the entire way home and never stopped until he had bathed and settled down in front of a movie with his little brother in tow. As I finished up a few odds and ends for the day, it occurred to me I had left a to-go box from Garcia's Sunset Grill in my pick -up. Not wanting to let that gold go to waste, I ran out to my truck to collect my flauta plate. I went out the sliding glass door and didn't bother to put shoes on. I walked down the deck and onto the cement walkway. When I got to the end of it, I did a sort of awkward walk dance thing, not wanting to put all my weight on the gravel the last few steps. I grabbed the styrofoam container, shut the cab door, and turned around to make the same trek back. Right about the final tricky step before I hit the cement, I noticed something in the sky. I stepped down hard on a gray gravel rock and cussed a little. I
