This is easy
I'm not superstitious or prone to fits of fancy, and am relatively level headed.

I had to pick up the slack for an ex colleague's work ethic last year, and found myself driving from Dublin to Wexford, leaving Dublin at around 21:00, so getting to Wexford for around 23:00. I'm stone cold sober the entire time this happened.

The job was to photograph equipment at a radio site, ground and tower, so nothing complex. My plan was - drive down there, organise my van (long overdue and full of shite), get some kip (in the van), get up at 06:00 and do the work, then mission on to do the other jobs in the area.

The mast in question is in the middle of a forest (coilte if you're from Ireland) site, and to get to it I have to drive up these barely used forestry tracks in the dead of night. For those of you not familiar with rural Ireland, two things become immediately apparent: 1) It's deathly quiet 2) everything is apparently shrouded in mist.

So I mission it up to the first gate, open it, walk back to the van; no axe murderers, fine, climb in, drive in, close the gate. I'm now locked into a forestry site in the middle of nowhere, with no easy way out. There's another gate a mile up the track, same drill. Then the climb to the very top of the hill, and the enclosure gate itself (where all the ground cabin equipment is fenced in basically). The entire time I'm having a nervous chuckle to myself about this being a Blair Witch scenario.

I get into the enclosure, back the van up and start organising all the crap in it so it's at least manageable. While I'm carrying equipment to and from the van to where it's laid out (dead of night, pitch black, no clouds, deathly silent) at the very edge of the enclosure, I see something like a dull glow at the outside fence perimeter - so I step forward to see if it's something stupid (eg: a high vis jacket caught on a branch / a bit of paper / some luminous tape) but I can't identify what it is. So I stand there, trying to make sense of what I'm seeing, a foot in front of me, on the other side of the fence - and ultimately can't (there's no light reflecting into this area of the enclosure and we're in the middle of nowhere, and it looks like luminous smoke) - at which point my balls react first and retract fairly rapid, my brain reacting second and making me step back and turn around.

tbh, I pretty much (mentally) stuck my fingers in my ears and went LALALALALA, NO SUCH THING AS GHOSTS, HAHA and carried on clearing out the van, while keeping an ear out for pikeys or similar around the enclosure. I finish, dig out my sleeping bag, and go to sleep in the van cab with all the doors locked and having lurid nightmares about freakish horrors watching me sleep through the windows. Shit scared is about the size of it.

Morning comes, and it's fucking _beautiful_ - high summer, morning dew, crisp smell of the forest, nice and peaceful. I get on my harness, clip on to the tower and start climbing - get to 30-40m, look down, and where my mystery glow was there's plenty of nice thick undergrowth for a good 20m all around, the sort that's fairly unforgiving and painful to even touch, all round the site. Coupled with embankments running down towards the site, covered with the same. There's simply no way anyone could have been where I'd seen that weird light without being stabbed to death by the undergrowth, or making a fuckload of noise.

I stayed in a hotel the next night. Still love Ireland though.
(mymilkshakebringsallthemongstotheyard poison hearts, poison minds - joining hate, Thu 7 Apr 2011, 23:17, Reply)