A Breath of Evil

Ed is a well site geologist that offices with me. We were discussing ghosts and he conveyed this ghost story to me. It happened in southwest Kansas.

There aren’t many cities in southwest Kansas and most of the towns small. Drilling wells are often located miles from the nearest town. The primary roads are blacktopped, but narrow. The side roads are often impassible when the weather turns bad.

Ed was sitting a well miles from the nearest town. Early winter snow had melted, leaving dirt roads that were all but impassible. After driving fifty miles for dinner, Ed and the tool pusher were returning to the rig, finding the road into the location too muddy to traverse in their truck. Parking on the blacktop, they began the quarter-mile hike to the location.

Ed and the tool pusher had a lone flashlight that cut a narrow swath of dim light through the misty darkness. About halfway to the rig, they both smelled something that Ed described as putrid and ugly. The temperature dropped, perhaps twenty degrees.

“Did you just feel something?” Ed asked.

“Yes, did you?”

“I think we just passed through something evil.”

“Amen to that,” the tool pusher said.

The experience unnerved both men. When Ed returned to his truck the next day, he felt the same sense of dread as he passed the spot where he and the tool pusher first sensed the presence of evil.

“It was so far from town, I couldn’t imagine what was haunting the hollow we crossed on the way to the rig. Maybe it was an Indian spirit. I don’t know. It was evil, whatever it was. That I know.”

Gondwana