Ghosts???

In honor of the season, I decided to tell my ghost stories. They're not all that spectacular, but this is what I've seen.

While hunting
One time I was deer hunting with my dad and brothers. I was standing along a riverbank by a great big pine tree and my brothers were hunting up and down river from me while my dad made a drive, which entailed him walking slowly and quietly through the woods to see if he "kicked up" anything to us.

Dad had been gone for about an hour and a half and I was expecting him at any time now. I was looking towards the direction he would be coming from because sometimes deer are really quiet and you don't hear them coming.
I suddenly saw a white misty clearly defined figure with a head, shoulders and shape, just like a man, about 30 feet from me, like it was looking at me, though it had no discernable features. No arms or legs. Just a head, shoulders and man shape. I said, "Okay.." like I usually do when I see something strange. It was white, shimmery, but more solid than transparent. But I could see the branches of the trees behind it.It was there for over a minute, maybe two, not changing or moving. I was wondering if it were a refraction of light of some sort, or breath of some sort or optical illusion of some sort when the figure suddenly stepped (with now clearly discernable legs) behind (or into) a real skinny tree, about one-third the width of the figure. I think the fact that it dissappeared behind or into a tree freaked me out much more than seeing it in the first place.
I was apprehensive, but I did not feel any sort of threat coming from it. But I wasn't about to turn my back on it either. It wasn't scary. But it was perplexing.
A few minutes later, I heard my dad coming slowly through the woods but not directly towards it. My brothers and I walked over to meet my dad when he made it to the river bank. I told them about what I had seen. My dad and my youngest brother were far more skeptical people than my other brother. But dad and my youngest brother took me at face value. My other brother, who's seen strange stuff himself, shook his head and said, "Well, I've heard EVERY hunting story NOW!" and kept shaking his head at me all day. Go figure!

Haunted treament facility
I worked in a treatment facility for troubled teens. It was an old Indian school where members of the Ho Chunk nation were forced to go and live away from their families and learn English and were beaten for speaking their own language. Elders who attend this school told me these stories about their own youth.
When I worked there it had been a home for troubled teens for many years. There was a main building and several more recently built units and houses that had been remodeled into units. I heard ghost stories right after I first started. Stories about cold drafts and things moving and what not. I didn't have any of those problems. I'd already worked in a haunted restaurant (see previous post) and I felt NOTHING, so I wasn't worried.

One night I was pulling a night shift. I had to check the girls every 15 minutes, but other than that there was nothing for me to do until it was time to get them up and make breakfast for them. I was sitting on the couch in front of big windows watching tv and waiting for my next check when in the big glass windows I saw a little girl with blond hair walk out of the bathroom, DIRECTLY behind me and walk into the kitchen. I JUMPED up and looked behind me -- NOTHING!! I looked back into the reflection on the windows just to see her in the center of the kitchen as far as the reflection would show. I walked out there, nothing. I checked all the doors. Locked. She had appeared completely solid. All the girls in that unit were 12 to 18 and sound asleep. Every one was in their beds. They were all in rooms down the hallway to the right of the living room. No one could have gotten past me. This little girl had been about seven. Weird as hell. I KNEW I had seen a ghost.

I didn't tell anyone at work about it. I did tell an elderly Ho Chunk woman I knew. She told me it sounded just like the daughter of the people who ran the Indian school. BUT, she was alive and well and an old lady now. And although the unit I was in had been that family's house, they didn't have indoor plumbing back in those days. Where I had seen her used to be the kitchen area and where the kitchen was now, used to be the outside. So maybe it WASN'T a ghost, but some sort of energy imprint or something.

I saw one other person that wasn't there while I worked there. I was in a different unit, one of the more modern ones. It was nearly 9 a.m. and my shift was about to be over. The kids had already been escorted off to school by another aide. I was just finishing up my paperwork, when I saw, clearly and solidly, a young boy duck into a bedroom belonging to a boy that looked just like him. I thought it was the boy I knew. I called his name and went in to ask him what he was doing there. All students had to be escorted whenever they went anywhere. I was calling to him when I walked in to find the room empty. He wasn't in the closet, under the bed, anywhere. I did wonder if it was another ghost. I called over to the school and talked to the aide that had escorted the kids to school. He said, no, that boy was sitting right there, he could see him right now. Why? I said, oh nothing, must have been my imagination. He said, "Oh. yeah. I've had one of those too."

I worked there a little while after that but had no further experiences and saw nothing else. Other people continued to have strange experiences like feeling they were sat on and getting blasted with cold drafts.