One of my hobbies is Civil War reenacting. I have been doing this on and off since I was about 14 years old. Back in my late-teens, I am now in my mid-twenties, when I used to have more time to devote to this sort of thing I used to do other kinds of reenacting as well. Since the weapons and the uniforms were so cheap my buddies and I would occasionally go out and do WWII reenacting with the local American outfit (yes there are people who do this). It is on one of these WWII reenacting outings that I had the strange experience which I am relating.

It was a fairly casual outing. There was no organized event but the family of one of the guys in one of the British outfits who we were friends with had a farm in the Shenandoah valley. We all decided to go there and wander around the woods all day shooting at each other and playing out little tactical situations. As it ended up only about 10 of us showed up, none of whom were Germans. So we basically just spent the whole day playing a sort of modified paint ball game on this guy's property. We were all planning on crashing out in the farmhouse at the end of the day.

The farm that this guy's family owned was a very old piece of property located very far out in the countryside of central Virginia. The house itself had four or five different sections, each of which was very distinctively constructed according to the architechtural tastes of its respective period of American history. The oldest part of the house was a log cabin dating approximately to the 1740's. Several additions separated it and the newest part of the house, a quasi-Victorian addition dating to the 1920's. It was rumored that the first white baby born west of the Appalachian mountains was born in the log cabin. Whether or not that was true that section of the house was very old.

My friend's family had owned the farm and house for roughly ten years before we were there on that Summer evening and, according to him, it was haunted. His family had always used the property as a kind of weekend retreat, mostly in the summer. He related how they first became aware that the house was haunted when they arrived one early Spring day to do some cleaning and prepare the house for use during the upcoming Summer. When they walked in they heard a set of footsteps on the topmost floor, the attic, which sounded like someone walking to the windown to see who it was who had just arrived. They assumed that there was an intruder in the house, left immediately, and then called the police. The police were unable to find anyone or any evidence that anyone had broken into or even been in the house since the previous Summer. This happened on one or two more occasions and then the family finally talked to some local people familiar with the house who told them that it had a history of such strange activity and was rumored haunted, although nothing really serious had ever been known to happen. Since then it was not considered abnormal to hear strange noises in the night or footsteps walking around in the attic. The activity always seemed centered around the attic of the main part of the house and the back stairway, both areas dating from the late-19th centuries. The family considered the ghost, or whatever it was, to be just another part of the landscape of the farm and never really gave it too much attention.

I learned all of this over the course of a long evening's conversation with my host after we stopped our wargames. We were all sitting around just talking and enjoying the warm, summer evening in the countryside.

We went to bed that night around midnight. My own sleeping quarters were in the old log cabin section of the house, which I shared with one other person. He got the couch so I ended up sleeping on the hard, plank floor which ended up being more comfortable than it would seem. Sometime in the middle of the night something banged into my head. Actually it felt like the plank on which my head was resting had been banged up from beneath. I remember sitting up groggily and thinking about how my friend had also told me that there was about three feet of clearance under the floor of the cabin and how he used to play under there as a child. I figured that it was just our host trying to frighten the two of us sleeping in that section of the house after telling us about the house's ghost all night. I had no trouble getting back to sleep.

For some reason I woke again around 6 AM. I know the time because ther was a clock in the cabin and I remember looking at it. I also remember the growing light of dawn casting a sort of half-light throughout the cabin. What I saw then didn't startle me. I don't know why it didn't startle me but it seemed perfectly natural to me at the time. Perhaps the reason for that is that I was only half awake or perhaps the story that I am relating to you here is dream rather than reality. If it was a dream then it was one of the most realistic dreams I have ever had. All of the details of the cabin were present in my dream as they were in reality, right down to my friend asleep and snoring on the couch. What I saw then was an Indian sitting in one of the cabin's armchairs looking down at me. He was wiry and of medium height and wore what looked like dearskin pants with a loincloth over them and a dirty white or gray shirt covered his torso. His hair was black and greasy, his face looked weather beaten and he was wearing silver hoop earrings and what looked like strings of glass beads around his neck. He didn't look like any kind of apparition, he looked like a man sitting in a chair staring at me.

Like I said his presence didn't startle me but I remember sitting there for a moment looking at him and wondering in a totally non alarmed way who he was. The next thing I did was to ask him. Who was he? Why was he there? His answer came in the form of a story and when I think back to it I can hear none of his words. Instead of the memory of his words in my mind I have what could be considered a kind of film of the story that he told.

I see him walking down from the hills with a load of furs which he wanted to trade with the white settlers. I see him sitting beside a fire outside of the log cabin with the owner of the cabin bargaining. As part of his bargaining the owner of the cabin was plying the indian with mug after mug of hard cider. I then see the owner of the cabin trying to take the furs and getting into a fight with the indian. Then I see the owner of the cabin stabbing the indian to death and taking the furs for himself.

The next thing I remember is waking up with the rest of my buddies. It was raining so we decided to call the day's wargames off. As we were loading our stuff into our cars and prepared for the drive home I got a chance to ask my friend whose family owned the farm a few questions. The same local people who told his family about the ghost in the attic had told them of a ghost in the cabin area of the house. He hadn't wanted to tell anyone about that ghost the previous evening as he knew that someone was going to sleep in there. Apparently the ghost was that of an indian who had been killed in the area of the cabin a long time ago.

I don't really know whether my conversation with the indian took place in reality or in a dream. I don't really care either. I think that somehow I made contact with that spirit that night and heard his story.