When I was in my mid-twenties, I bought a piece of property in a rural part of Nevada. It was a great place with views of two mountain ranges, access to the eastern Sierra Nevada, and open space for miles. This was the last place in the world I would’ve expected a paranormal experience, but that’s exactly what I got over the next several years.
On the first night I stayed at the house, I happened to go outside in the back yard to get something from the car. It was a full moon and I could see everything as if it were daylight. While I was climbing down the steps on the back porch, I happened to glance up when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye.
Walking across the yard from the chicken lot was a Hispanic man dressed all in white. His jeans where white, his cowboy shirt was white, his boots and wide-brimmed hat were white. Even his skin had a slight white pall to it. I realized that I was not watching something of this earth and stood on the back steps watching as he silently crossed the yard from west to east, then vanished.
I never saw him again, but I often sensed his presence in the back yard after dark, especially on moonlit nights. I’ve never known who the man was or what he represented, I just know that he only appeared once in the whole time I’ve lived on this property. He was jokingly given the name Carlos because this name kept appearing on the ghost detector app on my phone and it seemed appropriate.
Several years later, my sister and brother-in-law dropped by for a visit and decided to car camp in the yard. They parked not far from the porch where I had seen the ghost years before. I didn’t mention anything about Carlos to them, nor had I ever told the story of what he looked like.
One moonlit night, my brother-in-law left the van with the intent of going to the bathroom in the mother-in-law quarters. He was about to climb the porch steps when he was startled by the presence of a man in the back yard. As he described the next morning, the stranger was dressed all in white, with a white, wide-brimmed hat, and he walked across the yard without a sound.
“Oh, you must’ve met Carlos,” I said, when I heard the story. It told my sister and brother-in-law about seeing Carlos when I first moved in.
We realized that my brother-in-law and I had both seen the same ghost at different times. The fact that he was able to describe Carlos without knowing anything about him tells me that this sighting is more than an optical illusion or my imagination. There really is a Carlos of some sort.
But Carlos isn’t the only weird phenomenon that happens on my property. There are also the Cowboys, as I refer to them. These cowboys are never seen, but they can be heard talking outside the living room near the back window. There are three of them, two men and a woman, and they are always engaged in some cheerful, yet indistinguishable conversation. Laughter often punctuates their discussion, and on occasion I’ll hear the crackling of a campfire or someone moving a heavy pot.
I’ve tried to find an explanation for the voices. So far I’ve eliminated the sounds of radios or television sets, because none are usually running when the conversations take place. I tried to test to see if it could be coming from the neighbors’ houses, but the eastern neighbors were an elderly couple and didn’t sound anything like the voices. My western and northern neighbors were too far away to project the voices, and there are no neighbors south of me, just miles of open desert.
This was also not another case like what occurred along the Columbia River before. That house was newer with a metal frame and an antenna that was picking up radio signals. This house has a wood frame, and the antenna that is now attached to the house wasn’t present when the phenomenon began. The origin of the Cowboys remains a mystery.
So does the origin of the weird odors that sometimes waft through the house. It’s not unusual to catch a whiff of stewing beans or old-fashioned rolled cigarettes drifting through the house. No one in the family smokes, nor did the previous owner of the house, so it’s not residual. Beans are not a common dish at my house, either.
Perhaps the most prominent smell is that of frying bacon. This odor is sometimes so strong that it’s possible to smell it all the way down at the front gate. It is always strongest near the wall where the voices are emitted, sometimes mingling with the beans and cigarettes. Again, I don’t frequently cook bacon, so the source of the odor is unknown.
There is someone in the neighborhood who owns a meat smoker and I’ve often wondered if the bacon odor may come from there. However, every time I’ve known the smoker was operating, bacon was not on the menu and it smelled nothing like what was coming from my house. To this day, I still occasionally smell it, and I have no idea where it comes from.
Probably the creepiest thing that ever occurred on my property was one stormy night in 2016. I had the windows open to cool off the house because it had been hot during the day. Around one o’clock in the morning, while I was typing away at my computer, I became aware of an eerie sound in the front yard. It sounded a lot like a sobbing woman.
I paused in my writing and peered out the window into the darkness, expecting to see lights on at the neighbor’s house. Everything was black and dark, yet the sobbing continued. It only ceased when I exited the house and looked around the yard with a flashlight.
I’m not sure if this was a paranormal experience, or some kind of animal, but it certainly was creepy. Whatever it was, I never heard it again, nor did I ever locate the source of the sound. I wrote it off as another of the weird noises that sometimes echo through the desert.
I continue to live on this rural Nevada property. The unexplained phenomena don’t occur as often as they used to. I don’t hear the Cowboys that much anymore, nor have I seen Carlos again. It has been a while since I smelled beans or cigarettes, but I still occasionally get a whiff of bacon. And every once in a while, late at night, there is a strange noise in the darkness. It’s all part of living in the high desert, I suppose.
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