Recently, my friend Tara Rule (whose UAP sighting over New Jersey I covered earlier this year) reached out to me regarding an incident she and her partner experienced.
In keeping with my code of keeping all information open and leaving as little to interpretation as possible, here is her email to me (titled "ghomst");
My partner and I used to drive around all the time and look for spooky places when we were kids. We were feeling nostalgic so we took a night drive. I started filming on my phone out the window just in case we saw anything out of the ordinary.
My partner has multiple masters degrees in Science and is an AI programmer, so he doesn’t like to admit that he’s sensitive to things because it’s outside the realm of explanation, but he is. We drove aimlessly for a long time and ended up on some unnamed road near Galway when he started to feel something. We turned onto a desolate road with hardly any houses on it. He said, “If you see a flashing light at an intersection, we need to turn left.” I asked why and he said he didn’t know. Neither of us were familiar with the area we were in. About a mile down the road, we saw a flashing light at an intersection and turned left onto a road that didn’t have a sign indicating the name of it. He asked me to go on maps and see if I could find a road named Stairs. I thought the name was weird, but I looked on google maps and it said we were already on a road called Stairs Road.
We drove for quite a while. At one point I said I didn’t feel anything and he said he felt like something was about to happen. A moment later, we drove through a mist. It was warm out, and we had been driving through the country all night. There was no fog or mist anywhere else. Not saying it couldn’t have been fog, but it seemed odd that it only appeared in a narrow strip on the road and nowhere else. We drove for what felt like a very long time, but didn’t see anything. Whenever we passed an animal or a person in their driveway, we made sure to say something about it so we wouldn’t mistake it for something else when we watched the footage back. I didn’t look away from the road once, except to check for Stairs Road once - this was not only to ensure that there were no people, but also because my partner doesn’t see animals crossing the street as well as I do, and we’ve almost hit a few animals in the past.
At one point, my partner and I both made note of feeling like we were in some kind of time warp, as strange as that sounds. When we finished recording, I looked at the amount of time we had been filming - over 70 minutes. We only filmed for about half the time we were driving. We began filming at 8:49pm. The last video was taken at 9:11pm. The times just don’t add up.
Because of the weird time difference, I looked at the footage.
On route 126, only a few moments after driving through the mist and my partner stating that something weird was going to happen, a girl appeared in the video on the left hand side of the road wearing what looks like a bikini top and denim cutoff shorts. We did not see her with our eyes. She looked so real, I initially thought it was human error on our end and that it was, in fact, a person.
I really thought about it and know for a fact I did not take my eyes off the road for a second, and neither did my partner. I still wasn’t convinced it wasn’t just a girl until I looked at the footage closer.
Before the girl appears, a car passes by us on the same side of the street as the girl. You can see the vehicle coming for quite a distance. The car never swerved out of the way. Based on where the girl was on the street, the car would have hit her if the driver did not swerve. I suppose it’s possible the girl jumped out of the way of the car, but it seems unlikely.
A girl wearing a bikini top and shorts walking down the side of the road alone late at night was kind of weird on it’s own, but then I zoomed in on the footage.
It looks as if the girl just kind of fades in from the feet up. The headlights of our car hit the telephone poles down the way and you can see those clearly from a distance, but not the girl. At one point, a mailbox is sticking out in her path and she appears to walk through it. When I blew up the video on my computer and brightened it a bit, I feel like I can see the mailbox through her, as if she’s not fully solid.
If that isn’t enough, she doesn’t have a head. I thought maybe this was an illusion caused by the headlights, but in the video, trees next to her and street signs right near her are illuminated all the way up. I also enhanced the brightness as high as I could, and it really doesn’t look like she has a head.
I have all the footage from that night that I can send you, but I’ll just send you the important stuff for now and give you some timestamps below. I’ll chop some of it up so you don’t have to sit through boring nonsense while nothing is happening.
You did such a good job enhancing the UFO footage that I didn’t know if you could play around with this footage to make it more clear. I’ve tried on my computer, but I’m not used to working with low quality footage so I feel like I’m just making it worse, haha.
I also googled girls that went missing in the area, and quite a few girls in our age group have been bludgeoned in the head to death in that area. One girl was murdered this way last year and was found wearing denim cutoffs.
I’m HOPING that when you enhance the footage, it’s clearly just a person, because I really don’t like trying to wrap my head around shit like this, haha. But I SWEAR on every fiber of my being there was NO PERSON and we’re both militantly sober people, so we were of sound mind when this all went down.
Lemme know what you think!
Beginning of video is just some weird stuff that seemed kind of relevant conversation wise.
1:41 - mist
2:15 - car comes into frame, does not swerve
2:33 - right before girls legs appear
(if you miss the girl, stop video at 2:36;25 , you’ll see her clearly on the very left hand side of the screen, right before the picture cuts off. It’s fast so she’s easy to miss the first time you watch it.)
You can hear that neither of us react.
Reading the email initially, I found the partner's intuitive exploration fascinating, but what really jumped out to me was the out of place mist and missing time. These two factors go hand in hand in paranormal reports for centuries. From the classic Bermuda Triangle tales, to the more recent Missing411 cases often involving sudden fogs, mists, or unexpected heavy weather, strange mists and missing time go hand in hand. For me, even trying to play the "fair skeptic" card, this (coupled with the intuitive exploration) indicated something was happening. Also, the fact that this is just one more oddity taking place in Saratoga County, NY really grabs me.
The footage I received was indeed cut up. But, to be fair, I'm not sure my horrible laptop could even handle processing multiple versions of a 70+ minute film clip. It should be noted that I have not seen the full footage, nor have I any evidence that the times that are claimed (8:49 to 9:11 pm) are accurate. I trust Tara, but would love to have that evidence.
Here is the clip I was sent, as well as a couple of "cleaned up" (as much as I could) versions:
Tara's initial time stamps are inaccurate at this point, as I have pushed the footage forward for the context bit at the beginning of the video. In the footage you hear the two of them discussing the mist. Occasionally pointing out things they are passing. Toward the end of the clip you do see what seems like a girl walking on the lefthand side of the screen. As far as being headless... I don't know. No, I don't see a face, or anything above the neck, but a few things could be going on here:
1. She is walking with her head down and her hair is covering her face.
2. The headlights just don't reach that high up (coupled with low quality video shot at night).
I think either one of these are perfectly fine explanations, as much as I think it would be cool to see a headless ghost walking around in dukes and a crop top. As far as the cars not swerving, it's also possible they didn't see her, or she moved out of the way. It's an interesting and fun addendum to the evening, but in my opinion, the missing time is the real star of this show.
However, Tara points out that there have been girls in the area that were found bludgeoned to death. I found one case that was similar, and not too far from where they were driving, but not necessarily tightly enough connected. Tara later sent me the same article, and agrees that the connection would be tenuous at best. According to the article the girl was found on "Dean Lung Road", which is about nine miles from the area Tara and her partner were driving.
In the end, and after watching, editing, and contemplating Tara's clip for about a week now, I'd have to say the "headless girl" is a combination of poor light, poor video, and poor decisions (seriously, don't walk on the side of the road at night without a light or something reflective, lest you end up headless). As for why neither Tara or her partner saw the girl until they watched the footage back, well even my first time watching the footage I didn't see her. I had to go back and look at the time stamp before I saw it. It remains possible that the two of them just didn't see her (again, I say; wear something reflective or bring a light).
The thing about this event to me that really grabs me, that I'd love to investigate a bit more is the missing time. Seventy minutes of footage filmed within a half hour?
However, if you are a person who was walking that area around 9pm on August 10th, 2020, I'd love to hear from you. Ghost or not.
