True Ghost Stories

A candle on the grave

November 7, 2023 |  0 comments
Image Credit: Pixabay / Myriams-Fotos I had an unexplainable experience about 40 years ago while hiking on a mountain in Switzerland with a buddy of mine from the US army. It happened on Christmas Eve exactly at midnight the start of Christmas Day. My friend and I were going to midnight Mass in Switzerland and we discussed what time it starts. Being a Catholic I told him it starts at 11:00 and it's over by midnight. He was saying "no it starts at midnight that's why it's called midnight Mass".

So at 11: 45pm we arrived at the church and noticed everybody coming out of the church because Mass was over. Since we missed midnight Mass we were exploring the old church grounds and noticed a graveyard. As we walked around the graveyard I noticed candles on every grave in front of tomb stone. I came up on one grave that did not have... I told my friend I want to take one of the candles on the grave site next to him who had four or five candles and place it on the plot of the person with no candle. I respectfully knelt down and asked the occupant of the gravesite next to the other side if I could borrow one of his candles because it was Christmas and his neighbor did not have any candles. I blew the candle out and moved it over to the empty plot.

My friend (Leonard Johnson) said "hold on I'll get a picture of you lighting it..." He took out his camera and was ready to take the picture, I took my lighter and as soon as I touch the flame to the candle we heard wind swishing and then a loud crashing in the back of the cemetery.(a large tree fell over in the graveyard from a mountainside) It freaked us out so bad we took off running out of the cemetery to a bar up the street. We sat there and talked about how scary and freaky that was...

The next day we had nothing to do and decided to hike up a mountain that was near our hotel. We started up the mountain around 9a.m. As we were walking up the mountain we were enjoying some of the sites we could see from the mountain... I even made the comment to Leonard "look how high up we were seeing mountain goats." It was around that time I looked at Leonard and said "what time is it..." He told me it was around 3:30 and I realized we had been hiking for 6 hours up this mountain and the sun is going to go down in 2 hours.. we will not make it off the mountain before it's dark and we're going to be stranded on this mountain. We tried to quickly figure out our way back down this mountain but the sun was feeding rapidly. At this point I took off one of the two pairs of socks I was wearing wrapped him around the stick to try to make a torch but it did not last very long. We came up on a fire break running up the mountain and we figured if we go down the fire break we can get to the bottom of the mountain. We also noticed since we had our ski suits on they were sliding on the snow. We started joking as we were sliding down this fire break we called it a zoom slide.

After about 2 hours of zoom sliding something hit me like a ton of bricks and told me to stop. But we were sliding so fast I could not get stopped with my hands or feet... Finally I came to a stop by grabbing hold of a rock as Leonard slid up behind me and tapped me slightly as he stopped. His legs were on both sides of me straddling me behind me and I told Leonard.. "listen to me slowly back up and don't touch me". He questioned it and laughed but moved back carefully. He then asked me what's going on and I told him "my legs are hanging over the edge of a cliff and down below me is the graveyard and we are directly above the tree that fell off the mountain the night before where we lit the candle on the grave!"

At that point I slowly slid back away from the edge and when I was about three foot away I turned around and started the fire break after about a minute I stopped for some reason and started looking left and right and noticed a walking trail to the right. I still have not said anything else to Leonard because I was freaking out in my mind we walked about 30 seconds on that walking path and came up on an old set of tram tracks with steps leading all the way down to the bottom of the mountain. We were freaked out at this point and Leonard kept saying to me "why did you tell us to stop and how did you know that this set of steps was there to lead us down the mountain in the dark?" I told him "I do not know, something just told me do it!!!"

We got over the fear of what had happened and continued our vacation for a couple of days then returned to our military base in Germany not thinking about it anymore. Until Leonard came to me about a week later and said to me... "Remember all the pictures we took on the vacation in Switzerland a camera that had 36 pictures on the roll?" I told him "yeah let me see them", he showed me the pictures, the first 16 pictures and the last 29 pictures were all blacked out. The only picture that came out on that roll of film was the one of me lighting the candle on the grave!

To this day, I am a 1000% convinced.. For whatever reason... My friend and I were supposed to fall off that mountain to our death! But instead the forces that be.. elected to have the tree fall off instead of us.

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