While I’m here down in Ohope Beach, East Coast Bay of Plenty area, where my family and I usually stay as a tradition every New Year with friends who join, I wanted to tell you about this incident of a sighting that still bugs me to this day.
My teenage daughter and I wanted to go to the beach at night as a fun excursion so we grabbed a torch and walked towards the beach entrance. As we went down the embankment stairs to reach the sand, we were arm in arm stumbling in the dark and sand to the water.
As we did, we were aware to not shine the light into other people’s eyes who are also maybe doing the same thing as us. It was pitch black and dark, and the only lights that could be seen were the stars. As we shined the torch towards the area we were going and in the direction of this area we noticed a silhouette of a man walking his dog and I rushed to tell my daughter to point the torch the other way to not blind the passerby. She saw the shadow as well and we both directed the torch away from him and apologised as we did. We giggled as we did so.
We heard nothing from him and he was about a couple of metres from us. So we let him pass and then as we turned back to ensure he was gone from the area we wanted to go towards, we shined the light in his direction to assume it would be the back of him, only to find no one was there. Both my daughter and I had asked “Where did he go?”.
We had made sure to give him enough time to pass us and ensured to check and still looked up again towards the shoreline and still no one was there. We were somewhat bamboozled by this so we went and followed the direction to where the “man and his dog” would have headed and still we found no one. We scanned the whole beach with our torch and found we were completely alone and no one was on the beach.
Thinking about it now, the figure truly looked like a grey shadow even in the torch’s light and the quickness we recognised the shape of what we saw. We removed the light so quickly that we were sure of what we saw and it couldn’t have been anything else. It was moving slowly along the sand so we had enough time to make out the shape and to apologise where he could hear us still.
We didn’t hear the snuffle of a dog or his footsteps. There were also no footsteps in the sand. It had been completely undisturbed other than our own.
I don’t have any stories of any traumas related to this area other than maybe some drownings. The area is a beach batch retirement area and is a very long stretch of beach with three areas, sectioned as West End, Maraetotara, and Port Ohope.
So maybe this was just a perfect area for an old retiree to remain even in his afterlife and wander the beach line with his beloved pal.