During college, the night shift at a Jack in the Box in a small California town ran from about eight in the evening to three or four in the morning. By ten the streets were empty. One night the manager sent our witness home early, around 3 a.m., and on the way home the student stopped for gas to save time before morning classes.
It was a tiny station: two pumps, no attendant, barely lit, with nobody around. Or so it seemed. Getting out of the car, the student noticed a tall, very pale, bald man in a full suit and a long coat, holding a briefcase. He stood about 20 feet away in front of the outdoor ice machine.
Nothing about him fit. The night wasn't cold enough for the coat, and the outfit was far too formal for that town. There was no other car on the lot, and the station wasn't anywhere you'd walk to. He didn't smoke, check a phone or look around. For the whole time the gas was pumping, he simply stood there without moving and never once looked over.
Our witness kept an eye on him all the way back into the car. Pulling out, the student took one last look in the rear-view mirror, and at that moment, almost as if he'd felt the look, the man started walking off into the dark in the same direction the car was going. There was nothing out there for him to walk to. The student took a different road home, just in case, and never saw him again.
Friends have always said it was probably just some guy. Maybe it was, the student admits, but only years later, reading other people's accounts of pale, oddly formal men in suits turning up in empty places, did the encounter start to make a different kind of sense.
