I thought we made up the Oxford ghost

This is weird. I seriously thought we just made up this story, so imagine my surprise when I found a reference to the Oxford Motorcycle Ghost in a book I'm scoping to buy. I've been meaning to get around to reading Weird Ohio since it came out in 2005. I just haven't gotten around to it yet. It's partly written by Loren Coleman, an expert on oddities who just happens to also be a really nice guy. Though I don't know him personally, he sent me an email about a blog post I wrote way back when (a different blog). Read everything he writes, starting with Cryptomundo.com.

I'm off track. So anyway, back in high school I was sitting around with some friends talking about nothing when the conversation got around to an urban legend about nearby Oxford, Ohio. I went to Colerain High School in Cincinnati. Oxford's not too far off, about a 45 minute drive. It's a college town so, you know, we spent a lot of time up there.

So we're just sitting around talking and someone says up in Oxford there's a ghost of a motocyclist that will show up, but only under very specific conditions. The specific conditions are that you have to go to Oxford-Milford Road, drive around the bend there, pull into the first drive to the right, turn off your lights, return the short distance back to the bend with your lights off, flash your lights three times, flash your brights three times, and wait. All of this must be done after midnight. Eventually you'll see a single headlight come over the hill (the ghost on the motorcycle). There was some backstory to the ghost as well, but I don't remember it. Something about lost love and whatnot. It didn't matter to me. I just wanted to see the ghost.

My friend Chris Walker and I figured we'd go up there that night and check it out. It was a school night and I was like 15 or something, so I had to sneak out of the house. My friend had a driver's license but no car. What we ended up doing is stealing my parent's van for the night — Hi Mom! : ) (The things we confess only after the statute of limitations have expired, heh).

Now here's the weird part: The whole thing is actually real, or at least it was for us. We showed up. We did the little ritual thing. We waited. Sure enough, a short time later there comes this single white light — a headlight obviously — floating over the hills where the road would be in the dark and stopping not too far from where we were parked. Suddenly the white light changed to red and headed back in the opposite direction, dropping over a hill and disappearing.

It - f-r-e-a-k-e-d - us - out!

So much so that we sped out of there going at least eighty miles an hour, so fast that we accidentally hit a post at the side of the road, smashing one of the rearview mirrors.

It's one of the weirdest things I've ever personally seen. Over the years I figured, you know, right timing to just happen to be out there when a living person rode by on a motorcycle. I even thought maybe there's a conspiracy where some guy waits for idiots like us to show up and flash our lights, just so he can ride around on his moped and freak people out. To be honest, though, I have absolutely no idea what it was, just that we saw it. I didn't even realize this thing was so widespread. And yet, here it is. It's in the book. You can check it out yourself.

P.S. Sorry Mom about the broken mirror and blaming it on drive-by teens : )