Submitted by Chris South 7th June 2006

 I now live in a village called Bishops Cleeve just a few miles from Cheltenham but until the age of 25 I lived in the village of Gotherington about 2 miles or so from Cleeve and this is where both of the incidents happened. Both incidents occurred when I was about twenty years ago.

The first was a solo experience. When we were teenagers, me and my mates used to go to a pub a few miles from Gotherington where we knew that the landlord was pretty lenient about age restrictions as long as there was no trouble so we knew we would get served. Most of my mates had mopeds at the time but as I didn’t, I used to go on my pushbike and get a tow off my mates. One night on the way home a police car went past us and saw me getting a tow so he turned round and came back to tell us off. After this I told my mates to carry on and I would pedal back and met them at the park as we were nearly home, so off they went. I then set off pedalling and as I rounded a bend I could see a man riding a bike in the distance. I was riding a BMX bike and as I could see that the chap in front was on a racing bike I thought it would be fun to see if I could catch up with him so I started to pedal as fast as I could and soon started to catch up to him. Along this road there is an old railway bridge and when the chap in front went into the dark under the bridge I was only a few feet behind him so imagine my surprise when I came out of the other side of the bridge to find that the chap and his bike had disappeared! The road on this side of the bridge is quite straight and even if the guy in front had gone into turbo nutter mode, there was no bends or turn offs that he could have turned into so I went back to see if he had stopped under the bridge and I had gone past without noticing him but there was no sign of him anywhere. Now at this point it was starting to feel a bit creepy under the bridge so I got on my bike and set off as fast as I could for the park! However, before I got to the park I found my friends had stopped outside the home of one of them whilst he went in to get a jumper. Between the bridge and my mate’s house there was no where for the chap on the bike to have turned off so i asked them if he had gone by but they said that they had seen no one at all come along the road until I appeared! Much later in life I was telling someone in my local about this and he said that a few years before I had my encounter, a man was knocked off his bike and killed when a car hit him as he was going under the bridge but to be honest I have never been able to confirm this so to this day I don’t really know what I saw but even now at the age of 36 I still get a shiver down my spine whenever I go under that bridge !. 

The second incident happened a few months later. It was October 31^st and me and my mates decided to play a Halloween trick on the girls we used to hang around with. On the hill behind the park in Gotherington there is an old church and graveyard and you can look down on to the park from the church. The plan was that me and two of my mates would go up to the church on our bikes and hide and then the rest of my mates would bring the girls up and the three of us that had gone up already would jump out and scare them! As we could see the park from where we were, I told one mate that if the girls wouldn’t come up to the church, let us know by waving his hands in the air. Sure enough the girls got suspicious when my mates tried to get them to go up so after a bit of arm waving by my mate in the park, the three of us set off back down the hill. As it was a nice evening we decided to walk back down pushing our bikes. When we got about half way down the hill, we met an old chap pushing his bike up the hill and he stopped to chat to us. The old boy was wearing very old fashioned clothes but as the village was (at the time) a typical Gloucester farming community and there were a couple of farms at the top of the hill, we didn’t think much of this, or the fact that his bike was very old fashioned as well (but in very good condition). We had a chat with the old boy and he asked us some questions about our clothes and bikes (we all had BMX bikes and were wearing typical 80’s clothes) as he said they were very strange and he had not seen anything like them before. By this time we were starting to think that he was a bit strange so we said our goodbyes and carried on down the hill. After only about 20 or 30 seconds, one of my mates looked behind us and said that the old boy had gone. We all knew that in the time he had had to get up the hill there was no where he could have gone but into the church yard so we went back up to see where he had got to but we could find no sign of him any where. We even went further up the hill and asked at the farms if anyone had seen him or knew who he was but no one had, although a woman at one of the farms said it sounded like it could have been her grandfather who used to ride his bike down to the pub at the bottom of the hill and stroll back up after a few pints with his mates. We asked her if he had come home but she said that as he had been dead for about thirty years and was buried in the graveyard down the hill it was unlikely! We set off back down the hill, checking the church and graveyard again in case there we had just not seen him the first time but there was still no sign of him. When we got back to the park, we told our mates about our encounter but they just laughed and said that we were just trying to scare them. To this day my two mates and I still remember our encounter and often talk about it. We never did find out who he was or where he went but I like to think that it was the spirit of the woman’s grandfather not letting a little thing like death stop him from enjoying his evening pint with the boys!