I didn’t believe in ghosts until the beginning of my sophomore year in high school. Up until that point I would always laugh at people who were superstitious about the dead and make fun of my friends who thought their houses were haunted. Everything changed on a chilly Friday night in October; a night where there was no moon in the sky and everything seemed darker than usual. It had been a rough week of school and sports, so a few of my friends and I were relaxing around a crackling bonfire in my backyard. The deep conversation we were having about girls had just died down when my friend Kevin asked, “Hey, who wants to hear a ghost story?”

“You’re kidding me,” said Steve, an acquaintance of mine who was skeptical about pretty much everything and everyone and no one really enjoyed having around. Come to think of it, I couldn’t even remember inviting Steve to the bonfire.

“No seriously,” Kevin exclaimed, “this one’s legit!”

No one interrupted him so him so he continued, “Did you guys know that there’s a ghost in our town? The legend goes that many years ago a man was jogging alongside Airport Road when a semi truck’s tire blew out and it swerved into him, knocking him dead instantly. People say that if you drive along the Airport Road at about midnight on some nights, he might appear in your headlights!”

“What makes you think it’s not just any random jogger?” asked Gary, my best friend since pre-school.

“It’s definitely a ghost,” said Kevin, “when my brother and his friends were in high school they spotted him for a second, but then he disappeared into thin air!”

“Has anyone ever tried to talk to it or anything?” asked Steve.

“I don’t think so, but we should be the first ones to do it!” Kevin exclaimed.

I glanced at my phone. It was 11:45 and the fire was dying. I had no faith that the ghost jogger actually existed, but there wasn’t much else to do and proving Kevin wrong was always a good time. “Let’s go ghost hunting,” I decided.

Ten minutes later, the four of us were packed into Gary’s car and cruising to our destination. There was an unspoken rule that Steve always got shotgun, mostly because he was a lot bigger than rest of us and would literally drag us out of the car if we tried to sit in his sacred spot. This meant Kevin and I always ended up in the back of the car where there was no leg room and trash all over the seats and floor.

“Take a right up ahead,” Kevin told Gary. We turned onto Airport Road, on the outskirts of town. It looked like we were the only car out there for miles. For some reason the car seemed to grow chilly, or maybe it was just my imagination. “Keep your eyes peeled,” warned Kevin.

I looked out the front windshield; the headlights illuminated the road up to about twenty feet ahead of us as we drove. There was a flash of movement to our left, and Steve shrieked like a little girl. “Calm down man, it’s just a deer,” Gary laughed as we drove past it. Then Steve screamed again and I was about to make fun of him some more until I looked ahead and saw a distinctly human shape running just outside the range of the headlights.

“I knew it was real,” whispered Kevin, his face whiter than a ghost itself.

“What do we do?” asked Gary. He had slowed down the car down enough so that we were barely rolling along behind the runner. I tried to get a good look at the jogger, because I was still fairly convinced that he was just a regular person who had strange running habits. The jogger was wearing dark sweats and had his hood up. He was slowly but steadily moving along the shoulder of the road.

“I’m gonna talk to it,” I said, making up my mind.

“Terrible idea,” Kevin and Gary told me at the same time. Steve had his face covered with his hands and I was pretty sure he was crying.

My friends’ advice didn’t mean very much to me, so I rolled down the window and called out to the jogger, “Hey!”

The jogger slowly turned his head around to look at us and the image I saw next would be scarred in my brain for the rest of my life. I was expecting a face, but instead I stared straight at a skull that was gleaming a blinding white in the headlights, with dark, empty sockets for eyes and cracks running down its left side. We were all too horrified to even make a sound.

Gary slammed on the brakes and I rolled up my window as fast as I could. When I looked back up, the ghost jogger had completely vanished. There was nowhere for it to have hidden, it was just simply gone.

Ever since that fateful Friday I’ve tried to convince myself that I saw something else on that night, that maybe it was a trick of the light or my imagination was too wild, but deep down I know exactly what I saw. Every night since then I’ve laid awake in bed, too terrified to breathe, knowing that there’s a demon not too far from my home that runs along Airport Road while I sleep.