Old school trail builder Bernie Connely was attacked while riding at Lehigh Saturday night. According to him, there has always been an eerie presence there -- when he's been building, he has at times felt like he was being watched. He's looked over his shoulder with chills and has seen the bushes shudder from far way and has seen logs and rocks suddenly appear of trails he'd cleared just 5 minutes earlier... He swears that when he crashed off the mountain and broke his neck up there, there was a ghostly shape standing beside the tree in his periphery at the exact spot that he highsided off the cliff. He remembers an undescribable force pitching him off balance on the cliff edge that ride, though he'll never talk about it. To mark the spot where he landed, he'd spraypainted a big "B" on the rock. Mysteriously it has disappeared. So Bernie gets creeped out up there some times. So much so that it has spooked him out of doing any more trailwork by himself.
This Saturday night was beautiful and warm. Bernie was on a moonlit solo ride and just picking his way along a trail when he was again violently pitched off his bike. Chugging along it suddenly got really cold, and in the blink of an eye he caught an obscure shape or shadow pass in front of him -- just then something forced his handlebars to turn violently as if yanked by a limb of a tree. He swears that he saw, even heard the motion pass in front, perhaps even looked it in the the eye -- it was a dark, empty undiscernable void in front of his face for that split second. All of this seemed to happen in slow motion, disbelief.
Bernie hit the ground hard and rolled out, his bike tumbling after him. As he lay there in a heap reaching for his cell phone to call for help, the ghost reappeared and brushed by him again. It seemed to "step" on his bike as while lying there, the derailleur just snapped off. Bernie was quick to capture this shot of the fleeting ghost on his phone, lit up by his tail light as it disappeared back into the darkness of the night. Bernie was scared beyond belief at this point. He shut off his tail light and hunkered down in the leaves for half the night, too petrified to move. When he stopped shaking, he got out of there, the hairs on his neck pointing straight up as he ran through the brush. Bernie wonders what he's done to piss off the ghost, and when this will happen again...
Have you had a frightening and indescribable supernatural experience while riding at Lehigh? Bernie'd like to know.
Beware the night at Lehigh.
