It's peculiar how chance encounters with strangers can be incredibly productive.

This one certainly was, as Calbert related a tale to me that more than merits a mention in this column.

Calbert recalled an occasion when a friend of his was driving near Torpoint, a peninsula in Cornwall alongside the River Tamar.

At some point, the chap passed an old, tumbledown ruin Calbert thinks was called something like Greysdon Castle, although he can't be sure.

As he approached the ruin, Calbert's friend saw a troop of soldiers walking along the road ahead of him.

His curiosity was piqued as the troopers were dressed in red topcoats and black, tri-pointed hats.

Without warning, they just vanished into the ether. They'd been ghosts, he reckoned.

Some time later, unaware of his friend's experience, Calbert happened to be driving down the same lane when he had a chilling experience of his own.

Suddenly a feeling of sheer terror came over him, although he was at a loss to explain why.

So overcome was he by this sense of morbid dread that he immediately slammed the brakes on and reversed the car back up the lane.

"I was really travelling fast", said Calbert. "I kept hitting the hedgerows, but I didn't care. I just had to get away from that spot."

Later, Calbert was on a coach trip when he bumped into an old schoolfriend.

Coincidentally, as the coach sped along its route, they passed Torpoint, which they could see quite clearly in the distance.

Calbert related his chilling experience to his friend, who admitted that he'd had a nigh identical encounter there himself.

All three strange experiences had taken place on the same stretch of country lane.

What is the explanation? I don't know.

Perhaps the soldiers were from a bygone age, maybe the 18th century, and, by some means we cannot understand, jumped forward in time for a few brief seconds, thus enabling the witness to see them.

Then again, they may well have been the spirits of the departed.

The second enigma concerns the feeling of raw, visceral terror that both Calbert and his friend experienced as they drove down that stretch of lane.

That both encounters took place at the same spot cannot be coincidence.

My feeling is that a tragedy of some kind must have taken place there, the horror of which has psychically imprinted itself upon the landscape.

* If you have any spooky stories you'd like to see in print, e-mail them to me here, and don't forget to visit my WraithScape website here.