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One of the cute tricks for telling ghost stories is to discuss your source, in order to establish credibility. How many times have you heard that around the campfire? "Some years ago, on a night just like this, an old man told me a story about this forest...."
Even Henry Shoemaker did this; a lot of his writing begins with discussing his source: An old lumberman he was visiting, a gravedigger he encountered, someone local in the community. Sometimes he changed the names or omitted them altogether. But this sort of thing is supposed to show how true and accurate your story is.
Having said that, I'm going to tell you about a visit I got from a nice, old man quite a few years ago. He's passed away now, and I don't want to get any hate mail from his family, so I'm not going to give his name. But he was a good guy, used to volunteer with several nonprofits, and I knew him well. I've interviewed a ton of people about things like this, and I would consider him a reliable witness. And he came to visit me to tell me about a paranormal experience he had when he was in college.
He claimed to have seen a vanishing hitchhiker. The vanishing hitchhiker is a common urban legend in paranormal circles. In general, the story consists of something like this: A young driver along a remote road picks up a traveler. There is some conversation, some of it perhaps ominous. And when they get where they were going, the hitchhiker is gone with no explanation. Some of the details may vary for drama, but the basic outline of the story always runs along those lines.
This would have been sometime in the mid-50's, by my estimate. My witness was going to school at Lock Haven University, (It may have been Lock Haven State Teachers' College at the time, but I'm too involved with the ghost story to go look it up), and was studying chemistry, as best I can recall. He was dating a girl from Renovo, and had gotten into the habit of driving her home, which is the right thing to do, but a pretty good drive nightly from Lock Haven.
On the way home, he told me, he saw a young man walking south. Thinking it was someone from his class, he stopped and offered him a ride. The young guy, about his own age, climbed into the car, and they chatted a bit on the way back into town.
I still remember my witness's expression, his tone, as he explained this to me. He was old at the time, this incident at least 50 years in his past, but he was still clearly shocked by it. In all that time, he'd never come up with an explanation.
"As we rode into town," he said,"I was talking to him, and in mid-sentence I turned to look at him over there in the passenger seat. And he wasn't there. I hadn't stopped anywhere, and there was no way for him to leave the car. But he was gone!"
As I noted earlier, the Vanishing Hitchhiker story is not exactly a brand-new thing in American paranormal culture; you can pretty much see the ending coming. The novel part, to me, is the location. I'd never heard of one on the Renovo Road before. In fact, Clinton County hadn't had one, as far as I knew. (Potter County, yes, but not Clinton.)
And once again, this was not some flaky drunk who staggered out of the general public to talk to me about the paranormal. This is a man I knew for several years, a dedicated husband and father, a volunteer with nonprofits. He was a reliable witness and I believe his story.