A man and dog inexplicably vanish from a country lane.
Location: Vicinity of Greenstead Green, Colchester, Essex, UK.
Time/Date: Mid-afternoon,?/?/1997.
Number of Witnesses: 2.
In the company of a friend, we went for a drive in rural Essex. We decided to park the car in a scenic spot, close to the village of Greenstead Green. We went for a stroll in a nearby copse of trees and sat for a moment, chatting and enjoying the landscape. After this, we returned to the car and began our return journey home.
We had been driving for a few minutes and were now proceeding along a narrow country lane. It was wide enough only for a single direction of traffic with tall, densely formed hedgerow on either side. The hedgerow was well maintained and without gaps. The lane was without any pedestrian pavement or passing-places for oncoming traffic.
As we began to travel along the lane, the elevation of the landscape from my position allowed me to see that beyond the right-hand hedge lay an open field of low-lying crop and a drainage-ditch immediately behind the hedge and following the field-boundary. About fifty meters ahead stood a man in the middle of the road. He was accompanied by a small, terrier dog. The dog was off the leash and a few feet away from where the man was standing. The man appeared to be in his mid-seventies and wore a flat-cap, grey trousers and a similar coloured jacket. His hat and clothes were of modern materials - similar to leisure clothing worn by golfers.
The following sequence of events transpired rapidly over a period of a few seconds. At the moment I saw the man and dog, I was about fifty meters distant from them. I was driving at a speed of 38-45 miles per hour. The man looked up and was registering my car approaching. He gestured with his hand to bring the dog to heel. Instinctively I decelerated slightly by lifting my foot off the accelerator. The lane deviates slightly from left and back to right in a shallow S-curve. I lost visual of the man and dog for a couple of seconds then the road had straightened-out.
The man and dog have vanished. Within a couple more seconds my car was now at the spot where they stood. They had disappeared and there was nowhere they could have retreated to avoid the passing car. In less than three or four seconds, even a fit person couldn't have picked up the dog and then moved off the roadway...through/over (!) a dense hedge at least six feet high (with a ditch immediately behind it). There was no gap in the hedge, no gate/style. A total mystery!
Another fifty meters further on and we had now reached the end of the lane and a T-junction. I turned to my friend in the passenger seat and said "there was a guy back there with a dog and he just disappeared!" My friend confirmed he had seen him too, commenting "Yea, I saw him too, he had a hat on..." or something similar.
I am interested if anyone has any experiences relating directly to this location. Apologies that I am unable to precisely identify the lane where the experience took place, but it was very close to Greenstead Green and we would have been journeying south from there, less than five miles from the village.
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