CONECUH COUNTY, Alabama -- Zach Davis spent that warm Saturday afternoon working on land he hunts, then about 4 p.m. joined his father-in-law watching deer come and go from a food plot until sundown.
Nothing seemed unusual, he said, until he saw the photograph snapped by a game camera.
Checking the digital pictures the next day, he said, he was startled by the ghostly image captured at the spot he had watched.
"At first I thought it might be me, from when we were working — but we were wearing camo head-to-toe," Davis said. "I looked at the time stamp, and we were sitting out there watching, and we never saw it."
The image is unmistakably a man in khakis and a plaid shirt, though it appears blurred from motion.
Davis, 26, and a Conecuh County Sheriff’s employee, said folks around L-Pond are saying it’s the ghost of Pot Weaver, who lived on the property until his death in 1984. Others say it could be his brother Horace, who died in a log truck accident years ago.
Davis said he checked the camera’s time settings, and they were right. The time stamp on the image in question showed the date and 5:12 p.m.
"We went right over and looked for footprints, and there weren’t any on the ground. I remember about that time the wind was blowing pretty hard, and deer on the food plot got spooked by something and ran."
Davis said he checked the photos before and after that frame to see if somehow another image was transferred, but the other shots showed only deer or the landscape. Since then, he said, there have been images with spots of bright glowing light, but nothing like the first one.
A friend took the image to a local business to see if photographic enhancement would help, but it only raised more questions, he said.
"It’s looking right dead at the game camera," he said, "like it knew it had gone off. It flashes a red light when it takes a picture. We never saw or heard anything."
Davis said the old house where Pot Weaver lived still sits nearby, with most of his belongings still there.
Peggy Sue Weaver, Davis’ mother, said Pot Weaver used to walk through the area on his way to feed his dogs every day. Weaver’s husband is a relative of the family who lived at the old place.
Her son picked Pot Weaver out of an old family photograph as looking most like the ghostly image, she said.
"It was shot with that game camera," said Weaver. "If we found it was faked, I’d be the first to say so. But it seems like the more we try to prove it’s not a ghost, the more questions we find."
It seems spooky, she said, enough to keep her away from the food plot. Others, she said, are more skeptical.
Davis said he’s not afraid to go back and hunt the spot.
"I figure if it didn’t do anything to us that day, it won’t ever," he said. " My father-in-law and I would have seen it if it was meant for us to see."
http://blog.al.com/live/2011/10/dead_man_walking_hunters_camer.html
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