Return of the Midnighters

For over thirty years, Jerry worked as a police officer in Pittsburgh. In his time on the force, Jerry had seen some bad things, some worse things, and some downright evil things. Cleaning up when people got mad or got crazy was part of the job, but there were other things that Jerry saw, things that most people never see, things that prowl the night, things that refuse to die.

I interviewed Jerry several times in 2002. The following incident is just one of the many stories Jerry shared in hours of audio recordings. I have transcribed them just as they were told to me by Jerry.

“This happened in the early 70s, maybe late 60s. Frank, that’s my partner, Frank and me, we was cruising downtown checking up on the stores, mostly just empty buildings and no people down there. It was late, probably past midnight, I’m thinking. We turn onto the highway to shoot over to the North Side and we see this bright light, like a bright flash, up ahead of us.

“So, I’m thinking there’s an accident or something and I say to Frank, ‘Let’s go,’ and Frank gives me this look like, Here we go again. Now, at this point, there’s no reason to think there’s anything weird going on, but Frank and me, we know what it’s like out there at night, so we gotta be ready for anything. Of course, we weren’t ready for this thing.

“We see this light ahead of us, we can’t tell if it’s in the sky or shining up from the ground, right? We’re driving towards it, but it seems like it’s getting farther away from us, and then I realize it’s out over the water – out over the river – the Allegheny. I says to Frank, ‘It’s on the bridge, Frank. It’s on the damn bridge.’

“So, Frank turns toward the bridge, one of the Three Sisters bridges, they got a new name for them now, but I don’t know what they call it. Anyways, Frank takes the turn onto the bridge and there’s no light, the bridge is pretty dark, it’s just gone.

“But out in the middle of the bridge there’s a car stopped. It’s turned sideways, just sitting there. I’m thinking now that, you know, there’s an accident, that’s what the light was about. So, we’re driving to the car over the bridge, and we start getting a funny feeling, like the hairs on the back of your neck go up, right? And I know Frank can feel it, too, ‘cause he turns to me and he says, ‘Here we go again, eh?’

“Well, we pull up to the car that’s sitting there sideways, right, and our cruiser just goes dead, out like a light: no engine, no lights, no nothing. Just our luck, huh? We get out to check the other car, see if the driver is OK, and call it in. Well, now our radios is dead, too. Nothing works.

“Frank checks the car but we can see it’s empty. Just sitting there sideways, no one in sight. I tell Frank to give the engine a try so we can move it out of the middle of the road, not like here’s any traffic, but what the hey. Of course, it don’t turn over; it’s dead, too.

“So, there we are in the middle of the bridge holding our you-know-whats. I figure we’ll slip the car in neutral and move it off to the side when all of a sudden there’s this loud popping sound and Frank points and says, ‘There!’ I see down the bridge away a guy standing, and I’m thinking, There’s our driver, but I know that there weren’t nobody standing there a minute ago.

“Frank and me, we take off down the bridge, hands on holsters, not sure what the heck is going on, I mean, is this guy in trouble or is he going to be trouble, you know what I mean? We get up to the guy and he looks like any regular person, and Frank gives me a look like OK, what now ‘cause the guy is just staring off into space and I’m not sure if he’s been messed up from some accident or if he came that way.

“Frank and I, we ease around both sides of the guy and I’m saying, ‘Hey, buddy. You alright?’ but the guy doesn’t seem to know we’re even there. He’s got a look on his face like he was seeing something that wasn’t there and it was something you wish you wasn’t seeing.

“And all of a sudden the whole place lights up like Christmas, right? No, like Christmas in Las Vegas, OK? There’s this big light, see, coming from above, but it’s weird, you know, like you can’t tell where it is exactly, like it’s not too bright you can’t look at it, but you can’t see the light anyways. And it was like the light was hitting a dense kinda fog, but there weren’t no fog before on the bridge, but there was now, like the light was lighting up the air, like it was all solid.

“So, all three of us – the guy, me and Frank – are all standing there, the guy hasn’t moved and Frank and me, we ain’t sure what to do neither. We can’t really see the bridge anymore ‘cause of the light and weird fog, but I see something off to my right and point to Frank and we make our way over.

“It looked like something big and flat hanging there in the fog, like somebody set up a table, but it was just a shadow until we got closer, and then we saw that it was this lady. She was laying there but she wasn’t on the ground and she wasn’t on a table. She was just floating in the air, laying on the air. Her eyes was closed, she looked asleep.

“I know what Frank’s gonna say now, so I tell him to zip it, but he points behind me and we see that, yeah, there’s a guy floating over there. We start to walk around in this light and we see maybe a dozen people out there, all floating, all sleeping in the light.

“I didn’t wanna touch any of them, you know? I didn’t know what was happening, if they was dead or alive or what. But before we could do anything, the light starts to dim and move a bit, like someone was shaking it. The fog starts to fade and these folks who was floating just a few feet off the ground, start going up, higher and higher, faster and faster. I look up and Frank and me, we’re watching them go into the sky and I see the sky for the first time, and it’s weird, you know, like it’s not the right stars, they’re too bright, like it’s somebody else’s sky. And then the light’s gone and the people are gone and there’s me and Frank on the bridge in the middle of the night.

“And the guy’s there, too. He tells us he was driving across the bridge and there was this big light that came down – like a star, he said – and then he woke up with us standing beside him just now. Of course, all the cars worked just fine. The guy seemed fine,too, just confused, but so were we. So, we sent him home.

“Frank and me, we didn’t call that one in. There wasn’t much to report anyway. It went into our own files, of course, the files we kept for ourselves, the secret ones. Those are long gone now, you know. One thing I still remember, though, is that those people who was floating in that light all around us, some of them, they had clothes on that you don’t see anymore, like some of them were dressed like my grandma, like they was from the 1920s or even before that. These people, they weren’t from around here. I guess they was on a helluva long ride, huh?”

Read more stories of the Midnighters here.