Early morning in the Carneros 

Tom Barker from CA, United States wrote:

In the 1970’s I was a commercial trucker hauling beer out of a brewery in Northern California.  My crew usually started at about 2:30 in the morning, when the area is blanketed in fog.  Being on the edge of the San Pablo Bay, the fog comes in almost every night. 
One morning I had jumped into my truck to warm up my truck while I did my equipment checks.  I was surprised to see someone sitting in my passenger seat and I thought it was George – our crew boss.  I asked him if he was riding with me today and leaned over to give him a nudge.  My hand went right through him!  I looked closer and saw that it wasn’t George, but a cowboy in a heavy coat and leather hat.  He looked at me with eyes as cold as the grave and I jumped out of the cab. 

The other guys came over to see what was up and I told them what had happened.  George said it was one of the cowboys who’d been hung back in the 1800s by a vigilante mob.  He said they saw them all the time out there and usually took it as a message to wait before they hit the road. 

We sat in the office for about a half hour while I calmed down.  Other guys told me that they’d seen the cowboy in front of their trucks or in their trailers on especially cold, foggy mornings.  A CHP message came across the scanner that there had been a major accident on the highway with fatalities.  If we’d been on the road at our scheduled time we probably would have been right in the middle of it.