H. Mayne Young, a Church of England cleric, was living in colonial India in 1906 when he saw a Bijli, or evil spirit. A wandering holy man had warned him not to use water from a certain tank, but he ignored that warning and used it to bathe. Young wrote an account of what happened later when he traveled to a camping spot in the middle of the night. His servants and even his horse fled when they saw a light approaching.
The situation was now getting exciting. Deprived of my horse, and two guides, and in the midst of pathless fields, I felt it would be difficult for me to proceed, so raising the rifle to my shoulder, I cried “Stand still, or I fire at you! ” Hardly had I uttered the words, when I was horrified to see that the figure, which seemed to fly along, and was now only some few yards distant, was no human being at all. All that was visible was a grinning, bony skull and eye sockets, with long lank hair, and a fleshless arm holding a flaming torch ; the rest of the figure being a mere trail of grey mist.
As I stood there, unflinching, with my finger on the trigger, the apparition, which was now only ten or fifteen feet distant, suddenly diverged from me, and rapidly sank into the ground, some twenty feet past me, so that I had a good view of IT. I rushed up to the spot where it had disappeared, but no trace of it was to be found. I stamped upon the ground, but the only proof of the apparition was a sprinkling of red hot embers, which a moment before had formed the flaming torch.
The encounter was interpreted as a further omen that bad things were going to happen to Young, but what could he do about it at that point? And something bad indeed happened. You can read the whole story of the Bijli encounter at Haunted Ohio. -via Strange Company