Hauntings

The glowing greatcoat figure of the A3

A3, near Cobham

1965

This 1965 sighting is recorded with an unusually specific witness group, a musical band travelling together, a detail that at least implies multiple simultaneous witnesses to the same encounter rather than a single individual's isolated account, generally treated within this register as lending somewhat greater weight to a report even without further corroborating detail. The figure's description carries two genuinely distinctive elements rarely combined so specifically elsewhere in this survey: hollow eye sockets, suggesting a skeletal or otherwise severely deteriorated face rather than a more conventionally human apparition, and a strange glow, an actively luminous quality setting the figure apart from the more passively pale or shadowy ghosts recorded at most other sites.

The army greatcoat marks him plausibly as a military figure from one of the twentieth century's world wars, though no specific conflict, regiment, or identity has been traced in the sources consulted for this entry beyond the coat itself. No name for any of the band members, nor further detail about the exact circumstances or location along the A3 where the encounter took place, has survived alongside the story.

Recorded here as a specifically dated but otherwise thinly detailed roadside sighting, the greatcoat figure adds a genuinely eerie, actively glowing presence to Surrey's wider collection of phantom pedestrians and roadside figures, distinguished chiefly by the hollow-eyed, luminous quality that set it apart from a more conventional human ghost in the band's own reported experience.

An active A-road; approach any reported sighting with normal road safety caution.
Evidence
Single witness account
Access
Open ground
Location
51.318, -0.415 (Sited to the village)

Sources: Haunted Places, "Cobham, Surrey" [other]

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