In 1999, two young brothers were walking past an old church graveyard in Ballingarry when they noticed a man looking at them over the boundary wall. Curious, they approached to get a closer look. The figure appeared solid and lifelike: he wore a white shirt, dark glasses, and had curly hair. The boys later said he looked as though he had been crying, and despite their attempts to speak to him, he offered no response—simply staring past them in silence.

When the children recounted the incident to their father, he immediately realised something was wrong. The wall they described the man leaning over was eight feet high—far too tall for anyone to peer over casually. But what unsettled him even more was the description. The boys’ account matched, in exact detail, the appearance of a close friend of his who had died four years earlier.

The family could find no rational explanation for what the boys had seen, and the encounter remains one of Ballingarry’s most quietly disturbing local ghost stories.