I've recounted this to a handful of friends over the years but never actually written it down, so here goes:
In th early 90s I was in my final year at uni, on a campus in a valley below a small village (which was about 5 miles from the nearest city). There was a man-made lake on the edge of campus, with a dam at one end. The house I lived in was at the far end of the stream from the dam and overlooked the lake, so we were remote from campus by about half a kilometre. No street lighting, obviously. It felt like the middle of nowhere, especially at night.
There had been rumours for a while of people seeing a male figure cross in front of them as they were driving along the track around the lake, particularly the section on the side of the lake where the lodge we lived in was. I'd heard the rumours but hadn't paid much attention - I was in my final year and the workload was full on. I shared with two official housemates at the time, as well as a friend of ours who had taken a year out and was sleeping on our sofa.
The campus bar shut around 11 and I'd walked back over with some people I knew who lived in a cottage beyond a wood next to the lodge. We were all a bit drunk and on the walk back from the bar had been chatting away, and they practically walked me to my front door, so the 'sightings' hadn't been on my mind. When I got in my housemates had already gone to bed. Our front door opened onto the living room and I'd even had to creep through there to avoid disturbing the friend sleeping on the sofa, so the house was completely silent.
At that time my mum had moved into a new house and our family cat hadn't setlled very well, so she was brought up to live with me to see if that would suit her better. She slept on my bed, and as I got into bed that night she was in her usual spot. The bed was against the outside wall, under a low window that overlooked the narrow front garden and the lake beyond. I got into bed without much ceremony and was drifting off quite quickly because I'd had a couple of pints, but suddenly became aware of the weight of the cat on my lower legs. Irritated, I sat up to move her off me, only to discover that she was standing on her back legs with her front paws on the windowsill and her head poked through the curtains looking out at the garden. At first I just chided her, but she wouldn't move and I noticed the hair on the back of her neck was standing on end. I got a weird feeling that something was wrong, nothing I could really put into words, just an oddness. So I crawled to the window and parted the curtains.
Opposite my window was a low wall that dropped slightly to a ramped driveway that ran along the front of the house. Between my window and that driveway was a narrow strip of lawn, and to the right, just a few feet away from us, I noticed a man sitting with his back to us, legs dangling over the wall. What struck me immediately was his eerie stillness, and the grey colour of his clothes. His top had a hood, but it was down, and as he gazed out over the dam I felt this sudden realisation that he wasn't a proper person. There was an intense sadness in the atmosphere. I remember (stupidly) saying to the cat, "Who's that?!" She couldn't take her eyes off him.
Something broke the numbness I was feeling and I shot out of my room and knocked on the door of the bedroom next to mine, on my way to the living room. Then I whispered to our friend on the sofa and she was actually awake.She got up and joined me at the living room window to take a look. Bear in mind the figure outside was sitting directly in front of the living room where the front door was, so when we looked out he was right in front of us. All I remember next is whispering to my friend, "What is that?" (Not "who is that", which afterwards seemed very telling.) She turned to me and said quietly, "I don't know".
After that moment the two housemates joined us, we put the light on, and when we looked out again the figure had vanished. We stayed up for a while, scared of going back to bed, but in the end we all drifted back to our beds.
That happened over the winter, and sometime later that term friends of ours who were driving over to see us one evening had to do an emergency stop in their car when a hooded figure ran out in front of them and disappeared over the slope leading down to the dam. They were really shook up and didn't want to drive back, so we let them crash out on the floor for the night.
It wasn't until the following year, quite a while after graduation, that a local newspaper started reporting on similar sightings and it was thought to be the ghost of a young local man who had drowned in the dam years before (the campus was built in the 50s, so sometime in those few decades before we had that year living in the lodge).
I'm still in touch with two of the people I was living there with and occasionally we mention it. I'll never forget that sudden feeling of realising I was feet away from a being who was something other than a living person, but still existing somehow. The strange energy coming off 'him' was palpable.