Reds was on duty one night when the alarm sounded. The volunteers in the building jumped into their gear and prepared the trucks as other fire fighters arrived from home, leaving their cars parked in a crazy, scattered pattern all over the lot.

Reds explained that the officer of each truck sits in the passenger seat, next to the driver.

During this alarm, Reds heard the officer yell, "Let's move it!" and Reds immediately jumped onto the back platform of the truck, expecting it to take off any second.

After holding onto the bar and waiting a full minute, which in an emergency situation can seem like an hour, Reds ran along the right side of the truck toward the front and shouted up to the officer, "Are we going or not?"

"The officer," Reds recalled, "looked down at me, real odd like, and said, 'Well, I thought we had a driver. That's why I told everybody to get on...But we don't.'

"When he ran toward the truck, the officer said he saw, as clear as day, a driver at the wheel. But when he got inside, the driver's seat was empty."

A few days later, Reds was home when an alarm came over the scanner he keeps on in the kitchen. His wife, Marge, rode with him to the station.

"I rushed out of the car and ran inside to get my equipment," Reds said. "While my wife was in the parking lot, she looked up and saw someone in the truck's driver's seat. But later, she said it scared her, because when she looked up just a few seconds later, he was gone.

"When we came back in after the fire, my wife talked to an officer in the company. She described the guy she saw, who was in plain clothes, not a uniform. When she was done, the officer, who knew the man who had died, told her she had described his dead friend to a T."