Bill said he stared at the bunker almost all the while the couple walked the relatively short walk to the monstrous bulk of concrete that served as a lookout post during the second world war.

"I'm fascinated by the thing," he admitted. "I can't help but think of what it must have been like in those days. Guys were actually stationed on that thing, I guess, and there really was a threat of Nazi submarines coming close to Cape May. I read in your other book about shipwrecks down there that they think a German sub might even have come up the bay. Well, I treat that old bunker as some kind of wartime relic in my mind.

"I was looking at it as we walked, except for a couple of times I had to look where I was walking or when Karen distracted me. I even looked at those men on top of the bunker and I know for certain that they were there. There was no doubt in my mind or Karen's mind that we say and heard them."

Karen agreed. "Oh, yes," she concurred, "they were there. We couldn't make out any faces or dress, and we couldn't understand what they were saying, but they were definitely there. And, at the time, we didn't think much of it.

"We got closer to the bunker," Karen continued, "and the men were still there. We hesitated a little and decided we wouldn't go any farther, or walk onto the bunker. Really, we never intended to, but the men scared us away a little. I mean, there was nothing frightening about them at all. In fact, from where we were at that point, we couldn't even see them any longer.

"We heard them, though. Again, we couldn't pinpoint anything they were saying, but every once in a while we heard some recognizable words and some loud bursts of laughter."

Bill confirmed Karen's remarks. "I know we both picked up on a couple of loud cuss words and we both thought we heard one of the guys mention the Yankees, the baseball team."

There was never a notion of anything ghostly that may have been happening at the time. Neither Bill nor Karen had any thoughts of the supernatural, and There was no reason for them to have any.

That all changed very quickly after the couple lingered near the catwalk that led to the bunker's observation deck.

"We didn't really plan on it," Bill said. "We were just standing around, in fact, I think we sat down on a mound of sand. I remember that I was sifting through the sand and just watching the clouds forming over the sun."

Karen remembered that yes, the two did "plot down on the sand," and as they sat there, strange things started to happen. "I don't know, but for some reason I noticed that the laughter and the talking on the bunker had stopped. I really heard the moment when it stopped. I was sort of preoccupied by it and remember that there was a sudden end to all the noise. I kept it to myself, and I really had no reason to say anything to Bill about it. Again, the idea of ghosts or anything like them was the farthest from our minds.

"Everything was quiet, and just a second or two after the chatter on the bunker ended, I looked over to it. I clearly saw the bunker, the catwalk, and it wasn't very far away.

"It was getting darker, but there still was plenty of light enough to make out details on the bunker's walls and things like that. Like I said, I didn't tell Bill that I thought it was strange how the laughter and conversation ended so quickly. Then, though, he nudged me and asked me if I thought it got real quiet all of a sudden."

Bill said he heard the end of the conversation coming from the bunker, too. At first, he thought nothing of it. "It did stick in my mind for a few seconds," he said. "I asked Karen about it, just a couple of seconds after it happened. We both then looked over toward the bunker and expected to see whoever it was up on the deck come across the catwalk. We waited several minutes and there was nobody and no noise."

"I know for an absolute fact that nobody left that bunker deck," Karen said. "Then, Bill just happened to stand up and walk up higher onto the dune to look across the deck of the bunker. He whispered down to me 'Karen, you're not going to believe this, but there's nobody on that deck,' or something like that."

Bill continued, "She's right. I could see very clearly onto the deck, and as a matter of fact the last rays of the sun sort of shined down between the clouds and made the surface of the deck very clear. There was nobody there."

At that point, both Bill and Karen thought something was a bit out of kilter. They knew what they saw and heard. Between the two of them, they never really let the bunker out of their sight. Still, the forms they saw on top of it disappeared and the sounds they heard coming from it ceased abruptly. They were confused, and, by their own admission, finally somewhat frightened.

"You know," Karen said, "I still don't say I believe in ghosts, and maybe this little experience we had had nothing to do with ghosts. I mean, we're not saying that that bunker is haunted or anything, but we don't really know what else to think or how else to explain what happened that night. We just walked away from the bunker after what happened, across the highest part of the dune we could walk on, and kept looking at the bunker all the way. Nobody ever left it, there was nobody on it, and all the noise we heard had stopped. I guess we'll never figure it out."