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Me and my on-call partner had an outage on a particularly dark night. No moon, no nothing. We road the line out, which was a single-phase tap, controlled by a oil-type re-closer that was about 8 miles long mostly along the road, but with some areas in the woods. After stopping in several drives to look at the areas that were not along the road, we decided everything was fine and decided to close the switch in. it held, and we called dispatch to notify them. They started their callback and acknowledged, everything seemed all right so, and we headed home. About 5 minutes later dispatch called back to let us know half the consumers were not on. So we headed back and figured the line must be down, but in the clear. After traveling about two thirds of the line, we noticed a small glow, way back in the woods. We stopped and could tell the line was indeed down on the ground and energized. Thankfully it was way back in the woods, past an old cemetery. The only thing close was an old abandoned house place (we thought) we left the truck and was contemplating how to get to the line to get it up (after we de-energized and grounded of course) no matter what, we were going to have to cross the old cemetery to get to it. After a few moments of thought and discussion, Don, my 6' 6'' 260lb not a inch of fat, only muscle, decided he would go kill the switch and I would stay there, alone (GULP) and make sure no one (YEA, right, no one alive) or stray rabbit or deer would get on the phase. As Don turned to leave, a guy was standing 6 inches from his side and 12 inches from me. Don, all 6' 6'' of him would have made a great scream queen in the horror movies. I didn't think anyone other than Michael Jackson could scream that high, until I realized I myself had joined him in the scream fest. It seems a transient had taken up residence in the abandoned house and had decided to join us in our observation of the downed line, unheard and unnoticed by both of us. After we regained our composure and he had bummed a cigarette he left, and I don't remember two linemen getting a job done, quite as quickly as we did that dark, dark night.
