Upon visiting Strataca, my mom (along with my aunt and cousin) were met with several tour options, one of which was known as the Dark Ride. By opting for this tour they would be taken on a tram ride through abandoned shafts beyond the main gallery, pitch black save for the tram's narrow headlights. To them it sounded perfect.
So there my mom was, cruising along in the gloom as the guide began their tour. She wasn't really paying attention though, being that she was more transfixed by all of the eerie side passages that kept flying by. At one point the guide stopped to discuss a particular crystal formation right beside one of these aforementioned side passages. With no interest in what the guide was saying, my mother instead turned to look out into the darkness of the old shaft. As she did so, she started to see something, something that she at first mistook for pareidolia (where the mind creates a familiar pattern where none exists) but the more she watched it the more evident it became that this wasn't just some visual trick.
What she saw was the silhouette of a man some way down the tunnel, lighter than the surrounding darkness. As she sat watching this, the man suddenly charged down the shaft towards her, not stopping until he reached the mouth of the tunnel. This put only a few feet between my mother and the entity. Up close she could see that he was dressed in outdated mining gear with a strange sort of visible electric charge running through his body. The man wore a look of shock, making eye contact with my mother (though whether or not he actually saw her is unclear) before turning around and running back into the darkness from whence he came. No one else appeared to have seen the entity.
Next thing my mother knows the guide is actually driving the tram down the passage where she had just seen this apparition and he stops right around where she estimated the figure first manifested. While pointing out a barricade in the wall the guide explained that in the early days of the mine spent veins would be blocked off with old dynamite boxes to redirect air flow to where it was most needed. Things didn't always go as intended however, and sometimes there'd be cave-ins (I assume from leftover dynamite). Upon hearing this my mother had her "ah ha" moment and was able to piece together her experience. At some point in the mine's history there must've been an accident here, and what she saw was the ghost of someone reliving that horrific moment over and over again. Now, whether he was sentient or simply a residual haunting is unclear but my mother did seem to sense a certain degree of consciousness from the entity, a very human vibe of panic and desperation. It might also be worth mentioning that at the time she had no clue Strataca is supposed to be haunted, a fact the tour guide didn't bother to mention until the very end of the ride.
Ghost or pareidolia? My mother, who has encountered full bodied apparitions before, says she has never seen anything like this and I don't doubt her in the least. Pareidolia doesn't behave this way, doesn't come rushing at you in a surge of electricity while fully dressed in old mining gear. No, I 100% don't believe my mother's mind was playing tricks on her. The fact that she was the only one who saw it doesn't surprise me either, as I can imagine everyone else was pretty focused on the tour guide (plus my mom just tends to be a little more sensitive to the paranormal).
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