Distance travelled: 23.3 kilometers

It had been a strange night.

As had become my habit, I went to bed wearing an eye mask and ear plugs. At this point, I found that snoring no longer woke me up, though I could still hear it through my ear plugs during the few times each night when I woke up anyway. I never slept particularly well on the Camino, and I’m not sure why – perhaps some of it was to do with drinking wine right before going to bed. In any case, I went from my normal of waking only once (if at all) during the night to waking up several times a night and, often, having trouble falling immediately back to sleep.

On this particular night, I woke up not long after midnight to some very strange sounds.

I was sleeping in the bottom bunk, with Adam sleeping in the bunk above mine and our Spanish roommate sleeping in the bottom bunk perpendicular to mine. (Her feet were near my head.) I thought the sounds I was hearing were coming from above me. I never took out my ear plugs, and I took off my mask only for the second it took to look at my phone to see what time it was. For about ten minutes, what I heard sounded like someone having a very bad dream: there was progressively louder moaning, bordering on crying out, and the sound of thrashing around. Eventually, the non-verbal sounds transitioned into actual speech that I had trouble making out. It sounded like Spanish, but I only caught one word – I’ll come back to that. It was a man’s voice that I heard, and Adam does speak Spanish, so I assumed that Adam was having a really bad nightmare that happened to be taking place in Spanish. It was very unsettling, though – towards the end, he really sounded like he’d been possessed by a demon, and that is part of the reason I didn’t remove my mask or ear plugs… I wanted to keep blocking this out!

The next morning, the three of us woke up around the same time, and our Spanish roommate immediately left the room to go outside for a cigarette. I cautiously remarked to Adam, “it sounded like you had a really bad dream last night…” He stared at me for a split second and then said: “you heard that too?”

Hmm. I heard that too? “Wait… what did you hear?”

Adam and I compared stories, and it turns out that he heard exactly the same thing I did, except that he was convinced the sound came from the bunk of our roommate – he knew it wasn’t me. The only other difference between our stories was the one word that we’d each discerned from the otherwise unintelligible speech (which he also thought was Spanish). I had heard the word “oye” – the command to “listen” or “hear” in Spanish. Adam had heard “Deus” – the word for “God”.

Hear God?!?!?!?!

We got out of that albergue as fast as we could. There was a distinct sense of creepiness in our room; I also observed that several flies that had been buzzing around the room the evening before were now dead on the floor, for no reason I could come up with.

Adam and I spent the next two hours going over the details of this occurrence and speculating about what it could all mean. Were we the chosen recipients of this message to “hear God”? If so, why?! Had our roommate in fact been possessed by some sort of spirit, whose masculine voice had come out from her body? If so, had this been a one-time occurrence? If not, is it possible that she heard the voice too, and in fact there had been some sort of ghost in our room speaking to us? If it was some sort of spirit, why was he there, and who was he? Was it the spirit of a Templar Knight from hundreds of years ago?

We encountered our roommate again later in the morning when we stopped for a coffee and of course could barely act normally – we just exchanged smiles and a “Buen Camino!” She seemed completely normal, which suggested to us that she hadn’t been aware of anything strange the night before. (It’s really hard for me to convey just how scary and weird this episode was while it was taking place. I can’t imagine how anyone who heard it could not comment on it the next morning.)

Something else very strange happened later in the morning. I had been telling Adam about a man in my life in Paris, and he came up again in our conversation that morning. Adam said “I predict that you will receive a message from him today.” And, lo and behold, about 15 minutes later… a text from him popped up on my phone. The really astonishing coincidence, though, was that the message recommended that I listen to something… and the name of the album whose cover art appeared in the text was the name of a song I’d been listening to since Burgos and that had become my unofficial Camino anthem. I am still trying to work out the significance of that in all of this.

Anyway… Adam and I remained very keyed up about everything the entire rest of the morning as we approached Sahagún, a larger town whose principal significance comes from being the official halfway point of the Camino Francés. There’s an office somewhere in town that will present you with a halfway certificate. We were glad to be only passing through Sahagún as, perhaps because of our heightened state of spiritual awareness/anxiety, the place gave us what can only be described as a weird vibe. We saw our roommate one more time and actually spoke to her briefly (it turns out that she grew up in Spain but now lives in Switzerland); then we sat down for sandwiches at maybe the fourth restaurant we tried – the other ones we’d entered had all made us uneasy in some way. I know it sounds nuts; I think for all of this, you just need to have been there…

After leaving Sahagún, the route splits into two options – one way traces an old Roman road, and the other stays on the classic Camino path. We chose the latter (principally because it’s one kilometer shorter) and spent a comparatively tranquil couple of hours walking on a tree-lined path next to a small road with infrequent traffic.

Bercianos del Real Camino proved to be close to a carbon copy of Terradillos, right down to the accommodation: we stayed in an albergue owned by the same people as the one the night before and offering exactly the same menu in the restaurant. This time, Adam and I had an Italian man as our roommate, and I’m pleased to report that we passed a night uninterrupted by voices of any kind.

To close: it’s apparently very common for pilgrims on the Camino to have strange encounters of the sort I have described here. This path has been considered to have spiritual importance since pagan times, so you might say that its spiritual traffic is heavy. Pilgrims of centuries past frequently died en route – there are pilgrim cemeteries along the way – so it is not entirely outside the realm of possibilities (for anyone who concedes that ghosts might exist) that some spirits may have lingered. We’ll never know!