MOULTRIE, Ga. — It was in the winter one year in the early 1980s when two Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office patrolmen came upon a man walking down the street in the wee hours of the morning. Both John Bass, who was a sergeant at the time, and Freddie Greene are dead now, but the tale is a familiar one to Capt. Julius Cox.

“I know it was a Saturday night,” Cox said. “The guy was walking down South Main Street, in the early morning that night.”

At that more peaceful time, an officer working the night shift rarely received a call for service after around midnight. Bass and Greene were riding around checking the doors of businesses when they came upon the man while in the vicinity of what was then the county’s administrative building, but for decades prior to that had been the Vereen Memorial Hospital building.

“Anybody out walking that time of the morning was usually stopped,” Cox said. “He told them he had rode to Moultrie with some friends, and he was from Coolidge. Somehow he got separated from his friends. He was walking back to Coolidge.”

As it happened, the officers were heading out to U.S. Highway 319 to check the airport. They offered to give him a ride as far as the Thomas County line, which is only a short distance from the town of Coolidge.

This is where it starts getting weird.

Anyone who knew Bass knows that he was never averse to telling a good story, of which he had a few. Like the call from a man who swore that Bigfoot chased him around his yard and assaulted him. Or the time he ended the chase of a stolen truck by standing at the end of a “T” junction and shooting the radiator with a shotgun, putting his body on the line, “Because I was tired of it (chase).”

“I’ve heard him tell it,” Colquitt County Sheriff Rod Howell said of the mysterious rider. “He didn’t really like telling that story.”

Cox agreed that Bass was reluctant to talk about it, and Greene never wanted to discuss their experience.

“They asked him if he had anything on him,” Cox said of the late-night rider. “John said he had a little old pocket knife. John told him you can’t have that, you can’t have the knife in the car.”

Green took the knife to hold on the drive and planned to return it to the man. Then they put him in what would either have been a large Ford LTD or Chevrolet Impala. The lock mechanisms had been removed in the back seat so that no passenger could open the doors from the inside.

“They turned on 319 to go toward Coolidge,” Cox said. “They said they were talking to him on the way down there. They stopped at the edge of Coolidge. They pulled over and Freddie went to open the door and there was nobody there.”

Shocked, they started doing the only thing that seemed logical.

“John said they tore that car apart,” Cox said. “One of them got in the back seat and tried to see if he could get out of the car. They were going to keep it quiet.”

Apparently not quiet enough. One or both of the men must have discussed the matter with some of their fellow officers, because a few days later then-Sheriff Gene Beard called them into his office on the first floor of the Colquitt County Courthouse.

After relating their experience, “They told him the guy wasn’t there” when they reached Coolidge, Cox said. “He said, ‘Y’all haven’t been drinking, have you?’”

Both were teetotalers and assured Beard that they had not.

“You think y’all might need to start?” Beard responded.

The only possible explanation — excluding phantoms — is that, after veering onto Highway 319 there were some railroad tracks across the roadway where drivers had slow down — but not stop — and that maybe the back door had not been shut completely, Cox said, allowing the man to jump out of the moving car.

But it does seem that if that were the case the interior light of the car would have remained on.

“The last time I talked to Freddie, he still had that knife,” Cox said. “They both went to their graves never knowing what happened that night.”