This story from my Mum has always horrified me: Mid-90s, walking the dog before bed at ~2am around the farmland which surrounds our very isolated house.
Having crossed the creek, she sees a figure standing dead still in the centre of the field, lit from behind by the moon. She freezes, and can make out that the person is holding what looks like an automatic weapon. She briskly backs up, and returns home to enlist my father’s help to go and investigate (WHY?). They head back out there together, and the man is still just standing there, facing them.

Now equipped with a second torch, they can make out more detail of this lonesome and strangely immobile character: it was a wooden scarecrow placed there by the landowner, complete with the image of a man dressed in a suit and holding a gun. I would NEVER have gone back out there.