She didn't notice us.

I don't normally think of our house as haunted, but the truth is, I did once see a ghost here.

It happened one night a couple of years ago. I was lying in bed. Brian was next to me, dozing. Suddenly, a little girl of about two or three years old, with blond hair and a very blank expression, dressed in an old fashioned nightgown, just floated up out of the floorboards to my left and slowly drifted up above my head. She didn't seem to notice me or see me. She glowed a little. I got the feeling she wasn't in the same time as us. I screamed and said to Brian, "A ghost! A ghost! Look!" and pointed frantically at her, before she drifted up into the ceiling and disappeared. I got the feeling that she was just passing through. She just didn't seem to have any business with us.

Of course, my heart was beating fast and I was scared shitless. I asked Brian, "Did you see her?"

"No," he said. "You must have just hallucinated it. You were just asleep with your eyes open. It was a dream."

He gradually came to convince me that it wasn't real because, if it was, he would have seen it, too. It must have therefore been my mind playing tricks on me as I was on the brink of sleep. That made me feel better about the whole thing. At least, I felt better until a few months ago when I told the story to someone, and Brian confessed that the reason he didn't see her was that he never actually opened his eyes. He was too scared!

I guess I can't blame him. But that does now make me believe wholeheartedly that she was real.

7 comments:

  1. That is really cool. I think children show up alot as ghosts because they are too young to understand death and therefore don't know what it means... They just stay around, its what they are used too. It is said that most ghosts don't know they are dead, and I think that is the case with your little girl. She is nothing to worry about. It's the ones that know they are dead and still show up that freak me out..

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  2. I told you the next day I didn't look because I didn't want to see a ghost. I sure as hell didn't want to see no stinkin ghost.

    What would we think if both of us saw it? What would we think if only you saw it? Who would want to see a ghost and have it confirmed by someone else? Who would want to see a ghost and not have someone else see it? Either way its freaky and wouldn't have done any good.

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  3. I don't trust memories. Often they are false. Our present mind reshapes memories as it retrieves them, to suit our current world view.

    They say that every cell in our body is replaced within 7 years. Memories become copies of memories or copies of remembering memories.

    A memory can contain anything at all. The present, as we see it, is already untrustworthy. Memories are marginal recordings of the present.

    I don't think that you saw a ghost. (Is this a boys vs. girls thing?)

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  4. I believe you, I've seen ghosts before. And not always when I was half asleep.

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  5. I, too, have seen a ghost. And I believe you.

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