Ghostly Woman in White | I Remember
My brother Wayne and I shared a large room on the second floor of our Cape Code house in Fairfield, Connecticut. The wood-paneled walls and ceiling ran the length of the room and ended at a bunk built into the wall beside a window. We slept across from the bunk in twin beds, separated by a nightstand. There I kept my battery powered transistor radio and an illuminated clock. I had a habit of listening to the radio late at night.
But this night in February 1962 was different. I had fallen asleep about 11:00 P.M. after listening to Cousin Bruce Morrow play rock and roll and to Brad Crandell’s talk show from New York. At 3:00 A.M. I awoke. I looked at the illuminated clock to see if it was time to get ready for school. From the corner of my eye I noticed that the end of the room was engulfed in light. That’s when I turned and saw a ghost.
She was a woman in white with long blonde hair and a glow around her. She smiled and floated toward me. “Who are you?” I asked sitting straight up. She continued to smile, floated back to the bunk, turned to the window, and drifted into the night. I could see the dazzling moonlight reflected off the snow on the pine trees through the window from which she departed. Though I was slightly frightened, I was not petrified and was left with more of a sense of wonder and fatigue. Fifteen minutes later, I fell asleep.
I chose not to tell anyone what had occurred, thinking I may have dreamed the entire episode — or perhaps because I expected disbelief from family and friends. Deep inside, though, I believed what I had seen and felt. About six months later I was sitting at the kitchen table one morning when my sister Linda came running downstairs. She was excited and between gasps of breath, blurted out that she had seen a ghost in the middle of the night. I asked Linda to sit down and tell me about it. “It was a woman in white with long blonde hair,” she exclaimed. “She had a candle and floated back and forth from the closet to the bed.”
Linda, Wayne, our other sister Laurie, and I climbed the the stairs to the girls’ room to see for ourselves. My sister excitedly showed us where the ghost had been. There, splattered on the hardwood floor was candle wax.
Excerpt from “One Chilling Midwinter Night,” Yankee Magazine, January 1993.
