a ghost story

When I was little, before I entered elementary school, my Mom or my Grandmother or both would take me to Wingate, NC, to the family homestead to see my Aunt Sara and Aunt Mary Lee for the day.  I always enjoyed going and loved playing in that big old house.  My favorite thing was to go upstairs and play around the bedrooms by myself, as no one ever went up there anymore.  However, there was always something, or someone to be exact, standing in my way.

I would ask Aunt Sara's permission to go upstairs and, of course, was granted it.  But, everytime, as soon as I would hit the landing on the staircase and look up ahead, I would freeze in my tracks.  There was an old woman standing at the top of the stairs looking down at me.  In hindsight, she was probably more stern looking than mean, but to a three year old, she scared the crap out of me.  She wore a long, black plain Victorian era dress.  And her dark gray hair was pulled back into a very tight bun.  And we just stared at each other.  It always felt like an eternity, but it wouldn't have been more than a few moments at the most.

And I never made it up the stairs alone.  I would go back down into the kitchen, tell Grandmother what I had seen and ask her to take me up the stairs.  She would hold my hand and reassure me that there was no one there....but I knew differently.  And sure enough, we'd get to the stairs and no one would be there.  She took me upstairs and left me to play, which I did because once I was up there I wasn't afraid.  And I never saw the woman while I was playing, only when I tried to go up the stairs.

Fast forward about 12 years.  Both Aunt Sara and Mary Lee had passed away and the estate divided and the house sold.  Mom and I were driving somewhere, talking about all kinds of things, and the house in Wingate became the subject of conversation.  I told Mom about what I'd seen as a child in the house and it didn't phase her in the least.  She countered with her own story.

When she was 14 or 15, she would spend weeks of her summer vacation in Wingate especially when her cousin Margaret had come to visit.  Margaret was 30 years older than Mom but they were very close.  One particular visit, Margaret had brought Mom a St. Christopher's Medal to wear.  Mom loved it, but she would've loved anything Margaret gave her.  One night during this visit, Mom and Margaret were sleeping in one of the front bedrooms upstairs when Mom woke up to something strange.

There was a woman standing at the foot of her bed.  At first, she thought it was her Aunt Billie, who was also visiting, but the more she looked, she realized it wasn't her.  The woman didn't frighten her, she just didn't know what to think.  Same black dress, same gray hair in a bun.  Mom kept blinking her eyes and pinching herself to make sure she wasn't dreaming.  She eventually fell back asleep.

When she woke the next morning, something else strange had happened.  Her St. Christopher's Medal was no longer around her neck.  The chain was clutched in her hand, but the medal was gone.  She woke Margaret up in a panic and they turned that room upside down looking for the medal.  While they were searching, Mom relayed to Margaret about the woman she had seen during the night.

Margaret stopped searching for the medal and got one of the family photo albums.  She opened it up to a specific page, pointing to a picture and asking Mom if that was the woman she saw.  Mom told her it was and she was identified as their great grandmother, who had lived in the house and died there some 50 years prior.  Margaret told her that because they were a VERY Baptist family, she...the great grandmother...would never have allowed anything Catholic in her home so chances are she took the medal after Mom fell back asleep.

The medal was never seen again.  And just to be sure that Mom didn't swallow it in her sleep, because that thought had occured to them, they checked for a week to make sure Mom hadn't passed it lol

When we got home from wherever it was we had been going, Mom showed me a picture of my great great grandmother and sure enough, it was the woman I saw at the top of the stairs.

This isn't really a scary story, it's just interesting to me that the same woman appeared to both of us some 20 years apart.