Ghost stories

Like children sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories, adults can sometimes scare themselves.

I've lived in quite a few houses and apartments since my divorce and even though I scared myself a bit in the one in the country by thinking up ghost stories, I was never really afraid in any of them.

It is always possible to pass off the wafting scent of bath powder to an old lady who over indulged in it when she once lived there and the idea that someone might look back at me from a window while I am outside washing it is frightening to talk about, but never happened. Ghost stories.

Seeing things out of the corner of an eye, especially at night, is usually attributable to shadows and lights and reflections. Especially if it is very late at night and exhaustion is setting in.

But imagine turning around and being startled by someone standing behind you who  immediately disappears in the middle of the day. I thought fleeting reflection! Except so far I have not been able to recreate that reflection in three weeks.

Last night I woke up at 2:35 AM and an old woman was standing behind my big recliner facing the wall. She had a very large nose, big hoop earrings sort of  like mine and some sort of distorted dark hair, or wig that I couldn't quite make out. She didn't move. She just stood there and I thought I must still be asleep, or on the edges of sleep. I lay there looking at her, expecting her to disappear, or to evolve into my floor lamp, or any of a million things like that. For nearly five minutes I lay there looking at her and gradually became more and more terrified until I finally sat up to run away and she disappeared. I slept the rest of the night with a light on. I was so scared.

I have since spent quite a bit of time trying to recreate that look and make sense of what happened. Surely it was some really super lucid nightmare. It never moved. I didn't hurt me. There was something vaguely familiar about the earrings. She wasn't as tall as me and she seemed very old, but surely she was just a bad bit of beef. Surely.

Addendum: I still have no explanation for that first reflection, but the old woman standing behind my recliner in the middle of the night is the way the little bit of light that exists reflects off my floor lamp. I thought it might have been so, but it has taken a while to figure out. The light has to be just right and it probably doesn't hurt that I was just waking up.