Elizabeth

While none of my experiences were all that intense, there are several things that I have seen and heard that are more than real. I was born in a tiny town not far outside of the New York border. The town grew up as a railroad/mining town. Our house was built at the edge of town, the owner liking his privacy. While everyone in town took him to be a bachelor that spent most of his time at the rail yards, it became apparent, when the old man died, that he did have a son. The son moved in and raised a family there, also working on the rail yard. The family produced two sons. (Tin types of the family were found in my bedroom closet wall when we remodeled.) After this lineage, a daughter and son were born to one son and the other died. It was this son's daughter that greeted me not long after we moved into the house. It didn't help that she had died almost thirty years before I was born.

Through the back door, across the old linoleum floor to the staircase, in the room at the top, I lay snug in my bed. I had been playing earlier that day and had left an old music box (found in the room when we moved in) open, on my dresser. My parents were downstairs, enjoying their television, when they heard me scream. I had rolled over, disturbed by something in my sleep that I couldn't quite explain, and sat up. My music box, completely unwound when I'd gone to bed, was playing cheerily. But it wasn't the jingling tune that had woken me. It was the figure of a girl standing next to my bed, gazing out my bedroom window into the backyard. My first thoughts were that she was lovely, long blonde hair and a pale blue dress, hands clasped behind her with a slightly sad air about her. It changed quickly, though, when she turned to look at me and instead of disappearing, advanced on me, hands outstretched, her face changing from benevolent to cruel in a heartbeat. My mother sprinted up the stairs with more energy than I've seen in her since, driving her away. But it would not be the last time I would see her, though after that, each visit was absolutely benevolent.

A few years later, we (the family and I) began remodeling the house, tearing out walls and finding pieces of the house we had not counted on. Anyone who's ever remodeled a house knows the strange things that can be found in a house's walls. Between the disgust of finding a mouse corpse in one of my walls to finding the remains of a burnt-out old chimney on another, we also found a death certificate. For one Elizabeth Wesley, born July 17, 1940 died March 22, 1952. The cause of death was blurred with time, but we could make out something about a fever. We finally had our ghost - Elizabeth. We've realized, too, that 'my' music box was hers too, tied to it somehow. Since the remodeling though, I've not seen her.