The Lady In The Room

As I sit here by candlelight, at my sturdy, hard mahogany wooden writing desk, I write this strange encounter, which I can only describe as a mysterious Lady.

My Wife's sister was admitted to local hospital for pneumonia just after the New Year's celebrations.

My wife and I visited her every evening while she was in the hospital along side her parents. Her health was bad, but the doctors believed she would pull through within the week.

After the hospital, me and my wife would stop by her parent's house as it was on the way to ours and draw the curtains as it was dark at five pm. My wife parents would leave much later, preferring to stay with their daughter all they could as they feared for her.

One evening, like every other evening after our hospital visit, we stopped at my wife's parents house. Normally I would draw the curtains upstairs and my wife would draw the curtains downstairs.

I walked up stairs and across with landing, starting with my in-law's bedroom. The door was ajar and as I opened it, the atmosphere changed instantly. I can not explain it. It was an uneasy atmosphere but not an unpleasant one.

As I opened the door, in the dusk of the evening, with the room darkened yet not completely dark, a figure walked from the shadows by the window on my left towards the wardrobe on my right, walking diagonally across the room.

The figure was that of a woman who was on the larger side with hunched shoulders. She was wearing a woolen cardigan with a floral green dress. I could not see her face, but she looked familiar.

I must have seen her for four to five seconds before she disappeared in front of my eyes.

My brain did not register what I had just seen, and I walked into the room to draw the curtains. My in-law's bedroom has two windows overlooking the front garden.

I drew the curtains of the first window where the woman had began walking from and while I was drawing the curtains of the second window, I realized what I had just witnessed.

I was startled and quickly looked behind me expecting to see the woman there. But she was not. I turned on the lights and searched the whole house for her, not informing my wife what I was doing.

I did not tell my wife what I had witnessed, and I ponder many a year on who the woman was as she seemed so familiar to me. It took me about two years to find out who she was. It was so simple on observation that I overlooked it for two whole years.

We were at my in-laws for Sunday lunch and I made my way through the hall where there is a table full of photos in frames of various family members.

One happened to catch my eye and it was of the wife's Grandma who had taken her life about 10 years earlier, a time before I met my wife.

The picture resembled the woman I had seen in the room. That was why she was familiar to me. She was on the larger side, hunched over and was wearing a floral dress but with no cardigan.

I had never met my wife's Grandma while she and I was alive. But I had met while she was dead, and I was alive.