A Night at Abuela's House

This story takes place in the city of St. Louis, Missouri. The year was 1996. I don't remember what time of the year it was, but I was eight years old. I don't even remember what I did that day or why my mother and I stayed the night at my grandmother's house.

My grandmother's house was a shot-gun style house. The living room, dining room, and the master bedroom were all connected. There was a door that led to the master bedroom from the dining room. If you sat in the living room and looked straight, you could see through to the dining room and into the bedroom's door.

I remember we were sleeping in grandmother's living room. My mother and my grandmother were lying on the floor sleeping, but I was on the couch trying to sleep. I lay on my side and faced the dining room. I opened my eyes and in the dining room, at the threshold of my grandmother's bedroom, I saw something. I knew what it could be since my mother had told me ghost stories that took place in her childhood, so I was aware of the possibilities of a ghost's existence.

When I saw this white figure, I was terrified, but I kept staring at it and couldn't even blink. It was a figure of a woman, and I could see her hourglass figure. At first she was really still, but then she started moving in place. She was waving her hands as if she wanted me to come near her. I continued to stare and the woman began to move as if she was dancing very slowly. It looked as if she was moving in slow motion. I couldn't see her face or even the clothes she was wearing. Her whole body appeared a bright white, almost fluorescent.

I wanted to get my mother's attention, but I was too afraid to move. I didn't want the ghost to know I could see her. I just pulled the cover over my face until I fell asleep. The next morning when we all awoke, I told my mother and my grandmother what I had seen. They told me it was my imagination.

Years later, I brought the story up to my grandmother and she told me that she believed me, but she didn't want me to know. Since, I was so young at the time she didn't want to scare me. She stated that she had seen the ghost more than a few times and the ghost would often move things around.

I also found out that around the time I had seen the ghost my little brother was a few weeks old. They would wrap my brother up like a burrito and lay him on my grandmother's bed, then go sleep in the living room. Then, they would wake up to my infant brother's cry and go check on him. When they would go check on him they would find him on the floor in the threshold of the bedroom door with no blankets, cold as a popsickle.

There was no explanation for this since no one else was home and my brother couldn't have moved himself since he was only two weeks old. This happened more than once. Eventually my grandmother moved out to a house down the street. My cousin and his family ended up moving into her old house and say there is a woman haunting them.