It Looked Like My Mother

It all started when I was 10 years old when my mother passed away from brain cancer. My father had canceled Mom's life insurance policy about 5 years before she died and 1 year before she had been diagnosed due to the fact that we weren't very financially stable. As a result after Mom died, we lost our home. So we'd had to move in with my father's parents.

We wanted to keep going to school where we had been and so for a while, my father drove us thirty minutes to school every morning and came to pick us up every evening. That got old quick. So my grandparents put their house up for sale and bought an old farming property in the district which my sister and I went to school. I hated that house immediately.

The house was small, didn't have running water, and the realtors told my grandparents that it was over 100 years old. I thought it was creepy. It only had 2 bedrooms so my grandparents took one bedroom and my father, sister, and myself had to share the second bedroom.

It was close to the 2 year anniversary of my mother's death at the time that my grandparents bought the Scharcher place. It was called that after the people who had originally built the house as far as I know.

One night after my family had all went to sleep, I had stayed up a little later as I wasn't the most obedient of children and was quite rebellious after Mom had died. I heard a noise like something falling in the walk-in closet. So I got up and walked in the closed to investigate. Nothing was out of place. So I assumed that it must have been my grandparents making noise in their bedroom as their bedroom was on the other side of the closet and so I walked back in my bedroom.

That's when I saw her. She was kneeling beside my father's bed and had her head down on the bed beside his face and it looked like she was crying. I didn't notice who the person was from a side profile, just that there was a woman there that shouldn't have been.

I stepped forward and a floorboard creaked. She looked up toward the sound and I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach and knocked the wind out of me. My mother stood ten feet in front of me. She held her arms open to me and my first instinct was to run into them, which is what I started to do. I only took a half step and stopped in my tracks.

I don't understand how I didn't notice it sooner, but I realized that her eyes were red and she had long fingernails that to a 12 year old looked like claws. She started coming toward me and I realized that her feet were not touching the ground. To say the least, I got very scared.

I ran past her and darted into my bed and pulled the covers up over my head, but she'd clawed my ankle before I could get there safely and it hurt. I waited a minute and then peeked out. The room was empty. I don't know how but I must've dozed off because the next thing I knew it was morning and my Mamaw was singing that "gotta get up this morning" song that she made up to annoy me as she was cooking breakfast.

I thought it had all been a nightmare, until I threw back the covers to get up and saw the gash on my ankle that had started forming a scab and the caked blood around it.

I try not to think about that night, but sometimes it's hard not to. It does hurt because since then I've never been able to have a good dream about my Mother. Though I do know without a doubt that whatever that thing was, it was not my Mom.