A Sad Ghost

In 1995, my wife my two kids and I were invited by some friends to spend a 3-day weekend one winter in Payson, Arizona in an old rustic cabin. The cabin was a few miles off the main highway and deep in a beautiful pine forest.

It was a beautiful cabin. It had a Moosehead over the fireplace, a bear head on another wall and a deer head trophy on another wall, and several other wildlife heads spread throughout the cabin. The cabin had a lot of Indian blankets covering the walls and furniture and a southwestern motif throughout the cabin. I thought they decorated it, but they said no.

The inside was built with pine logs from the walls to the pitched ceiling and had a large living room, small kitchen, one master bedroom, and a room to the back with bunks for kids, and a loft with a drop down ladder where you had to climb up into the loft.

They invited another couple to their cabin, and unfortunately, the couple had dibs to the kid's room because they got there before us. Our kids would sleep on the couch and the floor in the living room under the fire place. My wife and I would sleep in the loft.

The loft was a very small part of the cabin. It was a small crawl space just underneath the pitch of the roof in one corner on top of the cabin. It had two full sized thin mattresses on two very cheap spring metal fold up metal beds.

We all played Trivial Pursuit and partied that night until two in the morning. When we went to bed (buzzed), my wife and I were handed blankets and pillows and we climbed the latter into the loft.

The minute my wife and I went into the loft, I felt an energy. It was not a bad energy. It was just a sense that something was different. The loft's ceiling's wood was completely covered with cob webs. The lady that owned the place hollered up..."I know its dark up there, but if you want, you can light a candle... I said. "Yeah, give me a candle."

My wife and I slept on one of the fold out beds in the small corner of the loft with another empty bed shoved in the corner and a candle lit next to our bed on the floor. I tried to read a book. As I began reading my book and tried to go to sleep, I became concerned that my candle might catch the cobwebs on fire, and I put the candle out and went to sleep.

During the night as I slept, I kept hearing a sigh and whimpering. At first I thought it was my wife having a bad dream, and I nudged her, and went back to sleep. But as the night went on, I kept hearing this very sad quiet whimpering. I kept nudging my wife, and she would shove my hand away. As I tried going back to sleep over and over again through this whimpering, I finally realized the whimpering was not coming from my wife, but from the bed in the corner and next to our bed.

It was a very sad quiet whimper and also once in awhile a sad sigh. It was a sad sigh of a woman. Hhmmm...hhmmm...hhhmmm. All night long as I tried to sleep, and in my dreams, I kept hearing this very sad whimpering and sighing. Sometimes, my wife would shake me awake and say..."Knock it off!" Many times during the night as I slept, I would perk up to a sigh from the bed. I never heard a sheet ruffle or a creek from the bed, but all night, I heard a sigh and so many times a whimper.

I don't know how long it took, but I finally fell asleep, when my wife suddenly woke me and said: "It's time to get up." She nudged me a few times and said: "Get up!" I looked out the window at the top of our loft and the light out of our small window was so incredibly bright that I thought the sun had come up. The only difference was that it was an extremely bright glowing white light instead of a nice golden yellow beautiful morning sun that one would expect from the early morning sun. When I looked at my wife, she was sound asleep.

The next morning, I asked my wife about her waking me up, and she said..."Did you see that? I thought it was morning. Then it went away. It was not morning. It was the middle of the night, and I went back to sleep. Then she asked me: So you saw it too?" I said: "Yeah. I thought it was morning."

Later, when the other people that invited us there while we were having coffee asked how our night went, my wife told her about our weird light experience, and how I kept hearing crying and whimpering all night and couldn't sleep. My wife said she heard the sighing too. Then the lady who bought the cabin told us a story about a young Indian Girl named "White Dove." That fell in love with this white man, and he built this cabin for her, but it had to be a secret because he was married and could not marry her, but he built this cabin so they could be lovers. Naturally, she wanted more. But he could not give more. He was married. She committed suicide in this cabin he built for her when he went away to his real family.

Sounds like a typical cliché story. But our experience was not a cliché.