Phantoms at Night

I like to stay on topic when it comes to blogging, but I had an incredible experience last night that must
be examined. I saw a ghost. Granted, visual hallucinations that occur soon after you wake up are not uncommon. The chemicals in our brains that make us dream can leave a little residue that causes the mind to create phantoms out of thin air. But what if it really was a ghost? I must appreciate both possibilities.

Ever wake up with one of these on your chest?

I was dreaming about wandering a large manor home filled with pretty Victorian children. Irrelevant. When I woke up, I noticed a young woman floating on her stomach above my laptop. She had mid-length curly blonde hair and a smooth complexion. She looked like she was reading something. I watched her there. I was quite unafraid, just laying in bed thinking, "Who is that?" Our eyes met for a brief second and she disintegrated into the shadows, as if I had caught her and she was too shy to hang out.

She is not the first ghost I've ever seen. I have now had the privilege of seeing two night-time phantoms. The last time was five years ago in my east village apartment. This spirit was a black woman with wild hair. She was trying to talk to me, telling me an urgent message about finding her book of disasters. When I tried to touch the book she was holding, that was when she disappeared. I asked my landlord and other tenants if they'd ever seen her before, and I heard a number of disturbing anecdotes. Two other people had also seen ghosts upon waking, but they didn't match the description of mine. A 29-year-old woman had seen a little girl sitting on her bed and touching her hand. The landlord's teenage daughter had seen a man watching her sleep from the corner of her bedroom. Additionally, our landlord told us that a man had murdered his mother in the basement and then shot himself outside. My roommate started waking up and finding me in her bed.

"Do you want to go get a pillow from your room?" she'd ask me.

"I'm fine without one," I'd reply. "I'm not going back in there."

You're supposed to call these guys.

This morning I told my husband about the ghost from last night. He began postulating all sorts of explanations for her presence.

"Maybe she came back from the spirit world to check her e-mail," he suggested. "OoooOOOOooo. Sorry to wake you, Meg. I needed to check my FaaAAAaaacebook."

"She looked like my grandmother when she was young," I suggested. "Maybe she's always with me, and this was the first time I saw her."

"No way," he said. "Why would your grandmother be so computer savvy? This girl must have died recently. Maybe she's buried under the floorboards."

"I don't think so," I said, incredulous. "She was a peaceful visitor, with very little interest in talking to me. Murder victims are supposedly more aggressive."

Whatever the cause of the laptop ghost, I plan to leave her story be and not investigate. My landlord strikes me as the superstitious type. If I told him I saw a ghost, he would probably send a priest into the apartment with smudge sticks and holy water.

One thing I find interesting about both of my ghosts is that they didn't look like monsters or the violently battered creatures you see in movies. They were just normal people, there one second, and gone the next.