The Woman In White - part 1

In the summer of 1975, I began having visions of a female spirit who wore a long, white, flowing nightgown. I didn’t see her in person. I only saw her in my mind…which meant that I couldn’t show her to other people. And while I understood that she was just a thought in my head - a figment of my imagination so to speak - I was also aware that she was unlike any other thought that I had ever had. The woman in my vision was different. The thought was different. The woman was real.

At five years of age, I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of her…or the experience. It was the first vision that I hold any conscious memory of. I didn’t understand the concept of visions at the time. I don’t believe I understood the concept of spirits or death either. I only knew it was different. She was different.

I remember wondering who she was and why was she standing outside of my home. I also thought it was odd that she was wearing a nightgown in the middle of the day; and she wore no shoes at all. My parents would have been livid if I’d walked around in my pyjamas and bare feet in public at two in the afternoon. The thought of it made me laugh out loud. But I figured that the woman I was seeing was an adult - one who likely didn’t have parents to answer to - and I remember thinking how glorious it would be for me to have that kind of freedom one day as well. I decided in that moment that when I grew up, I would wear pyjamas in the afternoon…and I’d eat birthday cake for breakfast every Tuesday morning…with no exceptions. There’d be no need to wait for anyone’s birthday; no need to wait until I got home from the store. I would eat cake in my car and bring the leftovers home to share with the birds, and the squirrels and the lady who lived in the forest outside of my home. I then left the apparition standing on the edge of my driveway while I ran off to play.

‘The Woman-in-White’, as she came to be affectionately known, made her first appearance to me in the mid 1970’s and she revealed herself to me on a number of occasions after that. She always emerged from the same spot in the woods. She always stopped at the edge of our driveway. She always looked up at me in the window. She always stared. Those details never changed.

The Woman-in-White held no expression on her face. She didn’t look happy or sad or angry. She never spoke or attempted to communicate with me in other ways. She had long, red curly hair and appeared to be in her twenties or early thirties. I didn’t know who she was at the time. But because she had flaming red hair, and I had heard stories about my grandmother on my mother’s side of the family having red hair, I made the assumption at a later date that it must have been her. The Woman-in-White always looked for me when she came out of the woods…as if she was seeking me out and specifically trying to find me. I saw her maybe four or five times in that same spot outside of our house over the course of the years that we lived on that property.

But when my family moved to a different house in 1981, everything changed…and things became dark.

When I was ten years old, I began seeing the Woman-in-White in my dreams; and it got to the point where I was seeing her almost every night. The dream was always the same dream, taking place in the same place - on an old dirt road somewhere in the countryside. It was overcast. The Woman-in-White lay face down on a dirt road. The road wound around a corner to the left and disappeared. A large patch of trees stood on the right side of the road; and there was a small homestead on the left - with what appeared to be a single-room cabin. The cabin was constructed entirely of weathered wood, had a shingled roof and a chimney made of stone. In the dream, I was several yards away from where the Woman-in-White lay…but I could see everything clearly…and almost fifty years later, I can still picture it as if I’d seen it yesterday.

The Woman-in-White’s nightgown was dirty, parts of it were torn, but it was the same nightgown that I’d remembered her wearing outside of my previous home. I also knew that something was terribly wrong. As I moved closer to her, she started to move.

I wasn’t afraid of the woman in my dreams at first. I’d seen her several times over the past five years. I remembered her. And nothing alarming had ever happened. But this experience was different from the previous ones; and I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t a person. In my dreams, I was a pair of floating eyes - hovering about six inches from the ground - that began moving closer to the woman who lay on the path. I don’t know of any other way to describe it. I just kept moving closer until eventually I was only a few inches away from the top of her head.

I watched the woman struggle to find the strength to move, and when she did, I backed away. Her face was covered in blood and she was dying.

That was when I woke up. She never spoke to me. I never saw her anywhere else. The dream never changed. It was always the same place, the same day, the same woman and - at ten years of age - she really frightened me. But why was I seeing it? What was the point of showing me such a painful moment in her life?

To be continued…