((submission to your ghost stories website))
I’ve never actually been a “non-believer”, but before this insident, I’ve never really been a ghost fanatic! Heh, things change.
I’m not sure exactly how old I was or what year it was. All I know is that I had to be around 8-10 years old. My younger sister and I had just gotten our own rooms in the house we’ve always lived in. My sister got the room we called the “golden room,” which was very pretty in the early morning but ugly otherwise. The ugliness came from the horrid flower wallpaper that peeled away daily. But all in all, it worked very well for her.
One day we were playing on her bedroom floor in the middle of winter. Her windows were closed, but very suddenly we could feel a draft. From just over our heads a large triangular piece of wallpaper fell from the wall.
“Look, Gwen! It’s a picture!” my sister cried almost immediately. I looked closer at the glue stains left on the wall. White on blue, and you could see the very faint image of a butterfly. “Pretty,” she said, and I would have agreed, but I was watching the wall. Slowly, I started to see more of the picture.
Frightened, I kept it to myself until one night my cousins came over to play. I was second oldest, and I worked up the courage to point out the picture to the oldest girl there. “Hey, look up there. No, there. What do you see?” I said to the little group.
“Glue. Wall,” said the girl a few months younger than me, Kayla. “It looks like a little girl, kneeling in a garden, with her dog,” I said, pointing. Amanda, the oldest, stood up and took a closer look. “Wow!” was the general reply.
When I told my parents they gave me an easy response: it was just an interesting pattern in the glue. But my sister Melissa, Kayla, Amanda, and I all disagreed.
It was at least a year later, in the middle of a hot, sweaty summer. My dad was working on some electricity in our living room downstairs, which meant crawling in the fiber-glass insulated attic. Right next door to my sister’s room. There was a crawlspace he had to go through that didn’t have a floor. It had beams, but falling between them could land you downstairs. So, crouch-walking as carefully as I could, I went towards his little workman’s light, being messenger to my mother.
By now we had decided that the girl in the picture was simply a coincidence, but were always on the lookout for something to prove us wrong. I stepped forward, and started to fall to the side. My arms flailed, but something grabbed me! I felt five fingers curl around my right arm. They held me steady until I could regain my balance. When I looked, scared, to see who it had been, my thoughts were comfirmed. No one was there.
Many people have heard my story of “Heather”, and it is always met with reply ghost stories. And Heather doesn’t stop there. Sightings by my sister have seen a girl about 7 standing in my father’s garden, or a small Scottish terrier running in our yard, only to disappear.
We have tried to piece together the story of the little girl. We call her Heather because of her apparent love of gardens, and know very little. We believe that her dog is the reason she is imprinted on our world, and we can only assume that it was harmed in some dramatic way to leave such strong ghosts in our world.
Heather’s appearances get stronger in the winter, when we can see figures standing in my doorway, or hear the clacking of dog claws on the floor when my dog is outside. Heather has not done us harm, so we try to piece together the images and figure out what happened, while sleeping with the lights on.
If you’d like a more in-depth tale of the figures, sounds, and even the sight of Heather and her dog, email me.
From: “Gwenivere Stephan” gesdreams@yahoo.com
To: obiwan@ghosts.org
Subject: The Girl Ghost
Date: Monday, September 26, 2005 2:51 PM