The Storm

by Ashaunda
(Pittsburgh, PA, USA)

I guess you can say that I'm one of those people who are born sensitive to ghosts. I can tell when they are around, and can speak with them, and see them when others can't. I have been like this since I was five years old. I sat here thinking which story I wanted to share with you and decided on the first time I saw a dead person.

I was six years old and in the first grade. As long as I could remember we had lived in our town house, my mother and I, along with my grandmother who would stay with us off and on. And my uncles would visit frequently as well as my father. (My parents are divorced.)

Well Sunday night we had a terrible storm, lightening, thunder, pouring rain. And of course like many six year olds I was scared to death, not to mention that I hated being alone in my bed room. Normally, when my grandmother stayed with us she slept with me. This weekend she returned back to her apartment on the other side of town. After countless attempts to sleep with my mother, and being rejected I returned to my room, and laid in my top bunk with the blankets pulled up to my chin.

Just as I was about to give up and cry myself to sleep my mom came into the room and invited me to sleep with her on the bottom bunk. I didn't ask any questions, I just jumped at the offer and slipped down there with her.

Well the storm waged on into the night, and all the lights were out. My room would only light up with a flash of lightening. I couldn't sleep, it was as if I was being watched. And I remember feeling the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. I looked around my room, stopping at every dark corner, which were only four, lol. When I returned to the wall directly in front of me, where my doll house sat next to my dresser, that's where I saw her.

She looked like a rag doll, she had a head, but only the outline of where her mouth, eyes, and nose should have been. She had mitten shaped hands with only thumbs unattached, and was dressed in a doll-like fashioned dress. I called her Rag Doll Ann. Because that is what she looked like to me.

I remember trying to scream, but nothing would come out. I tried to move, but I couldn't. I closed my eyes thinking that if I stopped looking at her she would be there. Well, when I opened them, she was still there!

That's when she waved her left hand at me. For some reason that enabled me to move once again and I nudged my mom with my head. She woke up telling me to stop pushing on her. That's when I told her what was in the corner of my doll house and dresser. She ignored me at first telling me to go back to sleep. But that a little doll girl was in my room.

My mom sat up, looked in the corner, saw nothing, then laid back down. She then told me to go back to sleep. When I looked back the girl was gone. She never again appeared to me in my room, but I could feel her.

Years later, and many strange encounters with other ghosts since, I finally told my grandmother about it. We were sitting in the living room of our new apartment, which by the way had four ghosts living with us.

So I told her about the little doll girl on that stormy night. And she told me that before my mom and dad had moved into our town home a couple with a little girl had lived there. The daughter had become sick with some form of cancer and later died from it. After that her parents moved out of the house.

Now how my grandmother knew the story I had no idea, it never occurred to me to ask her either. But I believed her. And to this day I believe what I saw.