Ye Best Start Believin in Ghost Stories!

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I was listening to a radio story describing a haunted house in Washington DC, and I thought that this Halloween, it might be fun to challenge Foreign Service bloggers to share ghost stories, with the caveat that they must be true, and must involve either the personal experience of the blogger, or of another Foreign Service member.

At the risk of sounding like a kook, I'll start.

My story begins on an ordinary night, in an ordinary apartment, at an American consulate in India.

The apartment was old, and very nice. It was built into a mansion that that had once housed a noble Indian family, and that had been divided into three apartments, and occupied as such, long before it was sold to the American government.

The apartment was large, and the bedroom suite had an anteroom, so there were two sets of interior doors to close at night. And being something of an obsessive/compulsive security freak (years of living in houses with safe havens), I routinely and ritually closed both sets of doors each night before retiring.

On this night, which was no different from any other night, I did the same.

It was a weeknight, and not special in any way. I had not been drinking, or working late. My sleep was not troubled, or fitful, and my dreams were not unpleasant. It was not raining, or storming, nor was it a holiday of any sort. An ordinary night in an ordinary city of 21 million people, in India.

There was a crash! And I woke up enough to hear the outer door to the anteroom jiggling, then slowly creaking open. I stared past my feet at the inner door, which likewise shook momentarily then opened.

There was a figure, hand on the door, entering my room!

A figure composed entirely of greenish-yellow light.

A lady, in a sari, with long hair, and, I thought, a rather shapely form and not at all unattractive in a green-light-ghost sort of way (hey, I'm not the dead one here!), was advancing quickly towards my bed.

Where I lay, lest it needs to be said, wide-eyed and cowering.

She paused at the door, then came slowly over towards the bed. There was a musty smell, and she began to lean forward over me.

Whereupon, I was told later, I screamed loudly enough to wake both sets of neighbors, and my wife - who turned on the light in time to see:

Nothing.

Just me, flailing about like a ninny, squealing like a pig.

"Did you see that!" I screamed.

"What?"

That! There was a lady in green light and she came in and leaned over me and...."

"Go back to sleep," says the wife. You were dreaming.

"But the doors are open!" says I. And they were.

"You must have forgotten to close them."

I did not sleep.

And the next day, when I showed her the knickknacks that had fallen to the floor from the coffee table (causing the crash, no doubt, that had awoken me), the wife blamed the wind.

Needless to say, I was a shaken and tired at my morning staff meeting,and it showed.

And after the meeting, the FSN RSO assistant noted that the guards had heard a scream from my apartment, but, it having been a "one-of" had decided not to disturb me. He hoped everything was alright.

So I told him. And he listened. And when I had finished, he did not call me a kook or tell me it had been a dream. Rather he said, "you saw the lady in white."

"Come with me," he said, and he took me to his office and took some guard logs off the shelf.

"Every few months, for as long as we have had those apartments, the guards have reported a young lady, dressed in a sari, floating around the grounds. We call her the lady in white, because she appears to be made out of light, and it's usually white, but that must be who you saw."

"See here" he said pointing a guard log: "She was in the garden walking through the flower beds."

"And here," pointing to another entry, "crossing the lawn."

"We think she must be someone who died in the house, but we have no idea who it might be. It's a very old house."

He showed me a good dozen entries, and assured me there were more, and that others had seen her too.

"On the other hand, she doesn't normally take an interest in people," he said. "She normally doesn't seem to notice when we are there. You must have sparked her curiosity."

Maybe I did. Maybe my rakish good looks make me attractive to young lady ghosts. But I guess she didn't like screamers. Because in another year and a half in that flat, I never saw her again.

That's my story.

What's yours?