The Floating Visage

Late autumn had settled over the small town of Harlow’s Bend, painting the streets in shades of rust and amber. My mother, Clara, often spoke of the strange occurrences that seemed to linger around our old Victorian house, but the one that haunted her most happened in the first week of September, just after the nation mourned the loss of a beloved princess.

Clara was in the front sitting room, the television flickering with somber news coverage, when a movement beyond the bay window snagged her attention. The garden, a modest patch of overgrown grass and wilting roses, was drenched in the pale light of a fading afternoon. There, floating just above the lawn, was a face. It was a man’s face, but with the cropped, feathered haircut more common to women of a certain age. The skin was the color of wet ash, and the eyes were hollow, like empty sockets in a skull. It hovered, motionless, about three feet off the ground, as if the body beneath were submerged in some invisible flood.

Clara froze, her teacup trembling in her hand. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, and looked again. The visage remained, bobbing slightly as if riding an unseen current. It had no neck, no shoulders—just a head severed from any corporeal form. The lips were slightly parted, and she could have sworn she saw a wisp of breath mist in the cold air. The television droned on, a reporter’s voice eulogizing the people’s princess, but Clara could not tear her gaze from the apparition.

After what felt like an eternity but was perhaps only a minute, the face slowly dematerialized, starting from the edges and dissolving inward, until only the garden remained. Clara set down her teacup and hurried to the window, but the grass was undisturbed, the air chill and still. She told my father, Daniel, that evening, and he dismissed it as a trick of light—a reflection from the television, perhaps, or a neighbor’s child playing with a balloon. But Clara knew what she had seen, and the memory lodged itself in her mind like a splinter.

Weeks later, we discovered that the previous owner of the house, a reclusive seamstress named Margaret Holloway, had been found dead in that very garden in the early 1980s. The coroner’s report listed the cause of death as a stroke, but neighbors whispered that she had been seen wandering the garden at odd hours, talking to someone no one else could see. Margaret had favored short, practical hair, and she was known for her gray, weathered complexion.

Clara never saw the face again, but the image stayed with her, surfacing in quiet moments—when the television flickered, or when the autumn wind stirred the dead leaves. And sometimes, on nights when the moon was full, she swore she glimpsed a pair of hollow eyes peering through the window, watching her from the dark. But it was always gone in the next blink, leaving only the whisper of a question: who was the man in the garden, and why had he chosen her to see him?