The Fourth Visitor

I’ve always been able to see things others can’t. As a kid, I called them ‘angels’ – shimmering figures that lingered at the edges of my vision, their faces etched with sorrow or serenity. My grandmother used to say I had the ‘sight’, but she passed when I was twelve, and the visions only grew stronger. By nineteen, I knew they were ghosts.

This year, I ended up in the hospital with a severe bout of pneumonia. The medication made me delirious, but amidst the fever dreams, I kept seeing a woman with brown hair past her shoulders, standing at the foot of my bed. She was small, barely five feet tall, and always smiling – a warm, reassuring smile that felt out of place in a sterile hospital room. I figured she was a hallucination, a side effect of the drugs.

When I returned home, she was still there. She’d appear in the doorway of my apartment, or standing by the window, watching me with that same gentle smile. I started to feel like I knew her, though I couldn’t place where from. Then I had a dream. I saw a young woman in a hospital waiting room, her eyes vacant, her body crumpled on a chair. She’d died of a heart condition that went undetected, and in the dream, I knew her name: Clara. A week later, her story was on the news. When I looked up from the screen, Clara was standing next to my bookshelf, her face ashen, her lips moving as if trying to speak.

So now I have four of them. My great-grandmother, who I’d known my whole life, a ghost who haunted my childhood home. The brown-haired woman, who always smiled. Clara, whose death I witnessed in a dream. And a little girl, maybe ten years old, with pigtails and a gap-toothed grin. The girl was a stranger, and she seemed the most curious about me, peeking around corners and giggling when I noticed her.

I tried to ignore them, but they were persistent. My great-grandmother was the only one who spoke to me, though her words were often cryptic. One evening, as I sat on the couch with a book, she appeared beside me, her translucent hand resting on my shoulder. ‘She wants to tell you something,’ she said.

‘Who?’ I asked, though I already knew.

The brown-haired woman materialized before me, her smile intact. She pointed at my chest, then at the photo of my boyfriend, Marcus, on the mantelpiece. Then she mouthed the word: ‘mother.’

I didn’t understand. Marcus’s mother had died a year ago – he’d told me. She was a warm woman who’d baked cookies for the neighborhood, and her death had been sudden, a brain aneurysm. But why would she be haunting me? I’d only met her twice.

That night, I had another dream. In it, I was Marcus’s mother, sitting in a waiting room at the hospital. I felt a familiar tightness in my chest, but no one noticed. I watched myself die in the corner, unnoticed, while nurses rushed past. Then the dream shifted, and I saw Marcus’s face, streaked with tears. He was standing in my kitchen, staring at a letter on the counter. The letter was from his mother, written before her death, and it had a confession in it: she knew about her death, and she’d wanted to give me a message. But the letter wasn’t addressed to me – it was addressed to my great-grandmother, who had been her friend.

When I woke up, I knew what I had to do. I searched Marcus’s apartment until I found the letter, hidden in a box of his mother’s things. It read: ‘You know that I will pass soon. But I want you to tell your granddaughter that she is not cursed. We are all here to guide her. She must listen to the one who led her here – the girl who came first.’

I didn’t have to ask who ‘the girl’ was. Later that day, I saw the little girl again. She was standing in my bathroom, pointing at the mirror. When I looked, my reflection showed the four of them behind me, all glowing faintly. The girl spoke for the first time, her voice like wind chimes: ‘You’re the one who can help us move on. But first, you have to help yourself.’

I realized then that I didn’t have to fear them. They were drawn to me for a reason. So I sat down in the middle of my living room, surrounded by the dead, and I listened. I let their stories wash over me. Clara’s fear of dying alone. The little girl’s unfinished journey. My grandmother’s longing for the living. And Marcus’s mother’s sorrow for the son she’d left behind.

In that moment, something shifted. The air grew still, and the ghosts began to fade, one by one, until only the little girl remained. She smiled at me, then turned and walked toward a door that appeared in the wall. Before she went through, she looked back and said, ‘We’ll be waiting when you need us.’ Then she was gone.

Now, I see them less, but I know they’re always there. And I finally understand that my ‘curse’ is a gift – a chance to comfort the dead, and to help myself heal. Marcus’s mother taught me that the dead don’t haunt us to scare us. They visit to remind us that we are never truly alone.