The Pale Visitor at the Bedpost

This happened in the fall of 2009, in the old farmhouse my family inherited from my great-aunt Marguerite. She had lived there her whole life, alone after her husband passed, and we rarely visited because she kept to herself. When she died of a stroke, we moved in to fix the place up, but I was seventeen and just wanted to use the empty rooms for my own space.

A few nights after the funeral, I was sleeping in the room that used to be hers. It had a high ceiling and a cracked window that rattled whenever the wind picked up. I woke up around 3 in the morning, not from any noise, but from a feeling that something was wrong. My heart was pounding before I even opened my eyes.

When I did, I saw her. A translucent figure stood at the foot of my bed, draped in a long white nightgown that seemed to glow faintly. She was facing me, but her features were blurred, like a photograph left in the rain. I could see the faded wallpaper through her body, and she didn’t cast a shadow. My first thought was that my cousin had come to borrow something, but the shape was too tall, too old.

I tried to speak, but my throat wouldn’t work. The figure raised one arm, slowly, and pointed a finger toward the ceiling. I followed the direction with my eyes, but there was nothing there. When I looked back, she was gone.

I didn’t sleep the rest of the night. I told my mother in the morning, and she said I’d had a nightmare from grief. But I knew what I saw. Over the next week, it happened again, always at the same hour, always pointing to the same spot on the ceiling. I began to keep a flashlight on my nightstand, and one night I shone it upward, just to prove there was nothing there.

There wasn’t. But the next night, the figure stepped closer, and this time her mouth moved like she was trying to speak. I couldn’t hear anything, but I felt a cold draft even though the window was shut. I screamed, and she vanished.

I started sleeping in the living room, but my mother thought I was being dramatic. Then one afternoon, I decided to investigate the ceiling in that room. I pulled up the loose floorboard in the attic directly above it, and there I found a small, leather-bound journal. It was my great-aunt’s handwriting. The last entry was dated two days before her death, and it read: ‘She comes again tonight. She points to the beam. I must not forget the box.’

I looked at the beam in the attic, and there was a small metal box nailed to it, caked with dust. I pried it open. Inside was a photograph of a woman who looked just like my great-aunt, but younger, and a piece of paper with a name: ‘Abigail.’ I had never heard that name in the family.

That night, I went back to the room, and the figure was waiting. She didn’t point this time. She put her hands on her stomach, and I saw a dark void there, as if she had been torn open. I heard a whisper, not from her, but in my own mind: ‘Abigail was my daughter. She never got to be born.’

I understood then. My great-aunt had been pregnant as a young woman, but the child was stillborn, and she had buried the tiny body somewhere on the farm. The figure was the mother, not the child, or maybe both. That night, I dug in the garden under the old apple tree, and I found a small wooden box, rotted with age. Inside was a tiny, mummified skeleton.

I buried it again, but this time in the local cemetery, with a little cross. The figure never came back after that. But sometimes, from the corner of my eye, I see a white shape standing at the edge of the orchard, as if watching. And I have never forgotten the look in her blurred eyes when she pointed. Some things are buried, but they never really stay under.