The Spinning Dress

The summer I turned twelve, my mother started leaving me with my grandmother more often. We lived in a small town called Graybrook, nestled between a pine forest and a lake that never seemed to warm up, no matter how high the sun climbed. Our house was old, with creaking floors and windows that frosted from the inside even in July. It was the kind of place where you felt watched, even when you were alone. My mother had always been skittish about the house, but she never said why. She just had this habit of looking over her shoulder, especially when she passed the hallway mirror.

I was left with my grandmother one evening while my mother went to a friend’s house. My grandmother was a brittle woman who spent most of her time in the kitchen, making preserves or listening to the radio static. She told me to sit in the living room while she fetched something from the basement. The living room had a heavy oak table in the center, and I was drawing at the table when I heard a sound like a slow spinning top. I looked up, and there she was: a little girl, maybe seven or eight, wearing a white cotton dress that flared as she twirled. She had on blue shoes that clicked against the wooden floor. Her hair was dark and hung to her shoulders, but I couldn’t see her face. She kept her back to me as she spun around the table, her dress rising and falling in a hypnotic rhythm. I froze, my pencil in my hand. She made three full circles, then stopped at the side of the table closest to the hallway. She stood still, not facing me. I wanted to call out for my grandmother, but my throat tightened. Then she began to spin again, faster this time, and her dress made a rustling sound like dry leaves. I dropped my pencil, and the clatter broke the spell. She vanished. When my grandmother came back up the stairs, she found me sitting rigid, my drawing untouched. She just looked at me and said, ‘You saw her, didn’t you?’ I nodded. She sat down heavily and said, ‘That’s Adelaide. She’s been here since before I was born. She was a girl who died in this house, but she doesn’t mean you harm. Just don’t follow her if she spins you.’

I didn’t understand what she meant by that, but I didn’t forget. The next month, my mother let me stay with her friend’s family for a weekend by the lake. I was excited to get away from Graybrook. But the first night there, I woke up to the sound of clicking shoes. The floor of the cabin was cold, and I saw a small figure in white at the foot of my bed, spinning slowly. This time, she was facing me, but I still couldn’t make out her features. They were blurred, like a photograph left out in the rain. She held out her hand, palm up, as if inviting me to dance. I pulled the blanket over my head, and I felt the air shift, and then the sound stopped. When I peeked out, she was gone. But the bedside table had been moved, slightly, as if someone had bumped it.

The next morning, I told my friend’s mom, and she just laughed it off as night terrors. But I noticed she avoided the cabin after dark. I started to research our house’s history. I found old records at the library that said a family had lived there in the 1920s. They had a young daughter named Adelaide who died of scarlet fever. The story went that she used to spin in the parlor, and her mother said she was ‘dancing with the angel of death.’ The librarian, an old woman with a face like crumpled paper, warned me not to dig too deep. ‘Some things are better left buried,’ she said, and she refused to help me further.

By the time I was fourteen, the visits had intensified. She appeared not just in our house but anywhere I went: in the grocery store aisle, in the school hallway, once even at a friend’s birthday party, spinning in the middle of the living room, ignored by everyone else. I began to sleepwalk. My mother found me in the backyard at 3 a.m., standing under the clothesline, turning in circles. She was terrified, but I had no memory of it. The house we moved to when I was a teenager was supposed to be a fresh start. But the spinning girl came with me. One night, I woke up in the bathtub, fully dressed, kneeling in water that had gone cold. The bathroom light flickered, and I saw her reflection in the mirror, standing behind me, her face finally clear. It was my face, but older, with hollow eyes and a wide grin that split my cheeks too far.

My mother broke down and told me the truth. Before I was born, she had gone to a medium to contact her deceased sister. The medium said a spirit had attached itself to our family line, a girl who was never allowed to grow up because she ‘danced too close to the veil.’ To keep her from taking my mother, the medium performed a binding ritual, but the spirit latched onto me in the womb. ‘She’s been waiting for you to become her vessel,’ my mother sobbed. ‘That’s why she always appears when you’re about to face a big change.’ I was about to turn fifteen, and I felt her getting stronger. I tried to fight it. I refused to spin, refused to look at mirrors, but she began to appear in my dreams, and in the dreams, I was the one spinning, with my own hand reaching out to a small girl in a white dress.

On the night of my fifteenth birthday, we had a small party at home. My mother and grandmother watched me nervously. As I blew out the candles, the room grew cold, and the lights flickered. I heard the clicking of shoes on the kitchen floor. I turned, and she was there, in the center of the room, spinning faster and faster until her dress became a blur. She opened her mouth, and a sound came out like a voice on a wind-up music box, twisted and slow: ‘Dance with me.’ My mother screamed, and my grandmother fell to her knees, praying. I felt my legs move on their own, and I began to spin with her. The room blurred, and I saw flashes of my life—my childhood, my mother’s face, the house in Graybrook—and then I saw the girl’s face again, but this time I was looking through her eyes. I was inside her, a prisoner, watching her control my body. She spoke with my mouth: ‘It’s my turn now.’

I don’t know how long I spun. When I stopped, I was alone in the room, the candles gutted, my mother and grandmother huddled in the corner, weeping. I looked at my hands, and they were mine, but I felt the girl’s presence coiled inside me, patient, waiting. Since that night, I’ve become the spinner. I feel the urge to twirl whenever I glimpse a mirror. And sometimes, when I’m alone in my room, I catch myself spinning in front of the window, and I see a reflection of a little girl in blue shoes, but it’s not my reflection. It’s mine, and hers, both at once. I don’t know how much longer I can resist her. She wants out, and she’s been waiting for two lifetimes. The only comfort I have is that my mother sees me, and she cries because she knows I’m still in there. But for how long? I’m starting to forget what my own face looks like. All I see is the spinning dress.