Nationality: American

Primary Language: English

Age: 51

Occupation: Chief Marketing Officer

Residence: Driggs, Idaho

Performance Date: November 24, 2023

Text:

“I was staying at this friend of a friend’s house near Georgetown, one of those little townhouses or whatever that have the entrances kind of underground, ya know? I thought it was a little weird, didn’t really know the people that well, but I had been driving for so long and it was so late, just had to get to bed. Whatever. The people weren’t staying there at the time, so it was just me in this townhouse. The whole thing was about three stories, and the layout was kind of funky. You have to kind of walk down from the street into the basement, and then walk up another set of stairs from there to get to the main floor and then again to the second. I ended up crashing in one of the guest rooms on that first floor, kind of tucked away into the corner of the building, and it was all hardwood. Like the whole place was all hardwood. Super loud to walk on, love it. Anyways. Went to bed that night, and sometime in the early morning, like 2 or 3, woke up to that same super loud footsteps on the hardwood. Well I was kind of awake, but not really awake. Like I couldn’t move at all, and I was looking through my eyelids and still seeing everything somehow. So I heard these shoes on the floor, and I look up and there’s this woman, just walking all around the bed in a circuit. And she had on these flats, and this kind of green looking pants suit, just clacking along the floor, around the bed, through the wall back behind the headboard, then back again on the other side. Fully formed too, she looked, like, full. Not wispy or ghostly at all. And she was walking this super fat golden retriever on a leash, just lapping around the bed. And the flats just kept slapping against the hardwood floor, super loud, and I couldn’t really get up at all, and I’m kind of starting to freak out. Cause I’m thinking, how did this person get in, middle of DC, only one lock on the door, random stranger in the house, nothing I can do, and for some reason they can magically walk through walls. After a while of her just kind of walking around in this little green pantsuit and these flats with her dog, she just sort of disappeared. Then I kind of drifted back to sleep eventually, got up as early as I could the next day and hightailed it out of there.”

Context:

AM is a 51 year old mother from a small town in central Connecticut. She was visiting her brother in the Georgetown Hospital in Washington DC when she experienced the events that she described above. At first skeptical of whether or not she had been visited by a paranormal entity, she became convinced entirely that the Lady in Flats was a ghost, upon finding no trace that anyone had been in the house, not even a single strand of dog hair or a scrape on the hardwood floors.

Analysis:

While AM may have been slightly inclined to believe in the supernatural before her experience in the D.C. Townhouse, I find that her encounter solidified her belief entirely. What I found to be particularly interesting is the description of the apparition as entirely solid, dissimilar from the usual physical characteristics that are ascribed to ghosts in the 21st century, such as translucence or appearing as a pale shade. While perhaps not exactly reminiscent of the modern day ghost, AM’s ghost did exhibit at least some of the physical qualities that were seen in a number of Japanese stories on the supernatural from the previous millennia, that same solidness described in the story. Another curious aspect of the story that appealed to me was the apparent lack of purpose of the ghost, neither malicious or helpful, rather, it was simply present. Furthermore, the liminal state of sleep paralysis lends itself as a perfect opportunity to experience the supernatural, a classic motif found throughout the majority of ghost stories.