Ok ready? Okay so one night when I was going to bed I had an uneasy feeling that something was watching me, you know… I normally felt this every night… I was never able to go to sleep and… wait can I start over? Ok, so I kept the light on, and that’s what I did very night because I would never be able to fall asleep. Eventually I fell asleep and … sorry… um and in the middle of the night I woke up again, and I was tired enough to know that if I turned the light off I would fall asleep without being scared. After a few hours I woke up again and I looked into my closet which was open and I saw a lady in a white dress standing there looking at me for … maybe… a millisecond, and I turned around to my left… didn’t look back my heart started pounding. I started to sweat, and I wasn’t able to go back to sleep the whole night. I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed… just paralyzed. In the morning I told my mom what had happened, and I looked into my closet and I had no white dresses that could have ever been seen from my bed, and my mom said don’t worry, its ok, just pray to God to protect you everything is gonna be fine. I told my dad and he thought it was bullshit. Then, I just kept the light on every night before going to bed, A few months later, I come home and James, my brother says that he saw a lady in a white dress standing in the living room. Then I looked at my mom, and we said “oh shit…” we then talk later and said we need to get this house … like this house needs to go under an exorcism like call the priest or whatever… but after awhile we just sort of forgot about it, but I was always still scared … couldn’t go downstairs by myself, and always thought someone was watching me from behind my back. Like six months later, I remember my sister telling me that our cleaning lady Martha saw a lady in white dress walk from my mom’s room into my room in broad daylight. And my mom and I freaked out… we… my mom called a clairvoyant and… who came to the house and said to my mom, “Oh, what does the lady look like? Is she tall? Does she have brown hair?” And my mom was like, yes, that’s the description…that’s what she looks like. Then the lady started to talk to the ghost lady and got information. She said the ghost lady accidentally died in our house from drug overdose, and basically…her unfinished business was that she didn’t want her family to think she had left them on purpose. The ghost lady was very protective of me and my mom. And she was supposed to have been a very successful doctor. We then talked to our neighbor across the street, who is an old lady, who remembered her – the lady across the street who we were talking to about the ghost lady … our neighbor said she was a very private person and didn’t know her that well, however she was very nice. Um…then the clairvoyant woman did something where she like led the ghost lady to the light or whatever. I’m not really sure what happened after that … the clairvoyant asked my mom, “Oh has anyone recently died in your family?” And my mom said, “Oh yes my dad died a few months ago,” and the clairvoyant said that “Oh he’s here now and he wants to let you know that he’s always here for you when you’re thinking of him and especially in a time of need and he … he has other lady figures here on Earth that he likes to visit as well, like Aunty Pas and Aunty Isabel.” And so when my mom was telling me all of this I realized that all these times as kid … ever since I knew what a ghost was, I was never able to fall asleep, and I always had to have the door open, the light on, or my parents snuggle with me because I always felt that there was someone watching me someone standing next to me and in all reality it actually was true.

Background: I have heard this story many times as the informant is my sister. However, hearing it again from her perspective is very interesting because she tells this story in a very different way from the way I tell it, probably because I heard it first from my mother, who may have had a different experience throughout all this than my sister did. Considering that my sister was the main person who had to go through all this, I am assuming this version of the story is more accurate than my version, but then again, that is the essence of folklore – the constant multiplicity and variation that comes with a story. Even my sister, as she was telling it to me this time, had made some small changes to her story that she was probably not aware of. I conducted this interview live at my house, so this story was given to me live. This story is particularly important to me, since I believe it occurred in my house and I feel bad that my sister had to suffer from so much anxiety as a child along with many of our family members refusing to believe her. This story is something I will never forget and something I’ll probably pass down to my children, which will probably get passed down to their children. It is very interesting for me to be present at the beginning point of a story that will probably become part of my family’s folklore later on.