*The informant has had multiple ghost encounters and has heard many stories regarding spirits. She says that she had recently moved into this house as it was her her step-father’s house. She currently lives in the same house and has not experienced anything within the house since this story.

Informant: This happened when I was probably 15 years old. I was studying one evening in my bedroom and I had the door shut and then all of a sudden there was a knock on my door so I said “Come in,” and they didn’t come in. After 3 more knocks and no response I sort of got aggravated, so I opened up the door and here is this figure of a woman in the hall outside my door looking at me and I can see right through her. All of a sudden she turns around and walks down the hall a little bit and turned into the bathroom. And so my curiosity got the best of me so I walked down the hall to the bathroom, and no-one was in there– the bathroom was empty. I thought “Oh my god who was that woman?”, and she appeared to be in her late 50s or so I’d say. My stepdad had been married before, and so had my mother- my father died of leukemia, and my stepfather’s previous wife had died of cancer. I had never seen a picture of her, so I asked to see one and it was the lady I saw in the hall!

Collector: And she had lived in that house before with your stepfather?

Informant: Yeah! Then I was worried so I read up on it and I read that if you take a bundle of sage, either leaves or branches, and you make a smudge out of it and light it and go to the lowest part of your house and go the whole perimeter of your house with that sage smoke, and then you come up to the next floor higher and in every room you go the perimeter of the room with that sage smoke., and that is supposed to calm the spirits or make them go away. There were never any telltale signs of ghosts after that… it’s funny because she obviously looked at me. I’ve read about time being a tricky thing and so maybe there’s a parallel dimension where it’s a different time in that dimension, so she’s living in this house at a different time frame in this other dimension. So maybe we just kinda crossed. Or she came back in spirit as a ghost and wanted to see what happened to her house.

Collector’s Thoughts: This informant gave me many stories about ghostly encounters she has had and many spiritual stories she has heard. This informant has been surrounded by death, her father dying when she was a child and her mother and step father dying when she was an adult, and her open-mindedness to spirits may be why she has encountered so much and has heard many stories. The home was older and the fact that her step-father’s previous wifehood lived there and died may be why she saw her- like she said, maybe she was checking up on the house. It was very interesting listening to her and her stories and many ghostly motifs were involved in the story.