Fast forward to the next spring. I was teaching at the local middle school. I was in the break room with a number of people. All of them filtered out, except one older lady who was a teacher’s aid at the school. She had been close friends with the previous owners of the home, another family with young kids who had moved away for job opportunities. She asked me how I liked the house, I said it was great to have room for the kids. Then she looked around to make sure we were alone, and asked, “Have you seen the woman in yellow yet?” I nearly crapped my pants on the spot, and by the look on my face she knew I had. I told her my story, and she said one of the little girls who had lived there before talked about the yellow lady keeping her from getting hurt.
25. “The Second I Noticed It, It Moved”
Creepiest thing I’ve experienced was when I “saw” a ghost. I put it in quotations because there very well could be a rational explanation for what I thought I experienced, but nevertheless it was still really creepy. About two years ago, my friends and I visited Letchworth Village, in Rockland County, NY. It was a psychiatric hospital for the mentally and physically disabled opened in 1911 and was the site of the first polio vaccine trials in the United States. Letchworth was finally shut down in the 90’s because of the rampant abuse and mistreatment of the live-in patients there but many of the hospital’s abandoned buildings are still standing on the campus, and most are decayed enough, or already broken into, to be able to easily climb in.
The final building we explored was once the main hospital, I believe. My friend mentioned that this place was apparently featured on some Ghost Hunters type show as “one of the most haunted places in America” or something and so we were pretty excited when we saw someone had graffittied on the wall THE GHOSTS ARE HERE.
The first room had rusted metal bars suspended by wires hanging from the ceiling. This in itself was not out of the ordinary, but as we entered, a gust of wind shook the bars which began to swing and clank eerily against each other. Needless to say, it was a nice spooky entrance.
Upon exiting that tetanus trap, we entered a long hallway with a big staircase leading to the basement and the second floor. Ignoring every single horror-film infused instinct to not go down the flight of foreboding stairs into what could be the very gates of hell, we climbed down to the basement which was of course, extremely dark, save for a welcoming burst of light streaming in from a broken window near the stairs.
With our flashlights on we made our way slowly through the basement hall and at about halfway we found the old morgue. One of my photographer friends setup his tripod and began taking a long exposure of the morgue as the rest of us waited and jokingly tried to convince him to climb inside of it.
As this was taking place, I happened to look back down the hall from where we came. I couldn’t make out any details of the hallway, except for the beam of light, at the other end. It looked as if there was something partially blocking the beam of light coming in from the broken window. Kind of like a shadow but more like a silhouette– where a person’s upper torso and head would have be illuminated by the light, instead of just darkness. However the second I noticed it– it FUCKING MOVED and the beam of light was undisturbed once again. Right around that time my fight or flight instinct kicked in, and my bowels went a little loose as the SOUND OF FOOTSTEPS came clearly from behind the doors of the unexplored room ahead of us.
I can’t remember if I screamed or cried, probably a little of both, but we left pretty quickly after that.
