Storytime: The Day We Realized Our Housegirl Was Mami Water.

This all happened when I was around 11/12 years old. My mother had just given birth to my little sister Anointing. She didn’t have the same energy to deal with all the stress of a new baby the way she did with me and even though Anointing was a rather quiet and peaceful child, my mother was still struggling so she needed help.

That’s when my grandmother brought an older girl, she was maybe 20/21 at the time she came. My grandma said she was the niece of a church member she trusted. Her name was Veronica, we called her Vero for short.

At first, everything was smooth. She was a wonderful help around the house. She helped cook, clean, take care of the baby. The perfect house help.

Until strange things started happening.

My baby sister who never cried suddenly started crying all the time, and when I say all the time, I mean ALL – THE – TIME. It was non-stop. You think I’m exaggerating but I swear I’m not. Normally, children cry maybe a couple of minutes and then when you soothe them, they stop. Anointing was unsoothable. Her crying did not stop.

Worse, and this is the scarier part of the story, my baby sister's hair started going missing. Missing from her HEAD. Week after week, the hair on her head was getting less and less, like somebody was cutting it.

We didn’t know what to make of it and do you know what? Believe it or not, we had no suspicions that Vero had anything to do with it. At All. Because it was Vero that even pointed it out to us and made us start noticing the hair loss. She was the one always examining my sister's hair, suggesting healing products, praying the loudest during devotion. My parents would have suspected me before they suspected Vero, I swear to God.

But then, my God, things got a WHOLE – LOT – WORSE. We couldn’t believe what happened next.

Anointing one day started coughing. Seriously coughing. When a baby starts coughing, already you know it’s something you don’t take lightly. When a baby starts coughing like THIS, it is an emergency. Before we knew it, Anointing and I swear this is true, I'm not exaggerating: Anointing started coughing up BLOOD.

Real blood. And this was on top of the coughing that was still happening.

I’ve never seen my parents more scared. That day, they ran off to the hospital. I remember I was at home just crying because after what I'd seen, I believed Anointing was dead. There was no way she could survive it.

But she did. And get this: when the doctors did a medical check on her, they couldn’t find anything wrong so they kept her there at the hospital to keep running tests and monitoring.

Everyday my mother would go and see her, everyday she brought back good news that the coughing had stopped. In fact, the doctor was thinking of discharging her. ALSO, and this part is important for what happened next: the hair loss had stopped. Everything seemed to be okay.

UNTIL my mother told Vero to follow her to the hospital on one occasion.

That was where Vero fucked up.

I wasn’t there but my mom has told this story so many times, I feel like I was there. She said that when they got to the hospital, Vero at one point left the room. When she entered back inside, Vero told my mom that a nurse outside told her, Vero, that the doctor was calling her, my mother, to his office. Of course hearing that kind of news my mother jumped on her feet and went running to meet the doctor.

Only for her to get there and THE DOCTOR WAS NOT AROUND! When my mother asked the nurses, the nurses said they hadn't told Vero any such thing, that the doctor wasn’t even in the office that day.

So as you can imagine, my mother was very surprised. When she went back to the hospital room to confront Vero, Anointing was crying hysterically, like she’d been crying when she was at the house. My mother was so confused. When she went to carry Anointing to pamper her, she saw under Anointing's body, on the bed, a clump of Anointing’s hair. It’s as if somebody had cut out the hair and hidden it under Anointing's body.

At that point, what did Vero want to say. She was the only person in the room. Anointing had been okay until she was left in a room with her.

My mother LOST IT! According to what she says, the nurses had to drag Vero out of the room because of the way my mother was shouting. My mother says that she was just confused and kept on trying to understand what Vero had been doing to my sister. All the nurses thought was that my mother might kill Vero, so they took her out of the room.

When my mother finally calmed down enough to speak and listen to Vero, get this –

VERO WAS GONE!

The girl had disappeared. Gone ghost. Nowhere to be found.

Nurses and security said they saw her leave the hospital so it’s not like she physically disappeared like in the movies, BUT as Vero went that day, she NEVER came back.

I mean, NEVER. She didn't even come back to the house to collect her things. Which brings us to the final part of this story.

When my mother went through Vero’s things, I cannot even start to tell you. What didn’t we find?! It was like all those things you see in Nigerian movies. Strange things wrapped in red lace clothing, bead necklace that looked like rosary but wasn't, different types of containers containing strange powders and creams. The things in her room were not normal.

The church had to come and remove the things themselves because when my mother saw the first thing, she was too scared to touch any other thing. So she called the pastor who came along with some church members.

Till today, I don’t know what happened to Vero or what exactly she did to my sister. My sister by the way is fine. She’s now 12 years old and she HATES hearing this story. I mean, I can understand her. If I heard that as a child somebody was chopping off my hair and doing strange things to me that made me cry all the time, I too would want to know what she did to me.

And I think that’s the most frustrating part of this story: the fact that it just ends and we never get any answers. Was she a spirit? A witch? Mami water? What was Vero? And what was she doing?

That’s All.

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