Guardia Nocturna

Generally it takes a great deal to spook me. My birthday is close to Halloween, so I grew up having costume birthday parties, and then in college I became a hardcore gothic club hound. I love the elegantly spooky and macabre, and use my Halloween kitchenware all year long.

But in all seriousness, the one time I ever had what I thought might have been a ghostly experience in real life, I was more mystified than scared.

Until it was over, and then I was spooked as all hell.

***************************

Several years ago, my old car’s fuel gauge started acting up. It would tell me that I had a quarter tank of gas left, then abruptly drop to empty. I ended up running out of gas on two separate occasions before I got it fixed.

The first time I ran out of gas it was no big deal -- I was walking distance from a gas station. The second time, though, it was very late at night, and I ended up getting stranded on the inside shoulder of the 110 North freeway right before it hits the 10 interchange in downtown Los Angeles — a dangerous place to be stranded indeed.

I managed to pull alongside the center divider, hit the hazard lights, and called my husband on my old flip-phone. He said that he would rush over as with a gallon of gas as fast as he could. We hung up, and I sat and waited, an endless stream of bright headlights whooshing past me fast enough to make my car shake, some of them frighteningly close, missing a high-speed rear-end collision by inches.

After about ten minutes, I needed something to distract myself from my own nervousness, so I propped my foot up, leaned down and started to change the lacing on my boots. I was absorbed in this when peripherally I saw the outline of a person walking towards me along the shoulder in front of my car. Thinking it must be a motorist or police officer who had stopped to offer assistance, I looked up to tell the approaching person: "Thanks, I'm fine, I have someone coming to get me.”

No one there.

This gave me a bit of a start, needless to say. But I figured what with the hypnotic effect of the headlights behind me and the whooshing cars, it must've been my eyes playing tricks on me. Weird…. I went back to playing with my shoelaces, having nothing else to do.

And the outline of the approaching person came back, shortly after I stopped looking directly at it. I waited a second, then looked up, and again, no one was there.

Okay, now I was quite sure that there had been someone in front of my car, and I was starting to get scared. What if some piece of opportunistic street grease decided to take advantage of my stranded state to sneak up on me and attack me? I had all the windows up and the doors locked and no real cash on me, but I was a woman by herself, so there were other reasons someone might try to interfere with me. If someone was sneaking up on me, then I wanted to get a good look at the bastard, so at least I could identify him in a police lineup.

I watched closely for awhile, but no one appeared. I waited for so long that I convinced myself I was just seeing things, and got absorbed in adjusting the radio.

But it came back. The same dark outline of a person was coming towards my car.

This time, I didn't look up, but tried to glance at it only peripherally -- and this time I saw some details of the figure. A slim woman. She looked young, somewhere between 18 and 22, maybe? Much younger than me. I thought she looked Latina, with long curly dark hair, bright red lips, a red top, those tight low-slung jeans. She walked up to within about ten feet of my car, and waited, watching me. And somehow, perhaps the expression on her face — I got the sense that she was worried about me.

When I glanced up again, she was gone. And I looked far too fast — literally a miniscule shift of my gaze — for her to have dived over the center divider and hidden from sight. She was just gone, like a quick-cut movie edit.

Okay, NOW this was just too weird. I stared ahead of me fearfully for about another five minutes until I saw my husband's car in my rearview mirror, and he pulled up with a gas can. We hurriedly put the gas in my car, started it, and pulled off onto the Adams exit to a gas station.

As we filled my tank, I gave my husband a quick run-down of what had just happened, and he watched me, wide-eyed.

"What do you think it was?” he asked.

"I have no idea. I really don't."

"Why do you think she disappeared when you looked straight at her?"

"Again, I don't know why."

"Do you think it could have been your eyes playing tricks? Some kind've white-line fever optical illusion?"

"I'm not ruling that out. It probably was. But you see, if I was to invent some phantom girl who was watching me by the side of the freeway, it would not have looked like a pretty teenager from East L.A. If I had invented her, she would've been dead pale with a ton of black hair, wearing trailing gothic draperies and singing like Diamanda Galas."

"Do you even believe in ghosts?"

"No, I don't. I'm a rationalist atheist, you know that. And it’s always houses and graveyards that are haunted, not freeways…”

"You really think that she was checking up on you to see if you were okay?"

“Yes. Somehow yes. Can’t say why, but that’s how it felt.”

"Did you see her again after I showed up?"

“No. After you got there, she was just gone. Though I think if a guardian spirit was going to appear to anyone, it would be to you, a believer, one of the faithful. Not someone like me.”

“Maybe all that mattered to her was seeing you get to safety.”

I was still terribly rattled, so my husband took me home and tenderly hugged my fears away, like he always does.

I didn't then and still don't believe in ghosts. My nocturnal guardian probably was just some kind of optical illusion created by the danger and monotony of the situation. But I did see something, and I still have no explanation as to what it was. While I find stories of the supernatural entertaining, I’ve never believed in any of it in real life.

My husband, who is Catholic and does believe in immortal souls and an afterlife, suggested that I go down to the L.A. Highway Patrol station in the area and make up some kind of story about being a journalist, and ask if there were any young Latina women who perhaps died on that stretch of highway. He thinks that if she was hovering over me with concern, and then disappeared after help arrived, that maybe she was the spirit of a young woman who died there under similar circumstances, and who now watches over anyone who gets stranded in the area.

I've never gone down to the Highway Patrol station and investigated: first, because I don't think they'll give me the files, and second, I’m afraid of what I would feel if I did come across a picture of the woman who I thought was watching me that night.

Some weird, weird shit goes on in the City of Angels, I'm not kidding.

But I’m grateful to her, whoever she was, if she ever existed at all. It’s not everyone who will concern themselves over a stranger’s distress.