The Lady

Kevin J.N. Hughes 3/14/2021

I’m feeling a tad bit under the weather, and at times like this I’m abundantly glad to be working from home, where I don’t have to worry about getting anyone sick and can work or rest as I need to. While I have been sitting here, I was pondering something that happened to a friend of mine when we were kids. I hope you enjoy this spooky, 100% true ghost story (I have taken the liberty of changing names in the story to protect the family who experienced these things).

I went to Catholic School growing up, I will not say which school, but one of my absolute best friends in the whole world was a young man whom we will call Spencer. Well, Spencer ended up transferring to a different school and we lost touch with one another, to be honest, I don’t know what he’s doing these days, but I’ll never forget Spence, he was a good chap. He was surprisingly pious, even when we were kids. We would be playing blocks or something together and he would suddenly say, “I need to pray” Then he would pray a short prayer, and then we would be back to play time. The really cool thing is that it never felt weird or uncomfortable. It was just part of what made Spence so cool I guess. He could interrupt play time with prayer time and pick up where we left off like nothing happened. It was just part of play time and that was that.

Meanwhile, Spence had some difficult times at home. I probably don’t know the half of it, but his family had a lot of struggles. I won’t get into anything specific, both to protect the family and their privacy, and also because it isn’t relevant to the story. But suffice it to say, Spence didn’t tell me much about what was going on in his home life, we would just hang out at my place and play games together.

Well, Spence’s mom decided she wanted to try to move the family closer to the school to make things easier on the family, especially since the kids would be able to walk to school. Needless to say, she was elated when she saw that there was a house up for rent literally next to the school, I mean, right there in the neighborhood! It was a nice enough place too, and not too expensive, can you say, dream come true for a single mother of two trying to make ends meet and get her kids a good education?

So, the mom, we will call her Tiffany, called up the landlord and scheduled a time to check the house out. When she arrived, it seemed positively perfect.

The landlord gave her a tour of the house and it was spectacular, she was really excited to move in. Then she looked in the master bedroom, and she was troubled to see that there was a hole in the wall. It looked like someone may have punched, or maybe even taken a hammer to the wall.

Naturally, she asked the landlord what the heck was up with that. He stopped, and then rolled his eyes and said, “Oh, the idiot who was renting the house before kept calling and complaining about hearing banging in the wall. I was never able to find anything wrong, so he did this, and then left. I’ll make sure to fix it before you move in.”

Tiffany assumed that the last tenant must have had some kind of mental health issues. So, she packed her things and was ready to move right in. She and her sons were excited about their new home. A great place, affordable, and best of all, very close to the school.

So, she moved in, and got the beds set up, and went to sleep that first night… or at least, she tried to sleep. The whole night she kept hearing a knocking sound right behind her bed.

At first, she didn’t think too much about it, but it persisted. She couldn’t find any source of the sound, but as she examined, it seemed to be coming from inside the wall itself. Neither of the boys’ rooms were in the right location to be the source of the noise, but more importantly, the boys were sound asleep. Needless to say, she felt very uncomfortable, and was exhausted the next day. When the boys came to breakfast, she was basically a zombie walking the halls.

Her younger son, whom we will call Tommy, asked her what was wrong. She told him that she hadn’t slept very well because it sounded like there was a knocking. When she said this, Tommy replied without pausing, “Oh that must have been the lady.”

Tiffany stopped in her tracks and asked, “The what?”

To which Tommy replied, “You know, the lady.”

Well, when she asked Tommy more questions, he told her that the whole time that when they had pulled the moving van up to the house, and the whole time that they were unloading their belongings, there was a woman watching them from inside the house. Tommy hadn’t said anything because he simply assumed that Tiffany had seen the woman as well. Truthfully, she had not.

In fact, she informed Tommy that it was impossible for there to have been a woman in the house. No one would have been there, only she and the landlord had keys to the house, and it could not have been either of them, the door was locked when they had arrived, there was no place for squatters to be hiding in the house. Nothing like that.

Meanwhile, Tommy just shrugged, he knew what he had seen, there was definitely a woman looking out at them while they moved in.

Well, Tiffany wasted no time, she called up the landlord right away, and backed out of the move. She was not going to share the house with whoever or whatever this woman was. She left that very night, and never came back. In fact, she ended up sending the boys to a different School entirely. My best friend was gone from my life, and I never really got to see him again after that, and it was all because of a ghost.

I don’t know if “the lady” is still there at that house, I don’t know if she still makes her presence known to the current residents, I do know that some strange things have happened in that neighborhood, and all in all, that family probably ended up much happier for having chosen not to deal with the paranormal.

I know this is a short one, I like to mix in a few short ones here and there. If you haven’t done so, check out Perilous Delivery, as well as my other true ghost stories.