A True Ghost Story

Since it's the Halloween season, I'm going to tell you a true ghost story. This actually happened to Cory and I on May 5, 1988. I remember the date exactly because every year on May 5th, I've been afraid it would happen again. May 5th is also the anniversary of Grandma Courville's death but I don't think that had anything to do with what I saw.

After I got divorced in 1984, Cory and I lived with my parents for a while while I attended Lamar. In May, 1987, we moved to an apartment in Nederland on Spurlock Road. The apartments looked like they had been a small motel at one time. It had only eight units in a horseshoe formation with the parking lot and carports in the front.

From the time we moved in, strange things would happen but not strange enough to be concerned. I attributed everything to the fact that they were old apartments. As in any typical ghost story, however, events escalated as time went on.

One of the first things I noticed was that there were tiny baby roaches around the table clock I kept in the dining room. I never saw adult roaches nor did I see the baby roaches anywhere else in the apartment. I had the place exterminated and that took care of the bug problem but occasionally I would still see one or two by the clock.

On occasion, the smoke alarm would go off. This would happen every couple of weeks or so and only at 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m. After the first couple of times, I changed the battery but the alarm would still sound occasionally. I attributed this to an old smoke alarm.

After we had lived there several months, the sewage backed up into the bathtub. This only happened once, thank God. Old pipes, I thought.

One of the strangest things that occurred was when Cory and I got locked inside the apartment. We had bought a new stereo and when we got home with it, there were some creepy looking people in the parking lot and I didn't want them to see that I had bought a new stereo so we left it in the car until they left. Several hours later, when we tried to get out of the apartment to get the stereo, we couldn't get out. I called the landlord and my parents. My parents beat the landlord there and they couldn't open the door from the outside either. We put the stereo in the house through the front window and waited for the landlord. When the landlord showed up he changed the doorknob and installed a deadbolt. He said he had no idea what was wrong with the old knob.

Between the smoke alarm going off every couple of weeks (just a beep or two) and getting locked inside the apartment, I was beginning to have an uneasy feeling about the place. At this point, we had lived there about ten months so things weren't happening frequently enough to actually blame these things on anything other than the fact that it was a cheap ass apartment.

Then things began to get weird. Cory would tell me many years later, that he would see someone walk into his room at night or down the hall but he convinced himself it was just me. One night, I was in my room taking off my makeup while Cory was in the living room watching television. He came into my room with a strange look on his face (he was 7 years old at the time) and said, "Mom, were you just looking at me?" I said, "What?" He said, "You were just standing behind the rocker wearing that blue thing that you have." I said, "No I didn't. I've been sitting here. I'm wearing white. I haven't changed my clothes." He just said, "Hmmm," and went back into the living room.

Coming from a cajun background, my whole family is interested in the supernatural and takes strange things for granted. We grew up listening to the ghost stories of my mom and her sisters telling of all the strange occurrences that happened in Catahoula, the small Louisiana town they grew up in. So, you would think I wouldn't freak out when something actually happened to me. You would be wrong.

As I was sleeping one night, I heard my mother's voice calling my name. My first thought was, "How did mom get in my room?" and my second thought was, "Oh my God! Something must have happened." I rolled over and looked at the clock to see what time it was before asking mom why she was there. It was 4:11 a.m. I then turned my gaze to my bedside which is where I thought my mom would be. No one was there. I looked toward my bedroom door still trying to understand what happened thinking it must be a bad premonition or something when I see it. Standing, (actually, I couldn't see any legs so it was more like floating) at my door was a young woman with dark hair in a blue flowing dress. I say dress but it was more like a nightgown or something. It was the same color blue as the outfit that Cory thought he saw me in standing behind the rocker. She had one arm across her stomach and the other arm extended toward me.

I said, "What? What?" I assumed she was there for a reason. That was the last rational thought I had. The apparition faded away, I turned on the light in the bedroom and went and got Cory and put him in bed with me. I never turned out the light in that bedroom again and Cory slept in my room with me until we moved out two weeks later.

I decided I wasn't going to tell anyone at work about this but when I got to the office that morning the receptionist took one look at me and knew something had happened. I slowly began telling people what I thought I saw and, to this day, every time I tell the story, every single person (except one) has told me their own story of a brush with the supernatural.

Now I've freaked myself out again. I'll be sleeping with the lights on tonight.