I only experienced an interaction with a ghost once in my life.  Well, at least I thought I did, anyway.

Back in early 1987, my mother died.  To be more precise, she committed suicide.

To the best of my knowledge, most ghostly apparitions (if one believes in their existence) are those of people who have shuffled off this mortal coil in violent or unhappy circumstances.  Being that my mother’s passing was a bit of both, I found myself in a position one evening where I thought she was paying me a visit, as it were.

Not long after she died, I awoke in the middle of the night.  The room was dark.  And then, very slowly, a pale, bluish light began to fill the room.  It grew brighter, and brighter, and brighter… and then BOOM!  It was gone!

This happened not once, not twice… but repeatedly.

As I lay there in bed watching this cycle reoccur, slowly seeing the room shift from darkness and gradually come into view in the pale light, I began to question my previous experiences in life.

Could this be?  Is it possible that this is the ghost of my mother, so recently having died?

If that were the case, should I be scared?  Happy?  Saddened that she’d not “moved on?”  I confess, it left me with some serious thinking to do.

And all the while, as I lay there, the cycle kept repeating.  Darkness…  slowly, ever so slowly, the pale light increasing, leaving me to wonder if I were experiencing the supernatural first-hand and if so, how I should be feeling about it.

I confess, I was afraid.

I finally decided that if this was my mother, perhaps it might be the only opportunity I would ever get to tell her I loved her one last time, and to say a proper goodbye.

I whispered, so as not to wake my boyfriend, “Mom?”  My inquiry was met with silence.  I called out again, a few times, but heard nothing in reply.

After taking a while to work up the nerve to do so, I slowly and hesitantly slipped out from under the covers and walked toward the center of the room, with absolutely no idea of what to expect.

Once I was standing, I could see that the source of the light was clearly outside the bedroom window.

‘If that is her, this could really scare the hell out of me, or it might be extremely comforting,’ I thought.

So, with trepidation that had mounted over the span of time of all my ponderings and the repeated cycle of growing luminescence, I very slowly approached the window.

At that moment, at the brightest point of the light’s repeated cycle―darkness.

It was then that I realized how scared I really was―knowing that I’d have to stand there, looking out the window into the night and wait for the light to grow again before I knew what I was facing.

And as I stood there in the darkness, the light once again began to grow; ever so faintly at first…then brighter, and brighter…

…from a street lamp across the alley.  When it reached its fullest brightness, it went out.

And as I stood there in the dark, I felt many mixed emotions―relief that I wasn’t confronting a ghost; sadness that I wasn’t getting an opportunity to see my mother that one last time that would have meant so very much; utterly foolish for having convinced myself of the possibility that what I’d been seeing could hold so much potential when it was merely a faulty street lamp…  and I also felt very, very alone.

I stood there a while longer, as the light continued to brighten and then go out, and I cried for a short while.

Then, woefully, and feeling very worn out, I went back to bed.

-Linda Tatro Dobbins