My First Ghost

I always believed in ghosts, ever since I was a child, but I never saw one till I was about 13.

My father was a football coach who was working for the same man who coached him when he was in school. We'll call him Jim. And I was on his football team. That part is irrelevant to the story, but necessary nonetheless.

Jim invited my father and I to go fishing for the weekend. He owned a little cabin on a small island in the intercostal waterway of Corpus Christi, TX. So we hopped in the boat, and took off.

Later that day, after spending several hours fishing, we came to the cabin for the first time to clean the fish we had caught. While we (or they, rather) were cleaning the fish, I heard a boat motor approaching. So did Jim, and he walked over to the edge of the dock and stood beside me as I watched a very old boat slowly pull up along side. Inside the boat were two young looking men with navy whites on, and a young Hispanic girl. They asked us if we could spare any gasoline for their motor, and as we didn't have any, they thanked us and left.

I didn't really think very much of it till I looked at my father and Jim and they were both white as sheets. My dad looked at me and asked me if I had noticed what he had noticed about the boat, and it wasn't until then that I realized that there was NO COLOR AT ALL in the boat, or in the people. Everything was in shades of grey.

Jim sat down in a chair and slowly started to speak. He told us of two sailors who went AWOL after killing a young Hispanic girl in a water skiing accident right out almost in front of the cabin. They panicked when they found her floating with half of her head chopped off and decided to take off to Mexico. They would stop off at the docks where people were standing and ask for gas along the way, the ones who didn't give them gas were shot, so there was a (figurative) trail of blood about 50 miles long, along the coast going towards Mexico. That's where the Navy caught up with them. They were gunned down in their boat before they could get off a shot.

That night, Jim told me he would give me a 100 dollar bill if I would stay on the ground floor of his cabin. Being 13, and loving money and video games, I jumped at the chance. I went to bed about 11pm. And about 1am, I was awoken by what I thought was the wind. But there was no wind, and I could tell because I was sleeping in a screened in porch. And standing at the door of the porch was a young looking Hispanic girl in a white one piece bathing suit. I could see the screen on the door bend inwards as she pushed on it trying to open the door. I screamed, I couldn't help it. As soon as I did, she just disappeared in a puff of white fog. I didn't get the hundred, but he did give me 50 bucks because finally someone else had seen her, and his wife would stop calling him a liar.

I saw her several more times during that summer, but she never again came up to the house. She would just walk along the beach of the island and look out over the water.