She's Still Walking

Eight years ago, an old lady died in my house. Neighborhood rumor has it that she was found at the bottom of the stairs after being dead for a few days. When we first moved in, my family was fascinated by the story of the old woman, and I asked my next-door neighboor for all sorts of details about her. She said that the old woman and her husband (who died a few years earlier in a local hospital) were very much in love, and they had a beautiful garden in the backyard that they used to walk around in every day. After the old man got sick and died, the old woman let her garden turn into weeds, and she stayed inside all of the time, she would only come out every once in a while and walk around in the overgrown grass and weeds, and cry because she missed her husband. This happened until she passed away. We moved into our house only a few months after this.

About a year ago was when the haunting started. I don't know why it took such a long time to start and i don't know why it even started, but I was the first one to notice it.

One night, I was sitting at my computer, which is in my room, in front of a window facing into the back of the house. Something in the backyard caught my attention, and the rest of my family was asleep. I walked over to the window and peered out and saw the figure of an old woman, walking through my mother's garden. She wasn't floating, or transparent or glowing or any of those other ghostly stereotypes, she looked like a solid figure, like just any old woman, but who would be wandering around in our fenced in yard in the middle of the night? She walked the entire length of the yard, and when she got to the very back of the yard, she turned around and looked up at the window where I was standing. She smiled, or so I thought, and after I blinked, trying to focus my eyes better, she was gone. I have witnessed this a few times, late at night.

My sister has also had a few experiences. We share a room, the same room that used to belong to the old couple, and once in a while, she'll wake me up, because she claims to have heard soft music playing, when no one else in the house is awake, and a few times she has heard voices very close to her ears, but can never see anyone to go with them. She says that they're like whispers.

The creepiest sighting at all happened one night when my step-brother and I were watching a movie on the couch in the living room. He paused the movie to go get a drink in the kitchen, but when he got up and turned around towards the doorway, he saw a figure of an old woman standing there, in the doorway, which is also at the bottom of the stairs where her body was found. He didn't know about my previous sightings, or my sister's accounts of whispering and music, and he didn't even know that anybody had died in the house. He even said that she was smiling very kindly at him.

These sightings and hearings have become more frequent recently, and I'm wondering what they will amount to in the future. I don't think that the old lady means to scare us. She seems kind and caring, and I think that she is just letting us know that she is watching over us and the house.