Your True Tales
August 2007 - Page 15
Strange Bertha
by Laura
The following true event happened to my mother when she was just a teenage girl. My mother was born in a small town in southwest Georgia in 1942. As soon as she graduated from high school in 1960, she and her best friend, Rosie, moved to Newark, NJ with some of Rosie's relatives. My mother soon took a job at a toy factory there. And there is where she met Bertha.
According to my mother, Bertha was an older lady, maybe in her early to mid-60s. She was tall and slender, elegant looking, and you could tell she took care of herself. Well, this woman took an instant liking to my mother. So much so that the two of them became friends (nothing romantic at all - at least on my mother's part) and somehow (the details are a little foggy here) my mother and Rosie ended up moving into this woman's home in Springfield, NJ. From what I understand, Bertha asked my mother, but mom said the only way she'd move out there was if Rosie could come along with her. Bertha agreed, and soon things began to get a little weird.
Bertha was married, and her husband was a disabled veteran. However, every single weekend, she would pack her bags and leave for the entire weekend. Of course my mother and her friend found this strange, but, of course, they didn't question anything. One day, mom went into her room and found Bertha going through her belongings. She told Mom that she was just admiring her things because they were so nice. Mom said she knew there was something else going on; she was a girl from a small town in Georgia so her things couldn't have been nicer than anything this woman could have had.
Then came the deal breaker. Mom was sitting in her bed reading late one night when she thought she heard something at the bedroom door. At first she didn't pay it too much attention, but as the noise grew louder she looked up at the door. As she was looking at the door, Bertha came into the room through the closed door wearing a long white gown. My mother says the door never opened, yet she came in. Her gaze was fixed on my mother as she seemed to glide across the floor to the foot of the bed. My mother says by this time she couldn't make a sound, and she couldn't move a muscle.
When the figure of Bertha got to the foot of the bed, it stood there for a few seconds, and suddenly, it changed into the form of - as my mother puts it - a big white dog that looked like a police dog (German shepherd, more than likely). As the form changed into the "dog," it lunged for my mother, but she threw her hand up in front of her face, closed her eyes, and braced herself for whatever was about to happen. But nothing happened. When she opened her eyes, the form had disappeared.
The odd thing about it was the whole entire time, Rosie had been asleep next to her. Mom was rather perplexed, but tried her best to go to sleep. The next morning she told Rosie about what had happened and as they began to look at my mother's hand, they noticed what appeared to be fresh scratches across the back-like those made by a dog.
Soon after the experience, my mother and Rosie packed up their belongings and left Bertha's home. My mother never breathed a word of what had happened to Bertha, and when she was asked why they were leaving, they told her that Rosie's relatives had sent for them. To this day, whenever my mother tells this story you it gets so quiet around that you can hear a pin drop. Who, or what, exactly was Bertha? Could she have been a witch? My mother says she has wondered from time to time. Also, Bertha had told my mother that whenever she got back to Georgia that she wanted her to send her a big box of hanging moss - the moss like you find hanging from oak trees out in the woods. She never said exactly what she wanted it for. And of course, my mother did not send it to her.
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