LADY IN THE MIRROR
Some paranormal researchers suspect that children are more attuned to spiritual realms or other dimensions because they are relatively new to this world and haven’t yet been jaded by life’s hardships and complications. Could that account for Alice’s remarkable encounter in the summer of 1972?
She was eight years old and living in Glasgow, Scotland. In those years, Alice’s parents would often visit and elderly woman they knew, just to look in on her from time to time. This kind lady would sometimes request that Alice and her younger sister to sleep over at her house. “I have no idea why,” Alice says, “because she was really old and she didn't ever pay us any attention. But she was recently widowed, so maybe she was just lonely.”
One night, Alice and her sister slept over in the woman’s guest room. It was a small room with very old furniture: a double bed with a mahogany headboard that had a pull-cord light attached to it, a mahogany tall boy, and a matching mahogany dressing table and chair. The dressing table had three mirrors; a large one in the center with two smaller ones on either side.
Alice was having trouble sleeping that night. The heat made her very uncomfortable, and her sister’s persistent and loud snoring seemed intent on keeping her awake. “The bed had loads of blankets on it, and I reached out and pulled the cord on the light so that I could see to push some of the blankets off me,” Alice says. “As I sat up, I found myself looking straight into the dressing table mirror.”
Alice did not see her own reflection in the mirror, however. Instead, it was that of an old, slim lady with white curly hair. “She was wrapped in a huge white bath towel,” Alice remembers. “Her head was bent down, as if she was looking at the ground. With her arms crossed in front of herself, she was rubbing her upper arms with the ends of the towel. The room she was in was different than the guest room. It had brown wood paneling on the wall that stopped about three-fourths of the way up. It was finished off with a picture rail around it. Then the lady stopped rubbing her arms, she lifted her head and she looked up at me… and smiled.”
Scared out of her wits, Alice slid under that ton of blankets and stayed there, with the light still on, until the room filled with daylight. “I know I was not dreaming,” she insists. “I have gone over that episode so many, many times in my mind. Although as an eight-year-old child I was petrified, as an adult I also know that this spirit did not hurt me, nor did she do anything that makes me think she wanted to hurt me. Who she was or why she wanted me to see her is a mystery to me.”
There’s one last intriguing piece to this story. When Alice went into the bedroom of her kind, elderly host, she noticed that she too had a dressing table with a mirror. But hers was covered completely with a pink shawl. “I knew straight away that she too had seen ‘something’ in her mirror,” Alice says. “I wish I could go back in time and ask her questions about it.”
LULABY FROM A GHOST
If it’s true that children are more closely tied to the spirit world, perhaps this connection is very strong for the newborn, when they are most vulnerable.
Consider the experience Rachel had shortly after her youngest daughter was born in 2000. The baby was six months old and Rachel was living with her parents in Bethany, Oklahoma. With the baby sound asleep, Rachel, her mother and step-father all stepped outside the house for a smoke, keeping tabs on the infant via a baby monitor.
“My daughter had been asleep for about two hours,” Rachel says. “All of a sudden, my mom and I heard talking from the monitor. We just looked at each other. Then I would hear my daughter laugh, like someone was playing with her. At first I thought that maybe we were hearing a signal from another monitor in someone else’s apartment. Then the talking stopped and the female that was talking began to sing – and it was the same voice we had heard talking. The woman was even saying my daughter's name in the song (Allianna).”
Alarmed, Rachel rushed into the house to check on her daughter. Her mother was still listening on the monitor, and as soon as she heard Rachel open the door to the baby’s room, the singing stopped. “When I went into the room,” says Rachel, “there was no one there. So I went back outside and the singing had started again.
“I asked my mom if she knew who the female was who was singing and talking to my daughter. She looked at me and smiled warmly. She said that she believed it was her great-great-grandmother.”
